Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

This big initiative could make or break this fiscal year--or your career. Managing a successful strategic initiative may be the key to transforming your company--and propelling your career forward. Yet running a cross-functional team on a high-profile project can present a multitude of challenges and risks, causing even the most experienced manager to struggle. The HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives provides practical tips and advice to help you manage all the stages of an initiative's life cycle, from buy-in to launch to scaling up. You'll learn how to: Win--and keep--support for your new initiative Move rapidly from approval to implementation Assemble transformative, high-performing initiative teams Maintain the confidence of sponsors and stakeholders Stay on schedule and within budget Avoid initiative overload by killing projects that aren't meeting business needs Keep multiple initiatives in strategic alignment Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, from a source you trust. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy. In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? • When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage? • How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? • How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.

In the last century water policies relied on the construction of massive infrastructure in the form of dams, pipelines, and complex centralized treatment plants to meet human demands. These facilities brought tremendous benefits, but they also had serious and often unanticipated social, economic and environmental costs. Demand for water is one of the major challenges of the current century, but past approaches are no longer sufficient.

In the tradition of Octavia Butler, here is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help to shape the futures we want. Change is constant. The world, our bodies, and our minds are in a constant state of flux. They are a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, Emergent Strategy teaches us to map and assess the swirling structures and to read them as they happen, all the better to shape that which ultimately shapes us, personally and politically. A resolutely materialist spirituality based equally on science and science fiction: a wild feminist and afro-futurist ride! adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a social justice facilitator, healer, and doula living in Detroit.

Defines common ground at the interface of strategy and management science and unites the topics with an original approach vital for strategy students, researchers and managers Strategic Analytics: Integrating Management Science and Strategy combines strategy content with strategy process through the lenses of management science, masterfully defining the common ground that unites both fields. Each chapter starts with the perspective of a certain strategy problem, such as competition, but continues with an explanation of the strategy process using management science tools such as simulation. Facilitating the process of strategic decision making through the lens of management science, the author integrates topics that are usually in conflict for MBAs: strategy and quantitative methods. Strategic Analytics features multiple international real-life case studies and examples, business issues for further research and theory review questions and exercises at the end of each chapter. Strategic Analytics starts by introducing readers to strategic management. It then goes on to cover: managerial capabilities for a complex world; politics, economy, society, technology, and environment; external environments known as exogenous factors (PESTE) and endogenous factors (industry); industry dynamics; industry evolution; competitive advantage; dynamic resource management; organisational design; performance measurement system; the life cycle of organisations from start-ups; maturity for maintaining profitability and growth; and finally, regeneration. Developed from the author's own Strategy Analytics course at Warwick Business School, personal experience as consultant, and in consultation with other leading scholars Uses management science to facilitate the process of strategic decision making Chapters structured with chapter objectives, summaries, short case studies, tables, student exercises, references and management science models Accompanied by a supporting website Aimed at both academics and practitioners, Strategic Analytics is an ideal text for postgraduates and advanced undergraduate students of business and management.