Good Strategy/Bad Strategy untangles the jumbled thinking that underlies too many strategies and presents a clear path to developing and implementing an effective action-oriented strategy for the real world. This book is regarded as one of the best books on strategic planning.

A leader's primary responsibility is to develop and implement a strategy. A good strategy is a particular and cohesive response to – and approach to – overcoming roadblocks. A good strategy works by concentrating and directing power where it will have the most impact. However, Rumelt demonstrates that there is an increasing and regrettable propensity to connect "strategy" with Mom-and-apple-pie values, airy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial ambitions.

He debunks these components of "poor strategy" in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy and awakens an appreciation of the potential of a "good strategy." He introduces nine sources of power – ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth – that are eye-opening yet practical tools that can be put to use on Monday morning, and he uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples vary from Apple to General Motors, the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, a small local market to Wal-Mart, Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, Cisco Systems to Paccar, and Global Crossing to the 2007-08 financial crisis.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy is the result of Rumelt's decades of digging beneath the surface to address difficult questions with honesty and integrity. It reflects an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of human character.

Author: Richard Rumelt

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Difference-Matters/dp/0307886239

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, global premier management thinkers, challenge everything you thought you understood about the requirements for strategic success in this perennial classic, embraced by businesses and sectors worldwide. Blue Ocean Strategy, widely regarded as one of the most classic and influential strategy books ever written, contends that ruthless competition culminates in nothing more than a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a decreasing profit pool. Based on a review of 150 strategic initiatives (spanning more than 100 years and 30 industries), the authors claim that developing "blue oceans" – untapped new market spaces primed for expansion – is the key to long-term success.

Blue Ocean Strategy describes concepts and techniques that each firm may use to construct and capture its own blue oceans, as well as a methodical approach to making the competition obsolete. This enlarged edition includes the writers' new preface, "Help! My Ocean Is Turning Red"; updates on all cases and examples in the book; and two new chapters, as well as an extended third one – "Alignment, Renewal, and Red Ocean Traps" – that address some of the most important problems raised by listeners and readers over the years.

Author: W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Expanded-Uncontested/dp/1625274491

Are you just having fun, or are you trying to win? Strategy is not complex. But it's hard. It's difficult because it requires people and organizations to make concrete decisions about their future—something that most businesses do not do.

Now, two of today's most prominent business thinkers go to the heart of strategy, explaining what it is, how to think about it, why you need it, and how to implement it. And they utilize one of the most successful corporate turnarounds of the last century, which they co-created, to demonstrate their thesis.

In just ten years, A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, and strategic adviser Roger Martin doubled P&G's sales, quadrupled its profits, and increased its market value by more than $100 billion. Playing to Win shows how leaders in organizations of all sizes can guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business success—where to play and how to win—drawn from their years of experience at P&G and the Rotman School of Management, where Martin is dean.

The end outcome is a winning strategy. Lafley and Martin have developed a set of five critical strategic options that, when addressed holistically, will put you ahead of your competitors. They are as follows:

• What is your winning goal?
• Where will you be playing?
• How will you triumph?
• What capabilities do you need to be successful?
• What management systems are required to back up your decisions?

The examples of how P&G won repeatedly by using this process to legendary brands like Olay, Bounty, Gillette, Swiffer, and Febreze demonstrate how deciding on a strategic approach—and then making the correct choices to support it—makes the difference between just playing the game and actually winning.

Author: A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Playing-Win-Strategy-Really-Works/dp/142218739X

Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy, now in its 60th edition in English and translated into 19 languages, has altered the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy around the world. The book is among the best books on strategic planning you should read.

Porter's study of industries captures the complexity of industry competitiveness in five underlying factors, which is electrifying in its simplicity - as with all great breakthroughs. Porter presents three generic strategies – lowest cost, distinctiveness, and emphasis – that bring structure to the work of strategic positioning. He demonstrates how competitive advantage may be defined in terms of relative cost and relative prices, thus relating it to profitability, and gives a completely new perspective on how profit is made and split. In the nearly two decades after its publication, Porter's paradigm for forecasting competitor behavior has revolutionized the way businesses see their competitors, giving rise to the new discipline of competitor evaluation.

More than a million managers in large and small businesses, investment analysts, consultants, students, and researchers all over the world have absorbed Porter's theories and used them to appraise industries, comprehend competitors, and choose competitive positions. The theories in the audiobook address the basics of competition in a way that is independent of the specifics of how businesses compete.

Competitive strategy has filled a gap in management thought. It serves as a long-lasting foundation and anchor point for all subsequent work. Porter's extensive frameworks and profound insights compose a comprehensive perspective of competition unrivaled in the last quarter-century by bringing a disciplined structure to the subject of how firms attain better profitability. Scott R. Pollak expertly narrates Competitive Strategy.

Author: Michael E. Porter

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Strategy-Techniques-Industries-Competitors/dp/0684841487

Built to last, the seminal management study of the 1990s, demonstrated how great firms triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be integrated into an enterprise's DNA from the start.

But what about businesses that weren't born with exceptional DNA? How can good, middling, or even disastrous companies reach long-term greatness? Is it possible to transform long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? If true, what differentiating traits cause a corporation to progress from good to great?

Over the course of five years, Jim Collins and his research team examined the history of 28 firms to determine why some organizations succeed while others fail. In Good to Great, among the findings are:

• Level 5 Leadership: A unique approach that is essential for excellence.
• The Hedgehog Concept: Finding your three rings to overcome the curse of competence.
• A Culture of Discipline: The Alchemy of Great Results
• Technology Accelerators: How Great Companies Think About Technology Differently
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Why do people who frequently restructure fail to make the transition?

Author: Jim Collins

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0066620996

The 4 Disciplines of Execution is the book "any leader should read" (Clayton Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School, and author of The Innovator's Dilemma) for generating long-term organizational change. The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX), a Wall Street Journal best seller with over 500,000 copies sold, will transform your business.

4DX isn't a theory. It is a tried-and-true set of practices that reflects a new way of thinking critical to prospering in today's competitive environment, making its second edition one of the best books on strategic planning for any business leader.

The second edition has more than 30% new content, including information on themes such as:

• How does 4DX affect leaders of leaders?
• The one metric that ensures long-term execution
• Strategic commitment necessitates three leadership attitudes.
• Using technology to create compelling executive scoreboards

The 4 Disciplines of Execution are employed by over 100,000 teams worldwide in industry, government, and education, and they are redefining how teams and organizations achieve their most essential goals.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) is a simple, repeatable, and proven strategy for implementing your most critical strategic priorities in the midst of chaos. Leaders can generate breakthrough results by following the 4 Disciplines – Focus on the Wildly Important; Act on Lead Measures; Keep a Compelling Scoreboard; Create a Cadence of Accountability – even when implementing the strategy involves a significant change in behavior from their teams.

Author: Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Disciplines-Execution-Expanded-Achieving-Important/dp/198215697X

HBR’s 10 Must Reads series is the collection of books for both novice and experienced leaders. Leaders seeking the inspiration that big ideas give, both for their own and their companies' growth, need look no further.

HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the essential issues that any aspiring manager should be familiar with: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review sifted through hundreds of articles to find only the most important ones on each topic. Each title contains timeless information that will remain applicable in an ever-changing business climate. Among the best books on strategic planning, HBR's 10 Must Reads include classic ideas, timeless counsel, and the best thinkers.

Is your organization wasting time on strategy development with little to show for it? The HBR's 10 Must-Reads on Strategy will motivate you to:

• Differentiate your company from competitors.
• Determine what your organization will and will not do.
• Make a plan for an unpredictable future.
• Make uncontested market space blue oceans.
• To evaluate your plan, use the Balanced Scorecard.
• Make a memorable phrase out of your strategy.
• Make your priorities clear and allocate resources as soon as possible.
• Clarify decision rights to facilitate speedier decision making.

Author: Harvard Business Review, Michael E. Porter and W. Chan Kim

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-including-featured-Michael-Porter/dp/1633694496

B. Keith Simerson knows from experience what works and what doesn't when it comes to strategic planning. Strategic Planning: A Practical Guide to Strategy Formulation and Execution weaves such information into a roadmap for anybody entrusted with developing a strategic plan, evaluating a strategic planning process, or effectively and efficiently executing resulting plans. The book is not a one-size-fits-all answer; instead, it provides a menu of knowledge and possibilities based on a broad understanding of strategic planning, with similarly broad applicability.

The handbook focuses on two important components of the planning process: the numerous factors that contribute to an effective strategic planning framework, as well as the numerous drivers and enablers of successful execution. With specific facts at their disposal, readers will learn how to develop and implement a business strategy, a personal strategic action plan, or plans for any type of for-profit or nonprofit organization. Specific methodology, tools, and techniques will assist readers through the process of developing and implementing a successful strategy.

Author: B. Keith Simerson

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Planning-Practical-Formulation-Execution/dp/0313384800

Clayton Christensen's work has been acknowledged by some of the world's most well-known thought leaders, including Steve Jobs and Malcolm Gladwell. In The Innovator's Dilemma– one of the most important business books of all time – innovation guru Clayton Christensen demonstrates how even the finest organizations may do everything right and still lose market leadership. Christensen shows why most businesses fail to capitalize on new waves of innovation. He claims that regardless of industry, a successful company with proven products would be pushed away unless management understand when and how to forsake traditional business techniques. The Innovator's Dilemma provides a set of guidelines for profiting on the phenomena of disruptive innovation, using both successes and failures from prominent firms as examples.

The Innovator's Dilemma is the book that no manager, leader, or entrepreneur should be without. It is sharp, cogent, and provocative, and it is consistently cited as one of the most valuable business ideas of all time.

Author: Clayton M. Christensen

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Management-Innovation/dp/142219602X

Strategy Safari is widely regarded as a classic work in the subject of company strategy by top management theorist Henry Mintzberg and his collaborators Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel. No other book so vividly and entertainingly summarizes the entire history and growth of strategic management like this book. Since its first release, managers, consultants, and academics all around the world have found Strategy Safari to be a necessary and fun tool—it has been translated into over ten languages, including Chinese, Russian, and French, and is utilized in top MBA programs across the world.

Strategy Safari makes sense of a field that appears to make no sense at times. Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel complement their broad perspective of strategy formulation with an authoritative catalog in which they identify ten schools of strategy that have arisen over the last four decades.

Why fight your way through the broad, perplexing terrain of strategy formation? Strategy Safari maps the strategic landscape with clarity and depth, facilitating intelligent, informed strategy creation.

Author: Henry Mintzberg

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Safari-Through-Strategic-Management/dp/0743270576

Business Model Generation is a how-to guide for visionaries, game changers, and challengers who want to defy outdated business models and create tomorrow's firms. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities but lacks a strategy to stay ahead of your competition, you need Business Model Generation.

The book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It was co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries. It discusses the most common Business Model patterns and helps you reinterpret them for your particular environment, based on insights from top business thinkers. You will learn how to understand, build, and implement a game-changing business model–or how to examine and renovate an existing one. Along the route, you'll have a far better understanding of your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and core value offer.

Business Model Generation includes practical innovation approaches utilized by major consultants and corporations around the world, such as 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. It is intended for those who are willing to forsake old ways of thinking and embrace new methods of value creation: executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders from all organizations. If you're willing to break the rules, you're part of "the business model generation!"

Author: Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Business-Model-Generation-Visionaries-Challengers/dp/0470876417

Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr explains how the goal-setting method of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech behemoths ranging from Intel to Google achieve spectacular growth – and how it can help any firm succeed.

In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up for whom he had recently invested $12.5 million, his largest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin possessed incredible technology, entrepreneurial zeal, and lofty goals, but no solid business model. Page and Brin had to learn how to make difficult decisions on priorities while keeping their team on track if Google was to change the world (or even survive). They'd have to know when to abandon losing bets and fail quickly. And they required timely, relevant data to track their success - to quantify what was important.

Doerr educated them about a tried-and-true method for achieving operational excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He encountered OKRs as an engineer at Intel in the 1970s, where the renowned Andy Grove ("the finest manager of his or any era") led the best-run firm Doerr had ever seen. Doerr later shared Grove's idea with more than 50 companies as a venture capitalist. It worked whenever the approach was faithfully followed.

In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we want to achieve; key results indicate how those top priorities will be met with specific, measurable actions inside a defined time frame. Everyone's objectives, from entry-level to CEO, are visible to the entire organization.

The advantages are enormous. OKRs highlight the most important work of a company. They concentrate effort and promote coordination. They help staff stay on track. They connect objectives across silos in order to unite and strengthen the entire organization. OKRs improve workplace satisfaction and retention along the way.

Doerr provides a wide range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies in Measure What Matters, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to highlight the focus, agility, and rapid development that OKRs have spurred at so many great businesses. This book will assist a new generation of leaders in capturing the same enchantment.

Author: John Doerr

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Measure-What-Matters-Google-Foundation/dp/0525536221

Strategic planning emphasizes the importance of making decisions that will assure an organization's ability to successfully respond to changes in the environment and prepare for long-term viability in today's business environment. Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies shows you how to make strategy a habit for all organizations, regardless of size, kind, or resource constraints, by providing practical, field-tested strategies and a thorough 6-phase plan.

Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies is designed for businesses of all sizes that want to build and maintain a competitive advantage, establish an ongoing process for market assessment and trend analysis, and create a vision for future growth. This revised edition includes new and updated content on both short and long-term planning; critical information on succession planning; assistance in preparing for the unexpected using scenario planning and agile strategy; strategies for successfully implementing change and integrating strategic plans by involving all staff members; and more.

• The supplemental CD outlines a thorough, 6-phase, step-by-step approach, complete with downloadable spreadsheets, charts, checklists, video links, and other resources.
• It is beneficial to any firm or entrepreneur seeking to improve efficiency, focus, and competitive edge.
• Contains tried-and-true strategies.

Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies provides today's business owners and upper-level management with the skills and information they need to think and act strategically in order to weather current economic storms more efficiently while planning for future growth.

Author: Erica Olsen

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Planning-Dummies-Erica-Olsen/dp/1118077776

Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations is a thorough, hands-on guide to establishing and maintaining a more effective organization. A good strategy is more crucial now than ever before, and this book gives a clear framework for establishing and implementing an effective and efficient planning process. The conversation covers all stages of the process to help you keep your organization together and on track in the future, from identifying stakeholders and articulating a shared vision to implementing plans and modifying tactics. The foremost authority in the subject provides insight, advice, useful tools, and specialized methodologies, as well as a frequently utilized and well-regarded approach to real-world planning. This new fifth edition contains additional case studies and examples, as well as updated resources and references and new multimedia-related information.

To make your business great, innovation and creativity generate excellent ideas, but these ideas must be collected and structured into an actionable plan supported by a coalition of support. This book offers expert advice and perspective to assist you in putting everything together into a workable organizational approach.

• Discover an efficient strategy for strategic planning.
• Identify concerns, create a vision, clarify mandates, and put strategies into action.
• Manage the process by constantly learning and revising
• Link unique assets and abilities to better achieve the overall goal

Public and nonprofit leaders are constantly seeking to do more with less, and good strategic planning may help you incorporate efficiency and effectiveness into your organization's daily operations. Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations gives the foundation and skills necessary to begin planning for the future now.

Author: John M. Bryson

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Planning-Public-Nonprofit-Organizations/dp/1119071607

Consider running a company without a strategy. It would be like driving blindfolded or constructing a house without a blueprint. Yet, just 50 years ago, business "plans" were merely extrapolations of the status quo, oblivious to the forces that determine today's businesses' fate: competitive threats, consumer wants, and business costs. The concept of strategy transformed everything, setting the path for the modern corporate world to emerge.

The Lords of Strategy chronicles the development and growth of strategy, possibly the most significant corporate paradigm of the last half-century, as well as the difficulties and successes of the unexpected innovators who created it. Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group; Bill Bain, founder of Bain & Company; Fred Gluck, longstanding managing director of McKinsey & Company; and Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter were among them. Each was fascinated with determining how businesses get a competitive advantage over others. This insider narrative exposes the pioneers of the industry as "idea junkies" — a new breed of intellectuals who used thoughts as weapons in business disputes. Their tireless pursuit into the depths of competitiveness shattered much conventional knowledge, pushed CEOs into action, and challenged businesses to understand themselves like never before.

The Lords of Strategy, an important book by one of management's most astute observers, gives readers a better grasp of the world in which they compete, as well as a keener eye for what works — and what doesn't — when crafting strategy.

Author: Walter Kiechel

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Strategy-Intellectual-History-Corporate/dp/1591397820