Book Review: Your Strategy Needs a Strategy

Here’s a book which didn’t make our list of books to watch out for in 2015 that we published in January. Having had chance to have a look at this one now, this book is up there with the best of them. Here’s why.Your Strategy Needs A Strategy is a wonderful starting place for those of you whose work involves formulating strategy, those of you starting your own businesses and those of you with an interest in understanding how smart businesses operate.

In this book — which has received a glowing critical reception — Martin Reeves, Knut Haanaes and Janmejaya Sinha offer us a brilliantly insightful way of locating the most appropriate strategy for your business within the broad landscape of available strategy models. The authors drill down into five broad types of strategy: classical, adaptive, visionary, shaping, and renewal. From here they lay out how each of these can be of service and in which scenarios they are most effective.

This book is far more than a simple overview of strategy models however, as it fully leverages the author’s experience as well as the experience of the may C-level leaders quoted in their book. It successfully marries theory and practice, and as such makes the reader eager to put their ideas into operation in their own lives and businesses.

This book is chock full of advice about common strategy pitfalls and how to avoid them. The book is based on years worth of data collected by the authors and out of which several key themes emerge. The over-riding lesson from the wealth of data is that those companies who choose the most appropriate strategy model for their business have most success. This may sound intuitive, but when coupled with the rich and specific insights on offer this book is dynamite. To those willing to ponder its wisdom there it could be a real trove.

In case all this hasn’t convinced you, why not listen to what Martin Reeves has to say himself in his TED Talk on why Your Strategy Needs A Strategy: