Top Business Strategy books recommended by experts

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Table of Contents

Fundamentals of Business Strategy

Understanding the concepts of Business Strategy starts with understanding the fundamentals. On your way to mastery, it's crucial for you to understand how certain concepts were derived, and why things work like they do. Starting with these resources is the best way to do so.

Your Strategy Needs a Strategy: How to Choose and Execute the Right Approach

In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it's never been more important―or more difficult―to choose the right approach to strategy. In this book, The Boston Consulting Group's Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by he…

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Strategy That Works: How Winning Companies Close the Strategy-to-Execution Gap

“Strategy That Works demonstrates how capabilities shape successful markets, enable winning companies, and sustain on-target execution. The case for capabilities-driven strategy strengthens with every turn of the page.”

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Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

It provides a framework for businesses to follow in order to be successful. The book outlines five key choices that a business needs to make: defining a winning aspiration, deciding where to play, figuring out how to win, identifying core capabilities, and setting up management systems.

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The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World

"The Lords of Strategy" tells the story of the people and consulting firms that first defined what corporate strategy was. They showed the business world the benefits of making well-informed decisions about how you're going to compete. Will you try to beat the competition by having lower costs, for example?

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Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World

Accelerate highlights the iterative nature of the 8-step process, the importance of aligning people around a Big Opportunity, and how to create an organization that is both efficient and reliable, and fast and agile enough to respond to today's challenges.

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Additional Business Strategy Reading

These books are not required for you to learn Business Strategy, but they are highly recommended for you to deepen your knowledge.

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practit…

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HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including Featured Article "What Is Strategy?" by Michael E. Porter)

Is your company spending too much time on strategy development—with too little to show for it? If you read nothing else on strategy, read these 10 articles (featuring “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you catalyze your organization's strategy development and execution.

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Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't

Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study: For years, this…

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The Essential Advantage: How to Win with a Capabilities-Driven Strategy

In The Essential Advantage: How to Win with a Capabilities-Driven Strategy, we maintain that success in any market accrues to firms with a coherence premium — a tight match between their strategic direction and the capabilities that make them unique.

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Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss's head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues succeed where it mattered most: saving lives.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Key Strategy Tools: The 80+ Tools for Every Manager to Build a Winning Strategy

Key Strategy Tools: The 80+ Tools for Every Manager to Build a Winning Strategy. "A fabulous compendium of tools, woven into a no-nonsense strategy process. An enormously helpful book, invaluable to novices and experts alike." "A really practical guide to strategy development.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Specializations and Deeper Business Strategy Knowledge

You've got your basics in order – time to move on to some advanced and specialized concepts. Business Strategy is evolving every day, these books can help you master it.

Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise

What is strategy? For many it is the application of a theory, model or framework. In this book Spender develops a different creative approach. Emphasizing that firms face uncertainties and unknowns (knowledge gaps) he argues that the core of strategic thinking and processes rests on the organization's leaders developing newly imagined solutions to the opportunities that these uncertainties ope…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy

Both successful entrepreneurs and chess grandmasters have the vision to look at the pieces in front of them and anticipate their next five moves. In this book, Patrick Bet-David translates this skill into a valuable methodology that applies to high performers at all levels of business. Whether you feel like you’ve hit a wall, lost your fire, or are looking for innovative strategies to take you…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

This list is curated by MentorCruise and can include Amazon affiliate links. Have any other suggestions? Add here.

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