Top Business Strategy books recommended by experts

At MentorCruise, we are all about making the most out of the experience of others. As part of that, we've connected and asked dozens of experts and professionals about their favourite Business Strategy books – and here are the answers.

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.

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

“Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action” by Simon Sinek offers a fresh perspective on leadership and organizational success. By understanding the power of starting with “why,” leaders can inspire action, build trust, and foster meaningful connections with their teams and customers.

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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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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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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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Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive.
In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Br…

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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.

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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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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Do More More Naturally: Empowering Effortless Success and the Freedom to Be Yourself

Imagine getting up every morning psyched for work and ending your day with plenty of energy for your personal life. What if you could do more than merely exist in survival mode?
How would you feel if you could thrive — without having to change who you are?
Authors David Kolbe and Amy Bruske invite you to break free from the mounting stress of your learned routines and embrace a new path …

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Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy pac…

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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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Blue Ocean Strategy

BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand. It is about creating and capturing uncontested market space, thereby making the competition irrelevant.

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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…

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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…

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

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