Here are 100 books that The Mind Of The Strategist fans have personally recommended if you like
The Mind Of The Strategist.
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I’m an innovator. I’ve been one since I was a kid. Since then, I’ve started a couple of non-profits and four companies, and I’ve advised hundreds of clients on innovation opportunities. I’ve also led the team that created one of the world’s first smartphones. Over the past dozen years, I’ve written four books on the strategy and capabilities of innovation. Innovation is one of the essential characteristics that make us human. It can get the world into trouble, but it does more good than harm on balance. My mission is to make us better at innovation and make the world a better place.
As a strategy consultant for over two decades, let me tell you: the world is full of bad strategy. This book lays out so clearly what makes bad strategy bad, as well as what good strategy consists of. Rumelt uses examples from business, of course, but he goes far beyond that realm, too.
The book opens with a description of how Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated Napoleon’s forces in the Battle of Trafalgar. Rumelt, a Professor at UCLA, gives recommendations that are specific, tied to examples, and actionable. I walked away with a clear set of takeaways and wonderful stories to back them up.
When Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy was published in 2011, it immediately struck a chord, calling out as bad strategy the mish-mash of pop culture, motivational slogans and business buzz speak so often and misleadingly masquerading as the real thing.
Since then, his original and pragmatic ideas have won fans around the world and continue to help readers to recognise and avoid the elements of bad strategy and adopt good, action-oriented strategies that honestly acknowledge the challenges being faced and offer straightforward approaches to overcoming them. Strategy should not be equated with ambition, leadership, vision or planning; rather, it is…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’ve spent many years as a management consultant to a range of big, global corporations, smaller companies, and not-for-profits. I also headed up succession planning and management development at two major companies. I decided to go into this field based on a strong conviction, a conviction that continues today: that leadership counts. Strong leaders benefit people in their organizations and, ultimately, society itself. Having worked with many senior leaders and led organizations myself, I know the range of pressures executives face and how easy it is to fail. Companies need a supply of capable, well-equipped senior leaders, and those who aspire to top-level positions need guideposts about achieving their career aspirations.
As they move up, executives become more and more responsible for strategy and building the capacity of the organization. But one thing never changes: they are still responsible for making sure that strategic plans get implemented.
Their dilemma, given all the other responsibilities they take on, is how to manage execution without getting bogged down at too low a level of detail. Bossidy is a retired CEO and Charan is a well-respected consultant. They lay out a roadmap for ensuring implementation and simultaneously building organization capacity.
Larry Bossidy is one of the world's most acclaimed CEOs, with a track record for delivering results that has few peers. Ram Charan is a legendary advisor to senior executives and boards of directors, with unparalleled insight into why some companies are successful and others not. The result is the book people in business need today. One with a highly practical framework for closing the gap between results promised and results delivered. After a long, stellar career with GE, Larry Bossidy became CEO of Allied Signal and transformed it into one of the world's most admired companies. Accomplishments like 31…
My career in business strategy as a manager, consultant, and academic developed via my lifelong passion for military strategy and tactics, reading countless books on the Battle of Marathon through to the Third (!) World War. When I was introduced to business strategy in an MBA program, it was love at first lecture. I progressed to a doctorate in “Business Policy” at Harvard Business School as the second doctoral student of the then unknown Michael Porter. My main contribution has been the concept of global strategy for multinational companies. My focus is now on how Chinese companies are moving from imitation to innovation and reinventing management control.
Of the many books explaining the success of the Roman Empire, this is by far the best in that it shows how Rome continually adapted its strategy in building and sustaining its empire. Rome's strategy was not ceaseless fighting but comprehensive strategies that unified force, diplomacy, and an immense infrastructure. Initially relying on client states to buffer attacks, Rome moved to permanent frontier defense. Finally, as barbarians began to penetrate the empire, Rome fielded large armies in a strategy of defense-in-depth. This book's lesson for business strategy is that companies need to constantly adapt their strategies as their circumstances change. The book also has powerful implications for modern geopolitical strategy—be flexible in both means and ends.
At the height of its power, the Roman Empire encompassed the entire Mediterranean basin, extending much beyond it from Britain to Mesopotamia, from the Rhine to the Black Sea. Rome prospered for centuries while successfully resisting attack, fending off everything from overnight robbery raids to full-scale invasion attempts by entire nations on the move. How were troops able to defend the Empire's vast territories from constant attacks? And how did they do so at such moderate cost that their treasury could pay for an immensity of highways, aqueducts, amphitheaters, city baths, and magnificent temples? In The Grand Strategy of the…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
From my earliest memories I’ve always been interested in military history, and as a young man I served in the U.S. Navy on a nuclear submarine. As an ardent bibliophile, my home and office overflows with books. As a professor, for the past 25 years I’ve been fortunate enough to teach a broad survey on western military history, which gives me the opportunity to experiment with many books for my own and the students’ enjoyment. The books on this list are perennial favorites of the traditional-age undergraduates (18-22) I teach, but will appeal to any reader interested in premodern military history.
There’s an old saying that states, “Amateurs discuss battles; Professionals discuss logistics.”
Engel’s book proves the point, arguing that the Macedonian king’s real genius was not tricky moves on the battlefield, but by making sure his men had enough food and water to sustain themselves for twelve years. One of the great things about this book is that Engels covers things that work for any premodern era: how much a human or animal can carry; how much food and water they consume on a daily basis, and what it requires to keep tens of thousands of humans on the march adequately supplied.
You’ll never think the same way about premodern warfare again after reading it.
'The most important work on Alexander the Great to appear in a long time. Neither scholarship nor semi-fictional biography will ever be the same again...Engels at last uses all the archaeological work done in Asia in the past generation and makes it accessible...Careful analyses of terrain, climate, and supply requirements are throughout combined in a masterly fashion to help account for Alexander's strategic decision in the light of the options open to him...The chief merit of this splendid book is perhaps the way in which it brings an ancient army to life, as it really was and moved: the hours…
My mission in life is to create soulful workplaces because I believe that we spend so much time at work that it impacts society at large. To feed this passion I read. A lot. Too much. I have devoured many hundreds of books on improving organizations. I haven’t found one book that has all the answers, but there are several that capture a lot. I also find that if a book is fun and easy to consume, it’s stickier; I can hand out copies and enroll people in the vision and start to implement the ideas in their organization. Fun books lead to action.
Deming’s work is classic. He understood how messed up the corporate world was getting way back in the 1960s. But we Americans wouldn’t listen, so he went and helped Japan, and most notably, Toyota. It’s fascinating to read his work that was way ahead of its time and notice the things we are just starting to implement today. It’s also a great prophecy of what’s to come.
A new edition of a book that details the system of transformation underlying the 14 Points for Management presented in Deming's Out of the Crisis.
It would be better if everyone would work together as a system, with the aim for everybody to win. What we need is cooperation and transformation to a new style of management.” —from The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education
In this book, W. Edwards Deming details the system of transformation that underlies the 14 Points for Management presented in Out of the Crisis. The Deming System of Profound Knowledge, as it is called, consists…
I am an Australian who lives in France, and has worked and lived on three continents, and drawn inspiration for every location. Through this, I have developed a fascination about the way we all think in creatively different ways about the same things. All this cross-referencing has shown me that all responses to the need for change go better with a base of a few things: trust in your own people and those whose businesses support yours, discovery of assets hidden in plain sight, and fun. All these books share these themes. I hope they inspire you to think more creatively and to constantly value the value of values.
Put simply, it summarises the former four and has gifted me “So What?” When ‘Command and Control’ was recognised as an obsolete model for a modern army, the two authors had the task of rethinking what that would mean and how to accomplish something better.
When leading an organisation whose budget has been slashed, but you cannot lose the capacity to effectively respond, it focuses the mind. As the authors say, we must change the way we change.
There is a clue in the title. The recipe is clear and is anything but a dry narrative. It shows how the future will be created by positive action and empowered teams—not by slogans or strategies—but by action.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States Army has been reengineered and downsized more thoroughly than any other business. In the early 1990s, General Sullivan, army chief of staff, and Colonel Harper, his key strategic planner, took the post-Cold War army into the Information Age. Faced with a 40 percent reduction in staff and funding, they focused on new peacetime missions, dismantled a cumbersome bureaucracy, reinvented procedures, and set the guidelines for achieving a vast array of new goals.
Hope Is Not a Method explains how they did it and shows how their experience is extremely relevant…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
The world of entrepreneurship has been my driving passion for decades. Why? It is entrepreneurs, despite their many quirks, who make the world a better place. It’s entrepreneurs who create jobs in a world where jobs in many places are in short supply. It’s entrepreneurs who wake up every day with a passion to forge their own path with the freedom to do so. And it’s why I embarked at mid-life on a second career as a business-school professor. It’s why I teach and why I write. The books I suggest here will give you a fighting chance to deal effectively with the challenges you’ll surely find along your entrepreneurial journey.
Zook and Allen are two of the most insightful people I know. I’ve taught their “stuff’ to my students for many years. Entrepreneurship is a journey that’s not for the faint of heart, for there are the inevitable gale-force winds that threaten to blow you off course, as this book so clearly demonstrates.
If every founder would imbue his or her company with the founder’s mentality and follow Zook’s and Allen’s advice about how to keep it in place, we’d have far more long-run successes than today’s daunting failure statistics so sadly display.
A Washington Post Bestseller Three Principles for Managing--and Avoiding--the Problems of Growth Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company's Chris Zook and James Allen, authors of the bestselling Profit from the Core, researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external--increasing distance from the front lines, loss…
My passion for helping organisations, industries, and communities to make better decisions led me into the field of strategic foresight more than 20 years ago. I am particularly passionate about scenario planning as the most valuable tool for improving decision-making in a volatile and uncertain environment. Scenarios enable people to question their (often implicit) assumptions about the future and to reframe their perceptions of the future. It’s this enlightening quality about scenarios that makes them so special to me. My quest is to see scenario planning become a mainstream activity in organisations throughout the world.
I love this book because it brings a new perspective to scenario planning. In particular, de Geus writes about “memories of the future” and how these are critical to developing sensitivity to weak signals that otherwise go unnoticed.
This book contains so many lessons about scenario planning, and de Geus provides greater detail on these than many authors. His writing style is casual and easy to follow, keeping the reader engaged from page 1.
Most companies do not survive the upheavals of change and competition over the long haul. But there are a few remarkable firms that have withstood the test of several centuries. What hidden lessons do they hold for the rest of us? Arie de Geus, the man who introduced the revolutionary concept of the learning organization, reveals the key to managing for a long and prosperous organizational life. The Living Company speaks not just to aspiring leaders, but to anyone trying to adapt to a turbulent business environment. Only those steeped in the habits of a living company will survive. 'This…
My family moved to Italy when I was six, and I attended Italian first grade in a fishing village where I had to rely on reading body language as I didn’t grasp the language for a bit. Fortunately for me, Italians have lots of body language to read so I could navigate the inevitable cliques and power dynamics evident even at the elementary school level. From that experience to being taken to view the Dachau concentration camp a year later, I’ve always been sensitive to how “the other” gets treated—often unfairly—and the role leaders can play for good or evil.
Emotions and emotional intelligence (EQ) aren’t taught in business school, and are rarely evident in abundance in the corner offices of CEOs. And yet here’s one ready to admit to the errors of his earlier ways, and to have adjusted his leadership style at Best Buy accordingly. If it can happen in business, why not in politics, too, perhaps saving us from leaders who lack empathy.
How to unleash "human magic" and achieve improbable results.
Hubert Joly, former CEO of Best Buy and orchestrator of the retailer's spectacular turnaround, unveils his personal playbook for achieving extraordinary outcomes by putting people and purpose at the heart of business.
Back in 2012, "Everyone thought we were going to die," says Joly. Eight years later, Best Buy was transformed as Joly and his team rebuilt the company into one of the nation's favorite employers, vastly increased customer satisfaction, and dramatically grew Best Buy's stock price. Joly and his…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
As a wannabe rockstar studying philosophy and mathematics, never in my wildest nightmare did I imagine I would one day earn a living traveling the world, helping corporate managers become better bosses. But in unexpected ways, all the different strands of my interests and passions have woven together into a work-life well lived, with over two decades of experience and contemplation distilled down into this book I have co-written with my friend and business partner, Bjorn Billhardt, CEO of Abilitie.
For decades, I was unsatisfied with the definitions of “leadership” I would read. For one thing, they failed to account for why we need the term “leader” when the more humdrum “manager” would do just fine. To me, the word "leader" will always be linked to 20th-century fascism, so I'm reluctant to use the word casually. Additionally, many conventional definitions of leadership are just laundry lists of virtuous behavior we’d really like to see in anyone, not just “leaders.”
At the same time, I was fascinated with game theory. This book brought those two strands, leadership and game theory, together.
Miller opened my eyes to the fact that there was something that could be called “leadership” that helped explain a nagging puzzle in game theory, namely how we are able to overcome social dilemmas and cooperate with each other, even in the absence of brute incentive systems provided by “mere”…
In organisation theory a schism has developed between the traditional organisational behaviour literature, based in psychology, sociology and political science, and the more analytically rigorous field of organisational economics. The former stresses the importance of managerial leadership and cooperation among employees, while the latter focuses on the engineering of incentive systems that will induce efficiency and profitability, by rewarding worker self-interest. In this innovative book, Gary Miller bridges the gap between these literatures. He demonstrates that it is impossible to design an incentive system based on self-interest that will effectively discipline all subordinates and superiors and obviate or overcome the…
