TITLE : MAKING SENSE OF STRATEGY.

Let's cut the b.s. and cut straight to the chase. Strategy is not rocket science. It's about listening to customers, asking some pretty simple questions, making some choices and getting people to support your decisions. Strategy is the ultimate responsibilty of ever business leader. Companies succeed when they get it right and fail when they get it wrong. The fact that more companies fail than succeed says that something is very wrong indeed with the state of strategy. It's also an indictment of leadership. This new century is a time of extraordinary complexity, opportunity and risk. Business is a 24/7 activity. Markets are global, competitors are increasingly hostile and change occurs faster than at any other time in history. Managing almost any organization gets harder by the minute. There's too muc to do and too many new challenges. Things need more thought but there's less time to turn ideas into action.

Smart people have been writing about management for close to 100 years and they offered "solutions" to just about every business problem. Yet executives everywhere still seek The Answer to a simple question :

HOW DO YOU CHOOSE WHAT TO DO .... AND HOW DO YOU GET IT DONE?

Or, to put it differently, what is the best way to take your company from here to the future and make a bundle of money on the way?

Whether you think of our company as "old economy" or "new economy", as "bricks-and-mortar", "B2B" (business-to-business), "B2C" (business-to-consumer) or whatever, the race for tomorrow's customers and profits hinges on two things : business model design and implementation capability. So best you wrap yor mind around what really matters and get busy with it fast. Books fly fast and in great numbers onto the shelves. Some have serious titles and clunky prose that ensure most readers won't get past Chapter 1. Others are catchier and jammed with bullet points and checklists.

Many best-sellers of the past two decades have been written as if for idiots. Parables are popular, and "Bill" and "Mary" feature in lots of them, along with mentors like "The Executive". The heroes of one winner are "little people" and a couple of mice. And there are any number of titles promising the wisdom of dolphins or foxes or wolves; the inspiration of eagles; lessons from some ancient Japanese warrior, Bushmen hunters, the Marines or a trendy Californian chef; or insights from survivors of aircraft crashes, cancer or a cocaine habit.

This book is the antidote.

Making Sense of Strategy is based on the latest management thinking, as well as the author's own experience of what actuallygoes on in companies and what really works. It captures views that have developed over the past century, from writers listed in the bibliograhy and from many others, too. Some of the ideas have appeared in his earlier books and he uses them here because they have been extensively "field-tested" over a long period of time.

Unlike other books, which tend to focus on one aspect of management or anther, this one presents a holistic view. It gives you an original - and effective - way of making the difference that matters.

Like politics, business is the art of the possible. Whether you're a practicing executive, a student, a teacher of management, an investor, an investment analyst or a business analyst, this book will help you make a difference.