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Brilliant, original and entertaining, he may become one of the most important business minds of the new era. He works as a strategy and innovation coach for many of the most admired and ambitious companies in the world. He is a sought-after speaker on subjects including strategy, innovation, growth, leadership, team building and competitive advantage.
He has been elected to the Customer Service Hall of Fame, been nominated as a star of Human Resources by Personnel Today, is a fellow of the RSA the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce , and has been featured on national and international radio, television and newspapers.
Max has written several books, including: The Truth About Innovation, a definitive set of home truths about how to increase creativity, create competitive advantage and use innovation practically to inspire and help your organisation; Unshrink, featuring myths that stop people doing their best work and a set of leadership principles to engage hearts and minds; E-Customer, an insight into evolving customer behaviour; and Adaptability: The Art of Winning, the rules needed to adapt successfully in an age of uncertainty.
He can be reached at max maxMckeown. He writes on www. Comparing strategy theory with strategy in the real world is the heart of The Strategy Book. Particular thanks go to those who have offered comments and feedback throughout the writing process, and to those who have discussed strategy ideas with me over the years.
They also include the thinkers, alive and dead, whose work inspired this book. Thanks also go to my publishing team — to Liz Gooster and Elie Williams who both improved the book through their work as editors. All rights reserved; Figure on p. Kotter, Inc. Prahalad and Stuart L. Copyright All rights reserved.
In some instances we have been unable to trace the owners of copyright material, and we would appreciate any information that would enable us to do so. You can use the secrets in this book to become an effective strategic thinker and leader. The Strategy Book can help you understand strategy.
If you are ambitious, you can use the powerful strategy tools in this book to shape your future. The Strategy Book has its own strategic advantage. It is easy to read without dumbing down its strategic ideas. It is simple to use but is still based on a core set of intelligent strategic foundations. It offers clear explanations of tools that will help make sense of complex leadership situations. The ideas in this book are based on hard-won experience and knowledge. Some were feeling complacent.
Others were facing problems and crisis points. All of them wanted more success. This book helps with all of those situations. And it also helps people who are studying strategy as part of a course or degree. A lot of the books you have to study are either too shallow or far too long. The chapters here are about giving you the best ideas in strategy but wrapped up in a usable, enjoyable package.
How to use this book The Strategy Book is organised into six parts. The first five tackle the really important challenges that a leader of any team of any size will face in creating strategy and making that strategy work. Each part is sub-divided into specific action topics. These parts have been written clearly so that you can benefit from my experience as a strategist whether you are a novice or an expert. This is a powerful and memorable way to learn. The Strategy6 are the key principle and are worth reading first.
This section also lets you know how often a strategic challenge will be used and who should be involved. And also ways of succeeding with the challenge effectively as a strategist. The most important models and tools of strategy are explained in very precise, practical and efficient terms. Or you can move from specific action topics back to models that help you to organise your thoughts. There is also a list of further reading if you want to dig deeper. And naturally there is an index to make it easier to find your way to specific topics.
The Strategy Book is clearly structured and easy to use, something that you will find yourself referring back to again and again. Strategy is about shaping the future. Frequency — Read first, review occasionally. Key participants — First, you. Then, everyone. Strategy rating — Strategy6 Google made the decision to give their engineers permission to experiment in free time. They used this free time to produce an online video service. This experiment taught executives the importance of online video so they bought YouTube as a priority when it became popular.
As a result, they have two of the most popular search services in the world. Was this strategy at work? It helps you to discuss strategy knowledgeably and to see its limitations — as well as its purpose. Ancient strategy — The word strategy has its origins in the Greek word strategos which means general or someone who has an army stratos to lead. It was first used in Athens BC to describe the art of leadership used by the ten generals on the war council.
They developed principles of effective leadership and achieving objec- tives. This included approaches to war and motivating soldiers. In his book, Sun Tzu lists different principles that leaders may follow to win and achieve their goals. It set a pattern for books about strategy that is still followed. Experienced execu- tives and consultants always share their experience of planning for success. Corporate strategy started getting a lot of attention from the s.
It was only after the Second World War that strategy books appeared for business leaders. Alfred Chandler was a historian who, in the s, examined the relationship between strategy and organisational structure.
He concluded that the strategy chosen by the company will lead to changes in the structure of the company. His work also shows that strategy was not a new concept in business, since it was based on what companies were already doing. Igor Ansoff was a manager and mathematician often described as the father of Strategic Management.
His book — Corporate Strategy — was published in and was a comprehensive attempt to explain how managers could plan for a more successful future. Ansoff was the most prominent writer of an approach to strategy that became obsessed with detailed planning. It was a perfect fit to a management style that was all about control. It led to a view that CEOs could work with strategic planning teams to analyse the past to predict the future.
Early computers were used to help crunch the numbers and print the plans used to issue orders to real people in middle management and on the front lines. Henry Mintzberg is a Canadian professor and contrarian who mocked planning obsession. He argued that only some strategic plans ever happened the way they were intended. The big picture — or strategy — was decided by a stream of individual actions.
He believed that most strategy emerges from adaptation. Arguments between planning and learning approaches continue today see page Michael Porter also a professor continued the mathematical approach to strategy. These models were designed to determine what position the company should take in relation to other competitors in the market see pages —6.
Context In some ways, the intellectual history of strategy is more complex than my short introduction. Some argue for the more creative, human side, while others argue for the more analytical side of strategy. Both are important, so a strategist asks what balance of these approaches is most helpful in any particular situation. The first two questions are analytical, they are about positioning and benchmarking.
The second set of questions are creative, and are about desire and contribution. They are interrelated but the balance between them varies. The balance depends on your personal preferences and circumstances.
But if your market is dynamic and you want your situation to change, then you may choose to inject more creativity into improving what you offer and achieve. This book includes tools for both analytical and creative strategy.
It also includes my opinion that creative, dynamic strategy is the more helpful approach to take. The analytical tools can be used creatively to contribute something worthwhile and — if you wish — difficult to copy. You will also be able to combine the tools see page and the principles throughout this book to think like a strategist about the bigger picture and what you want to contribute.
You can study everything from ideas about how to run a strategy meeting to why reacting is more important than planning, to specific strategies that you can choose to use or adapt. The overall aim is to improve your ability do something worthwhile. Something better than merely sustaining a competitive edge. Pitfalls Over-reliance on any particular approach to strategy is dangerous.
You would be missing the big picture if you believe that you can ignore analysis, creativity or the action that makes creativity and analysis come to life. Your organisation may have a tradi- tional approach to strategy.
You will have to look carefully at how well the approach is working and what improvements can be made. Discuss how they have been used in the past and how you could alter the balance in the future. Include the discussion as part of a team meeting. The important part is to learn how to think better and think differ- ently. He introduces four schools of strategy: Classical, which seeks to maximise profit with deliberate processes; Evolutionary, which seeks to maximise profit with emergent processes; Systematic, which seeks plural objectives with deliberate processes; and Processual, which have plural objectives with emergent processes.
This book can help make strategy work more often. There are strategy tools and processes that can help, but the real heart of strategy is the strategist. The more you understand the people who make events happen and the connections between what they do and those events, the smarter you will be.
You have already used strategy to get a lot of what you have. You got a job. Or you got an education to get a job. You might have saved money for a holiday or a home. Maybe you romanced your partner, wife or husband. Becoming a strategic thinker — a strategist — is about getting better at shaping events. In the business world you need to understand how strategy is usually done. You need to know how to create strategy that convinces others to support you including your boss or shareholders. And you need to know how to make strategy deliver success in the real world.
Strategy that works. There is no guarantee that the future will turn out the way you want. Just writing a plan does not mean that the plan will happen. You learn that reacting and responding to events is just as important as planning. Some business schools and consultancies have sold the promise that strategy can solve everything. In their hands, strategy has become a cult that believes in the magical power of a few models.
They have weakened practical emphasis on the art of strategy and left some non-MBAs wondering if there is any room for entrepreneurial instinct.
Others have become cynical about strategy. They hear the word and disengage. They expect bad or boring things to come from any strategic planning process. They predict job cuts or mindless changes. Or just expect meaningless waffle that is incomprehensible in the real world. And there is some truth to this view.
Yet we have been trying to shape our future for as long as we have been human. It is in our nature to interpret our experience to provide shortcuts for a better future.
This is what strategy is about and how it can be of value in the real world. Thinking strategically is what separates managers and leaders. Max McKeown isn't new to strategies or writing books. He may not be a business celebrity, but he's thought of as being a brilliant strategic thinker and works as a strategy and innovation coach for many of the most admired companies in the world.
By Max McKeown. Published Dec 9, by FT Press. Saving your company from failure. Part 6 The Strategy Book tool kit. The basic powerful strategy questions. SWOT analysis. Porter's 5 forces of competition.
Authors: McKeown, Max. The Strategy Book 2nd Edition Paperback. Official author page for Dr. Looking for books by Max McKeown? The strategy book includes examples of strategies that were previously constructed and followed by small, medium and large companies. Often strategy books are found to be very confusing especially to a person who does not have a degree in business McKeown, From understanding what strategy can do for you, through to creating a strategy and engaging others.
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