Strategic thinking from HBR

Here’s a mini review of Harvard Business Review’s new book HBR Guide to Thinking Strategically.

The guide covers many of the recommendations and suggestions we think we’ve heard and we like to think we already know.

The truth is that these tips — covering topics such as structured decision making and prioritization methods in situations where objectives may conflict — are ones I frequently fail to remember and, even more often, fail to practice.

The guide — basically a greatest hits of the review’s various articles on strategic thinking and management — is a clever way to repackage pre-printed material. But even smarter is its accessibility. Each chapter manages, at an average of somewhere around 1,000 words, to boil years of thinking from a management professional or academic into a concise and accessible lesson. But that’s the value that’s always been provided by HBR, a resource I’ve been increasingly prone to tapping when starting major projects or doing some lightweight career planning.

Here are two points of many that jumped out for me:

· Regularly look at your institution and organization through the lens of outside stakeholders. Customers, for example. Many successful leaders place very real emphasis on informing their decisions and processes with external perspectives and outside best practices. Graham Kenny, a strategist based in Australia, recognizes that this requires “Look[ing] at Your Company from the Outside In,” as editors titled the guide’s eighth chapter. I can’t stress how much this tip reminded me of The Outside View, my favorite chapter from Thinking, Fast and Slow, the seminal work from Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. (Ken Pruitt introduced me and his other graduate students to Kahneman’s book six years ago and I’ve returned to it numerous times since.)

· Managers should try and shepherd their teams’ respective efforts and directions around what Peter Bregman, an executive advisor, calls a “big arrow.” Some objective that aligns everyone’s purpose, function and efforts. This helps get around the problem that successful project delivery isn’t always an issue with the what, but the who. As Bregman puts it, “a poorly executed strategy, no matter how clever, is worthless.” Time spent paying explicit attention clearly defining and communicating the team’s objective — the big arrow — before liftoff will be well spent.

For a synopsis (that happens to fit in a coat pocket) of strong, accessible thinking on the topics of contemporary management and strategy you could do much worse.