Yet another Strategy book to read ?

 


If you ever tried to fully grasp the concept of Strategy (and, yes, we have, most of the time at least, reached consensus with what strategy is - but the understanding of what we really mean by Strategy is most of the time very variable) from an historic standpoint, I would recommend you to read the great book from Sir Lawrence Freedman: Strategy: a history. The author takes a full overview, from the Origins to the military contributions to the discipline to finish with the Business environments (where we discover that business management has not innovated that much, compared to what the military has provided to the discipline). A good investment of your time - especially in the digital and tech spaces, where people seem always puzzled by some ‘strategic’ questions.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Applying systems design principles to business

A system is a collection of elements that interact to produce an effect that cannot be produced by any subset of the elements. This interesting definition of what is a system guides Haeckel to define the synergy (the glue between the elements): Defining synergy as a result that is "more than the sum of the parts" is closer to the mark. This definition, for example, is what the corporate office of the General Electric Company (GE) achieves by lowering the cost of doing business for its subsidiaries. Because they are part of GE's portfolio, the subsidiaries benefit from the economies of scope that come from sharing the GE logo: GE's AAA investment rating, GE's worldwide telecommunications network, and GE's 'boundaryless' knowledge, to name some of the assets that are shared accross units. The result is that the units are more profitable as part of GE than they would be as separate entities, which means that GE's revenue and profit are more than the s...
Read more

2024, nearly there...

Image
Waw...time flies...Already five years working back as a business consultant, advising clients every day (and coping with the traffic jams folks, what a nightmare) - trying to help where and when I can, providing support with concrete and realistic feedback. In a nutshell, this year, I've been busy consulting for two major public entities, both located in Belgium. One where I currently conduct a technical debt reduction strategy (see my previous post on that matter) and another one dealing with the whole delivery department (PMO management, testing and development teams)...and it has been a lot of hard work!! The current complexity in IT architecture, cloud knowledge, generic and broad technical concepts, down to earth KPIs, are nowadays mandatory to run a workshop, to present some convincing arguments (why should the client change, right?)...and all that in a secure (security by design, of course) environment (should use plural here)... And again, this year has been full of great m...
Read more