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.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 Safari: A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Strategic Management

Strategy Safari makes sense of a field that often seems to make no sense. Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel pair their sweeping vision of strategy making with an authoritative catalog in which they identify ten schools of strategy that have emerged over the past four decades.

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Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

In this perennial bestseller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, now updated with fresh content from the authors, argu…

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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.

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

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