Why do we need another strategy book?
THE STRATEGIC THINKER
By Massimo Garbuio, Nidthida Lin and Philipp Fuhrig
Why do we need another strategy book?
Massimo Garbuio, Nidthida Lin and Philipp Fuhrig
Yes, really, why do we need another strategy book? There is probably more content about strategic thinking out there than we can actually teach, assimilate, and put into practice. However, what we might be missing is a roadmap that helps us see more clearly what strategy is nowadays. Our goal in the book was to help us all reflect on strategy for the 21st century.
The strategy field is fairly new in comparison to other fields. In the past, strategy was often compared to war, and then to chess, but it’s really neither of them.
Today’s strategy is really not war, it’s not only about competition, and it’s not ‘I win and you lose’. It’s co-opetition, it’s competition and collaboration with other companies in the ecosystem, and it’s collaboration with partners that you want to attract to your own platform. It’s Amazon. It’s Apple, Netflix and Facebook. It’s Afterpay. Ah yes, of course, the mother of them all; Google. As a company, you want to be different, keep your identity and differentiate your product while collaborating with other companies, while having a clear plan of how two create win-win opportunities in the ecosystem. You want to focus on how to create value together.
Today, it’s not really chess either. It’s not about choosing from a small or big, or a limited set of options, or either doing just X, Y or Z. It’s often about carefully selecting a limited set of activities, doing them well and seeing where they lead you. Our cognitive capacity is limited, we crave work-life balance, and we want to have informed strategic conversations. You don't want to spend most of your time making PowerPoints that second guess what the audience wants to hear, and that will never be implemented anyway. We want what Thomas Powell has recently called diligence-based strategy. Today’s strategy is more like what entrepreneurs do: they manage a limited set of activities and let the strategy emerge over time. Yes, you do have a business model, but the strategy may emerge over time. If you are starting out as an entrepreneur who wants to build the next Apple, that’s what you want to know.
And finally, today, strategy is (still) a hypothesis about the future, imagining where customers and technology will be in 5 years time and working backwards. It’s not about doing millions of things at once. It’s not about a goal for a certain market share to be gained over a fixed period of time. Strategy still needs the clarity that Richard Rumelt gave to it; the clarity to generate hypotheses about the future and gearing your organization towards them. This should be complemented with the focus on key activities that you can control and which allow you to take your company up an extra gear.
So, in this short book we want to guide you through the good from the old and the best from the new in order to help you really understand what concepts stand the test of time, and what has emerged that really explains why investing 10K in Amazon at IPO in 1997 is now worth over 12 Million. Yes, it’s a game changing proposition. We are not going to give you a step-by-step process of how to apply a framework, but we will give you the seeds to critically think about whether a framework or a concept is useful and how some companies have really milked it to success.
At the end of the day, you are in the strategy seat. We offer you various concepts and help you pick what really makes sense for you. We want you to form your own opinion of what you need to know to build the next Amazon, or to advise the next Amazon or even to invest in the next Amazon. We want more Apples, and more Teslas, and more Afterpays. If you are sitting on a board, no matter your role, or if you are in a C-suite, no matter how much strategy you already know, we believe that there should always be time to reflect on and rethink strategy.
Seeds of Strategic Thinking is available only on Amazon Kindle and for free on Kindle Unlimited: https://bit.ly/SeedsOfStrategicThinking
Works that really inspired us (among many others):
Richard Rumelt on Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. See http://goodbadstrategy.com/
Thomas Powell on diligence-based strategy. See https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0008125617707975