Book

Strategic

The Skill to Set Direction, Create Advantage, and Achieve Executive Excellence

Rich Horwath

Wiley, 2023

Buy the book

Read, Listen, or Discuss

Amazon Kindle Discuss

1×

登录收听有声浓缩书。

Editorial Rating

getAbstract Rating

Comprehensive
Applicable
Concrete Examples

Recommendation

In this thorough, applicable guide to strategy, Rich Horwath advocates developing the correct strategy to help you avoid pitfalls. He warns that imitating a competitor is not a strategy. Instead, Horwath urges you to differentiate your business by developing its distinctive qualities, not by lowering your prices. Most leaders reallocate budgets annually. But to heighten performance continually, Horwath advises reassessing your resources more often to take advantage of ongoing openings. He calls for periodic reviews to unearth promising opportunities and spur innovation. Even though academia endorses diversification, Horwath reports that most successful companies concentrate on a core business.

Summary

Decide what to do and what not to do.

Leaders must understand their organization and set a strategic course to succeed. Unfortunately, 30 years of Gallup’s research found that fewer than 25% of more than 10 million managers feel confident that their leaders offer an unambiguous sense of direction. To set a corporate direction effectively, organizations need skills in the pivotal realms of strategy, leadership, organizational structure, and communication.

As leaders decide what to do and what not to do, it’s clear that developing a strategy entails making trade-offs. Business strategies should be neither cautious nor aspirational – neither aimed at a distant future goal nor based only on a repackaged older initiative. The decision to follow best practices can’t stand alone. That often calls for surrendering to operational routines, with the result that a company converges with its competitors instead of differentiating itself.

To set your strategy, use the GOST Framework, which covers goals, objectives, strategy, and tactics. A goal is a general aspiration. An objective defines the goal with specificity. For example, if market leadership...

About the Author

Founder and CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute Rich Horwath is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author of eight books on strategic thinking including Strategy for You: Building a Bridge to the Life You Want.

Strategic

The Skill to Set Direction, Create Advantage, and Achieve Executive Excellence

Read, Listen, or Discuss

Editorial Rating

getAbstract Rating

Recommendation

Summary

Decide what to do and what not to do.

About the Author

My Highlights

Comment on this summary

More on this topic

By the same author

Elevate

Learners who read this summary also read

How the Best Leaders Lead

Business Strategy

The Strategy Book

Uncommon Sense, Common Nonsense

The Real-Life MBA

Winning

Related Skills