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.

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

The Challenge: 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: …

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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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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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The innovator's dilemma

The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen explains how successful companies fail by sticking to their established business models, overlooking disruptive innovations. It offers a framework to help managers anticipate and respond to market changes.

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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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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.

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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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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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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The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business & Life

It's the art of anticipating your opponent's next moves, knowing full well that your rival is trying to do the same thing to you. Though parts of game theory involve simple common sense, much is counterintuitive, and it can only be mastered by developing a new way of seeing the world.

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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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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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