This post contains a list of ten books that I found helpful as I wrote my book: Developing an Analytic Strategy: A Primer.
I thought about different ways to order the list, but, in the end, I simply ordered the books alphabetically by the last name of the author. I don’t find this ordering very satisfactory. I thought seriously of ordering the books by the number of pages, from the shortest (The Art of War) to the longest (Exploring corporate strategy: text & cases), since I have a particular fondness for short books that can concisely summarize complex subjects.
Focus Your Business: Strategic Planning in Emerging Companies
Steven C. Brandt, Focus Your Business: Strategic Planning in Emerging Companies, 1997, Archipelago Publishing, Friday Harbor, WA.
Steven Brandt is an entrepreneur who also taught at Stanford’s business school in the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s. The book is concise (169 pages) and practical. Its focus is on smaller and emerging companies. The book is full of diagrams and tables, which I particularly liked. There is an emphasis on practical planning to support the identification and implementation of a strategy.
Competing on Analytics
Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, Harvard Business School Press, 2007.
In 2006, Thomas Davenport, a professor at Babson College and a Fellow at Accenture, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review called Competing on Analytics that brought the importance of analytics to the attention of many corporate level executives for the first time. The article was the most downloaded article that year. The following year he wrote Competing on Analytic with Jeanne Harris. The book has sold more than 100,000 copies and has been translated into 13 languages.
25 Need to Know Strategy Tools
Vaughan Evans, 25 Need to Know Strategy Tools, Pearson, 2014
One of my favorites for getting a good practical introduction for writing a strategic plan or for refreshing your memory about some strategy tools and frameworks that you have learned in the past. It is probably more useful if you have had a course in strategy or have a bit of exposure to strategic planning, but even if this is not the case, you will probably get something out of the book.
The book is relatively concise (about 200 pages). Knowing 5-8 of the tools in detail and knowing the names of the others would put you in good place.
Evans has also written a related book with even more tools and frameworks that I also recommend:
Evans, Vaughn, Key Strategy Tools: The 80+ tools for every manager to build a winning strategy, Pearson, UK, 2013
Strategy: A History
Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A history, Oxford University Press, 2015.
Freedman has written a comprehensive book (over 600 pages) about thinkers who have written about strategy, their impact, and Freedman’s assessment of their work. Unlike most of the other books in this list, Freedman looks at strategy quite broadly and discusses military strategy (Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Jomini and others), business strategy, strategies of non-violence (Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi) and strategies of class warfare (Karl Marx). The book is very readable and does not need to be read from end to end, but it is still quite comprehensible if individual chapters or even sections are read.
Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors
Michael E. Porter, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, The Free Press, 1980.
Michael Porter is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School. His book Competitive Strategy was selected as one of the most influential management books of the 20th century by the Academy of Management.
Porter views strategy as a competition between firms and advocates understanding competition through what he calls the five forces: competitive rivalry, the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of buyers, the threat of substitution, and the threat of new competitors, and using this understanding to position a firm within a sector to provide structural barriers so that it could sustain above average profits over a long term.
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters, 2011, Crown Business, New York.
Richard Rumelt is a business school professor and consultant who has written a thoughtful and practical book about strategy. The McKinsey Quarterly called him as a “strategist’s strategist.” He emphasizes the importunate of any strategy having a kernel, which contains the following three elements:
- A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical.
- A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.
- A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.
The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy
Carl W. Stern and Michael S. Deimler, editors, The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy: Classic concepts and new perspectives, John Wiley & Sons, 2006.
This book contains reprints of several dozen articles written by consultants and principals from the Boston Consulting Group covering the classic tools they introduced and / or popularized, including the cash cows, experience curves, time-based competition, and many others. Still worth reading.
The Art of War
Sun Tzu and Lionel Giles (translator), The Art of War, 1910, retrieved from http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html.
This is the classic test on military strategy written about 2500 years that has spawned many books on business strategy. It’s always helpful to think about some of the similarities and differences between military and business strategy. The book exploded in popularity in 2001 due to an episode on the HBO series The Sopranos. Tony Soprano’s therapist recommended the book to him, and Tony Soprano in a clip that you can see on YouTube told the therapist that he found the book much more helpful than the Prince by Machiavelli, which some of his colleagues and adversaries had read. Your mileage may vary.
Exploring corporate strategy: text & cases.
Gerry Johnson, Richard Whittington, Kevan Scholes, Duncan Angwin and Patrick Regner, Exploring corporate strategy: text & cases. Pearson education. 11th edition, 2017.
One of the standard and most widely used textbooks on strategy. It’s been used by over 750,000 students. It’s through – the main text is over 500 pages and the case studies cover more than 200 additional pages. An excellent text and an excellent reference. You can get most of the benefit from one of the older editions, which can be much less expensive than the current edition.
What is strategy – and does it matter?
Richard Whittington. What is strategy – and does it matter?. Cengage Learning EMEA, 2001.
A thoughtful book about strategy, providing an analysis of the various academic traditions in strategy. For those wanting to master strategy, the insights and historical analysis are well worth it. The book is concise at 165 pages.
About the image. The image of Sun Tzu is in the public domain and is available from Wikipedia.