Playing the Strategy Game

Today's intensively competitive business environment places extreme pressure on managers. Success comes to those who become skilled at effective strategic thinking and behavior.

Playing the Strategy Game established the link between personal and corporate strategic agendas. It provides a clear guide to becoming a strong performer in the competitive game of business. The business game is still played at both the operational and strategic level. The ambitious manager, who wants to live and succeed in this complex but rewarding world, has to gain an effective set of generic skills.

Getting personal with strategy, you will:

• understand strategic thinking and the strategy process
• create better strategies more quickly
• create the appropriate strategies for you and your business
• communicate and win support for your strategy
• develop your own strategic sense and imagination
• make your strategic radar more reliable
• link your corporate and personal strategic agendas
• become a smarter strategist

Create your own strategt rather than living someone else's.

• Part 1: Understanding the strategy game
1. Business as a competitive game
• Identifying what drives your performance
• Case study: Caterer seeks recipe for tasty growth
• The rules of the game
• Who are the key players and what makes them so?
2. Some fundamental beliefs about business success
• What can the gurus tell us?
• Henry Mintzberg's ten schools of thought
• What can successful companies tell us?
• Case study: Walt Disney
• Case study: Compaq
• Case study: Nokia
• Summary
• Part 2: Becoming a better strategist
3. The quest for a business logic
• Identifying your business approach
• Case study: Recipes for a healthier brand image
• Finding the best approach
• Case study: GEC
• Is it all about having a superior business model?
• The McGahan study
• What does this research tell us?
• The fixed plan v. flexibility paradox
• Case study: Netscape
4. The reality of business strategy
• Believing in a winning idea
• Why we believe in a winning business logic
• Case study: Ford Motor Company
• Case study: The Body Shop
• Three generic strategies
• Case study: American Express
• Applying the generic strategies
• For a business, the past becomes the present
5. Why is everyone reinventing the wheel?
• For houses the word is "location"; for business it's "context"
• Putting contemporary business thinking in context
• Has www.com made your business thinking obsolete?
• Organizational entrepreneurship
• Summary
• Part 3: Generic skills behind effective strategic behavior
• Introduction
1. Integrating personal and business development agendas
6. Developing personal strategies
• Emotional and fundamental beliefs
• Maintaining the vision
• Setting personal goals
• Personality and cognitive style
• Summary
7. Developing business strategies
• Matching strategic thinking to the business context
• Linking development to implementation
• Valuing and learning from experience
• Summary
2. Winning support for your strategies
9. Taking action in context
• Balancing the stakeholders
• Is it sensible to try to control performance?
• Summary
3. Developing your strategic sense and imagination
10. Learning how to adapt
• Harnessing your creativity
• Accelerating your learning
• Confront basic assumptions
• Summary
11. Intuition, the ultimate skill
• Developing vision
• Being a visionary
• Using your imagination
• Develop your intuition
• Summary
• Epilogue

When you think that you know strategy; then you read this book and gain some more insight.