Book Description

“You will come away from The Art and Discipline of Strategic Leadership better equipped to not only think more incisively about future competitive advantage, but your organization will have greater strategic focus at every level, beginning with the top management team.”

—Gerald L. Kiser, president & CEO, La-Z-Boy Incorporated

Now in paperback, The Art and Discipline of Strategic Leadership offers business strategists an integrated five-phase model for setting and implementing strategy. Proven effective at a diverse range of organizations worldwide, the model provides executives with a powerful framework for assessing and tweaking current strategy, or charting a bold new strategic course.


Book Info
Key points are illustrated with case examples from a diverse range of organizations, including Hallmark, Hong Kong and China Gas, Lockheed Martin, Savoy Hotel Group, and others.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

￯﾿ﾽYou will come away from The Art and Discipline of StrategicLeadership better equipped to not only think more incisively about future competitive advantage, but your organization will have greater strategic focus at every level, beginning with the top management team.￯﾿ﾽ

—Gerald L. Kiser, president & CEO, La-Z-Boy Incorporated

Now in paperback, The Art and Discipline of Strategic Leadership offers business strategists an integrated five-phase model for setting and implementing strategy. Proven effective at a diverse range of organizations worldwide, the model provides executives with a powerful framework for assessing and tweaking current strategy, or charting a bold new strategic course.

SYNOPSIS

Drive Breakthrough Strategic Thinking Throughout Every Level of your Organization

"A gold mine of strategic insight and practical advice, with case examples drawn from Mike Freedman's stellar international consulting career. This book will change your concept of what strategy is and how to make it drive your organization."—Robert A. Lutz, Vice Chairman, Product Development, and Chairman, GM North America, General Motors Corporation

"I only wish I'd had this book to guide me years ago when I was named chief executive of the UK's largest (yet failing) transport company. This is a template for every CEO seeking to formulate a new strategy and revitalize tired values."—Sir Peter Thompson, former Chairman, National Freight Company, and UK Businessman of the Year

"Mike Freedman brings a holistic approach, deep thinking, and broad practical experience to the subject of strategic leadership. Read this book and you will improve your understanding of strategy and your role in it, wherever you are in the organization."—Sir Bryan Nicholson, Past President, Confederation of British Industry, Chairman, Cookson Group Plc

"Every corporate leader faces new challenges. This book presents a thought-provoking, integrated, and proven approach to strategy that meets these imperatives head on, and challenges chief executives, their top teams, and future leaders to benchmark their strategic effectiveness. The book also provides breakthrough concepts and processes to help improve strategic performance, arguably the most important aspect of a top team's work."—From the Introduction

Strategic leadership is one of the most used and abused phrases in today's corporate lexicon. The Art and Discipline of Strategic Leadership removes the theory and guesswork to reveal strategic leadership for what it really is: guiding an organization to establish a framework within which it will make choices to determine its future nature and direction.

In this thoughtful, pragmatic book, international strategic advisers Mike Freedman and Benjamin Tregoe draw on their extensive experience with leading consulting firm Kepner-Tregoe. Along with examples of successfully implemented approaches from Hallmark International, British Airways, Lockheed Martin, the Bank of Ireland, and many others, they outline a five-phase plan you can use to: Gather and analyze intelligence, craft a strategic vision, develop implementation plans, take action, and monitor results Secure consistency in strategic decision-making throughout your organization Dodge the currently popular—but potentially fatal—trend toward strategic short-termism

As you read these words, your competitors are formulating their own strategies and adopting and adapting your most innovative ideas for their own purposes—to trump your products, steal your customers, and capture your place in the value chain. Your defense? Accept the inevitable obsolescence of your current thinking, formulate and implement a self-renewing strategy, and regain the upper hand in the battle for competitive survival.

Today's uncompromising environment leaves you little choice. Every day, with every decision you make, you must improve your firm's strategic performance. Let The Art and Discipline of Strategic Leadership introduce you to a disciplined approach to creating and implementing results-based strategy, by providing tools and techniques for you and your team to discard outmoded standards, think the unthinkable, and implement a fluid and flexible strategy to drive extraordinary business results.

FROM THE CRITICS

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

In the 21st century it is more critical than ever that CEOs provide clear strategic leadership. In the ever-changing business landscape, leaders must master both the art of strategy creation and formulation and the discipline of strategy implementation and review. Mike Freedman, president of the worldwide strategy practice of consulting company Kepner-Tregoe, Inc., presents the Kepner-Tregoe five-phase model for strategy formulation and implementation to show how your company can develop a strategic vision and action plan, communicate the vision, implement it, and monitor it to ensure ongoing success.

Freedman defines "strategy" as the framework of choices that determine the nature and direction of an organization.

A "framework" establishes the boundaries and scope of the business activity.

The "choices" are about the products and services provided, the markets served, and the key capabilities needed.

The "nature" of the organization is what exemplifies it, and describes its character. Like Intel's "chips" and McDonald's "fast food chains," nature gives strategic coherence to decision-making and communications.

"Direction" is the organization's future course determined by choices about future products and services, future customers, and future markets.

Also understand what strategy is not. A decision is not strategic simply because it is long-term, or involves a multi-million dollar expenditure. These decisions can be made within the strategic framework, but only decisions that change the framework are strategic.

There are three critical aspects to a strategy: A strategic vision must be based on facts, informed assumptions, and the best-possible what-if thinking. The vision must be communicated throughout the organization to clarify and align the role of every strategically critical player and process. The vision must be monitored to ensure continued strength, agility and relevance.

Recent strategic thinking has been weakened by dot.com-fueled fear of failure or the desire to appease Wall Street analysts. When weak strategies fail, some assume strategy is irrelevant or unnecessary. In fact, a company without a coherent strategy is particularly vulnerable in these times, as is any company that does have a clear direction but poor implementation.

Strategy requires the art of creativity to fashion a vision and the discipline to direct thought processes and execution. Discipline turns vision into reality. Executives must proactively create a strategy instead of succumbing to a default strategy that was inherited, stumbled into, or borrowed from a competitor. Lack of a clear strategy subjects your organization to competitor, shareholder, and employee threats.

There are five phases of strategy formulation and implementation. These five phases are: Strategic Intelligence Gathering and Analysis. You only need enough data to find implications of trends and assumptions for your own business. The team must ask universal questions that explain the past and present and look to the future. Examine broad areas of your external environment that are out of the organization's control: trends in the economy, society, government, politics, and technology that could affect your business. Then identify key players in your current value chain: your major customers, purchasers, and end users. What trends are likely in your supplier base? What is the overall competitive scenario in the structure of the industry's value chain? What are the essential requirements for success for any organization in the industry, and how do you measure up? Strategy Formulation. Strategy formulation begins with the company's strategic time frame and basic beliefs. Timeframe and basic beliefs will help determine how to guide the organization, define and strengthen your competitive advantage, recognize which key capabilities you need, allocate scarce resources, determine direction and scope for growth and new business, and plan expectations for return and profit. All goals must have an endpoint to create a sense of urgency for accomplishment. Your timeframe should be determined by your individual organization and the forces that affect it — from macroeconomic trends to emerging regulatory concerns to your value chain's timetable. The strategic time frame is not the same as the time period for long-range planning activities, which are often arbitrary and determined by accounting and shareholder expectation. Basic beliefs are deeply held tenets, creeds, convictions, or persuasions that provide the social cohesion of organizations. Strategic Master Project Planning. Reluctance or incompetence in crafting a process for implementing strategic change is the most reliable predictor of failure. Every corner of the organization must change, so strategy implementation should be built into the work of the entire organization. The scheduling, resourcing, and sequencing of project management are familiar to us all, but the Strategic Master Project Plan has the following distinguishing characteristics:
A. All projects in the Plan flow directly from the strategy.
B. Plan includes a considerable number of diverse projects.
C. Plan requires the disciplined prioritization of initiatives.
D. There is enterprise-wide adoption of common project management language and methodology.
E. Plan includes disciplined approach to project management methodology.
F. Success depends on discipline, commitment, and active support of entire top team. Strategy Implementation. The fourth strategic phase is implementation. Though all Strategic Master Project Plans are different, they do have some common traits that are so important that they must be regularly reviewed and realigned with the strategic intent when necessary. These include organization structure, strategic information management, complexity, culture and performance. Strategy Monitoring, Reviewing and Updating. The final phase of the strategy process asks the top team to keep the strategy "evergreen" by asking what could go differently than anticipated, how will you know if it occurs, and what will you do when it occurs. It is important to recognize that monitoring is just as important as strategy formulation and implementation.