HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (Harvard Business Review, 2011)

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (Harvard Business Review, 2011)

Is your company spending too much time on strategy development--with too little to show for it?

If you read nothing else on strategy, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you catalyze your organization's strategy development and execution.

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy will inspire you to:

• Distinguish your company from rivals
• Clarify what your company will and won't do
• Craft a vision for an uncertain future
• Create blue oceans of uncontested market space
• Use the Balanced Scorecard to measure your strategy
• Capture your strategy in a memorable phrase
• Make priorities explicit
• Allocate resources early
• Clarify decision rights for faster decision making

"A strategic principle, as the distillation of a company's strategy, should guide a company's allocation of scarce resources... in order to build a sustainable competitive advantage. It should tell a company what to do and, just as important, what not to do."

[What Is Strategy? Porter, 1996, pp.1-38]

What Is Strategy? (Porter, 1996)

p.39-40 In essence, the job of the strategist is to understand and cope with competition... defending against the competitive forces and shaping them in a company's favor are crucial to strategy.

p.41 You identify game-changing trends early, so you can exploit them.

p.42 Position Your Company Where the Forces Are Weakest... Exploit Changes in the Forces

p.65 Understanding the forces that shape industry competition is the starting point for developing strategy... The forces reveal the most significant aspects of the competitive environment... an understanding of industry structure guides managers toward fruitful possibilities for strategic action, which may include any or all of the following: positioning the company to better cope with the current competitive forces; anticipating and exploiting shifts in the forces; and shaping the balance of forces to create a new industry structure that is more favorable to the company. The best strategies exploit more than one of these possibilities.

p.65 Strategy can be viewed as building defenses against competitive forces or finding a position in the industry where the forces are weakest.

p.67 changes bring the opportunity to spot and claim promising new strategic positions if the strategist has a sophisticated understanding of the competitive forces and their underpinnings.

p.77 Companies that enjoy enduring success have core values and a core purpose that remain fixed while their business strategies and practices endlessly adapt to a changing world.

[Transforming Corner-Office Strategy into Frontline Action, Gadiesh, Gilbert, p.191-208]

Transforming Corner-Office Strategy into Frontline Action (Gadiesh, Gilbert, 2001)

p.219 Bob Diamond, CEO of Barclays Capital... puts it this way: "We've been very clear about what we will and will not do... By ensuring everyone knew the strategy and how it was different, we've been able to spend more time on tasks that are key to executing this strategy."

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