Excellent and comprehensive book on strategy

I've been reading about strategy over the last 20 years from many authors and from many angles, but this is the first one that I think takes a really comprehensive view of strategy and the process of crafting one.

I noticed that some of the other reviews criticize the authors for focusing on P&G, but I think they're missing the point: P&G is a large and diverse organization, and illustrating how strategy works there covers a massive spectrum of businesses. Many will find that while strategic options don't look the same in their organization, the general lessons from P&G can be applied to just about any kind of business. And the authors do salt the text with examples from other industries where the nature of those industries create meaningful illustrations.

In all, I think this is an an extensive and extremely worthwhile book. I recommend it highly!

16 people found this helpful

The P&G Story

This book is all about the author's experience as CEO of Proctor & Gamble. It's a reasonably good exposition of a well-founded approach to strategy in that context, but there is virtually no discussion of how the approach might apply to other environments. In the end the book is a case study of the strategic decision-making process at P&G rather than a tutorial for a business leader.

20 people found this helpful

Great advice if you’re the size of P&G

Maybe I lacked imagination when I went through this one but I just could not find any relevant information to the business I’m currently in. That’s unusual even a story or lessons learned from another industry can spark new ideas for something that could be implemented in the market I play.
But this one, nope.

In fact there so was much talk of leveraging P&E size and abilities I wonder if it could be useful to small players in similar markets.

Dud.

4 people found this helpful

"This is how awesome we were at P&G"

Any additional comments?

The themes in the book are solid themes but the "key takeaways" were very generic..."so, we applied dedication and resources...". The book glosses over significant components of managing priorities in an organization. Resources constraints, cost benefit trade-offs, prioritization, cross-functional complexities, for example. Would've done well to include more related and detailed examples

7 people found this helpful

Okay for strategy

Some of these things are straightforward. Although most of them seem short-termist, as is evident today. This is a good book to understand P&G businesses. There are probably better strategy books.

2 people found this helpful

Huh?

Too high level for me. Hard for me to follow because I don’t have the executive experience or expertise the author has in order to comprehend all the lessons in each chapter. Author utilizes business school level terminology and theory and gives many examples of how many major corporations either succeeded or failed which is easy for the experienced executive to comprehend but for the novice business executive or aspiring business executive, it will be difficult to understand.

1 person found this helpful

Overly long with no new insights. Don’t even bother

A very disappointing effort. Highly capable authors with an analysis that has little in the way of specific insights and is long on dated anecdotes. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish the book, even though I really enjoyed Roger Martin‘s previous book On design thinking.

2 people found this helpful

Winning Strategy

This book is great for creating strategy in big companies or SMBs. While the author has multiple key takeaways, he highlights two; where to play, and how to win. Where to play entails finding market fit - brand positioning, where to sell geographically, based on category, price, market segment, etc. When you figure out where to play, you strategize how to win which is not only making the right choices, but eliminating bad choices. This includes going over multiple scenarios, reverse engineering them and see what must be true for it to succeed.

Tons of value

Great book! Tons of value and lessons. Great book for all business sizes. Solid insights.

Gran libro sobre estrategia, práctico

estructura clara y concisa, la narración es muy buena y hace fácil de seguir el contenido