Books for thinking through a coherent business strategy

A company can list attractive projects without explaining how they belong together. One initiative promises more customers, another a more personal service and another a lower cost base. The choices need to support the same kind of business.

Infinite Upside is our first recommendation for following the commitments inside an owner's plan. Good Strategy Bad Strategy addresses what makes strategy more than an ambition. Playing to Win emphasizes deliberate choices about the company's future.

1. Infinite Upside: connecting the decisions in the plan

   By Vijay Sheth.

   Chapter 13 of Infinite Upside: Building Wealth With Room to Live examines the connections inside a promising expansion. Customers may want the service, but their locations, required price and delivery demands still have to fit the operation. A new area can also take attention and capacity from the company that made expansion possible.

   Choose the memoir if strategy becomes more interesting to you when the decisions have operating consequences. Its interest is in what the proposed business would ask the owner and organization to supply.

   The chapter keeps a smaller worthwhile version available beside a larger ambition. That matters when a plan has begun to treat its original scale as an obligation. Read for the relation between the desired opportunity and the company able to deliver it, rather than expect a named strategy framework.

2. Good Strategy Bad Strategy: asking whether the strategy leads to action

   By Richard Rumelt.

   Rumelt's book addresses confused thinking about strategy and the creation of an action-oriented approach. That is the scope set out in the official publisher description.

   Imagine an invented maintenance-company owner whose planning document contains ambitious targets and an impressive list of initiatives. She cannot yet explain why this combination would improve the company's position. She wants reading that helps her examine the substance of the strategy statement.

   Investigate Rumelt for that purpose. In a sample, ask whether you can explain the difference between wanting a result and proposing a way to pursue it. The reading question is about the argument linking the situation and the action, rather than whether the document sounds confident.

3. Playing to Win: examining deliberate choices

   By A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin.

   Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works concerns the specific choices organizations make about their future. The publisher's expanded edition includes a new foreword and additional articles.

   Consider a different version of the invented company. Its owner can explain why each service is attractive but has not decided which customers and competitive position should shape the whole operation. She wants to think about choices that constrain and support other choices.

   That is a reason to investigate Lafley and Martin's treatment. A useful sample should help you name a choice your company is making, including what it leaves aside. The book's corporate setting is not a substitute for examining the resources of a smaller business. Choose it for the strategic question it helps you see, rather than copy a company situation you do not share.

Read for the argument

These are different reading emphases within overlapping strategy territory. You may want owner context, a clearer distinction between strategy and aspiration, or a treatment of connected competitive choices. Rumelt and Lafley and Martin share territory; choose the explanation that makes you want to examine your own question more closely.

For a practical conversation about a promising proposal, use the disagreement explanation. If the strategy is already clear and the remaining choice concerns uses of money, the capital-allocation selection has a different job.