Your Strategy Needs a Strategy: How to Choose and Execute the Right Approach

by Martin Reeves, Knut Haanaes

Overview

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• What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete?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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625275875
Publisher:	Harvard Business Review Press
Publication date:	05/19/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Martin Reeves is Director of the BCG Bruce Henderson Institute and a senior partner based in New York City. Knut Haanæs is the global leader of BCG’s Strategy practice and a senior partner in the Geneva office. Janmejaya Sinha is chairman of BCG Asia Pacific, a member of BCG’s Executive Committee, and a senior partner in the Mumbai office.

Editorial Reviews

In terms of business strategy books, one of my favourites this year was Your Strategy Needs a Strategy by Martin Reeves, Knut Haanaes and Janmejaya Sinha, HBR Press.” — The Irish Times

“Be bigger or faster? Blue Ocean Strategy or aggressive? ... But what strategy do YOU need? ... According to this framework, there are five approaches: be big, fast, first, the conductor or simply be viable. You just have to choose. At Business Digest, we could not miss this book in which three experts from BCG offer you to slow down the pace to choose the strategy that suits you better.” — Business Digest

“In depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insights to help leaders match their approach to strategy to their environment, helping to determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch.” — Consulting magazine

“Reeves, Haanæs, and Sinha’s ‘strategy palette’ deftly illustrates the core approaches that can lead to success within the complex world of global business. Clear and comprehensive, Your Strategy Needs a Strategy is a must-read for business leaders seeking a fresh take on strategy and implementation.”— Ian C. Read, Chairman and CEO, Pfizer

“Finally, a business book that does not oversimplify strategy, proposing the next recipe or tool that will solve everything. On the contrary, it rightly acknowledges the variety of different business contexts and provides a rigorous framework to navigate this complexity—and take advantage of it!”— Marco Airoldi, CEO, Benetton Group

“The business world will be transformed in an unprecedented manner in the coming years, and this requires completely new strategic thinking. This book provides the conceptual tool for leaders who want to succeed in this new world.”— Klaus Schwab, founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum

“Your Strategy Needs a Strategy provides a compelling and timely guide to strategy and execution. It explains how strategy is contingent on the environment and why, especially in unpredictable environments, some companies will need to delegate decision-making power and resource-allocation power to self-organizing teams and encourage everyone to create value for their users.”— Ruimin Zhang, founder, Chairman, and CEO, Haier Group

“We finally have a book that can help CEOs and their top teams decide the right strategic approach for their companies in today’s volatile business environment. A must-read.”— Deepak Parekh, Chairman, HDFC

From the Publisher