The Trouble with Strategy…
… describes how strategic management of many businesses is badly done, and why this problem has persisted for many decades. It explains that the field of strategy is unprofessional and badly flawed, having poor theory and few useful, reliable principles, leaving management with only little to help them do strategy well. The book ends by suggesting how setting professional standards for strategy would help, and might be done.
Kim speaks with knowledge of corporate strategy, having served as retail strategy director with Whitbread PLC, and having taught strategy on MBA and Executive programs at London Business School. He now writes, advises and develops courses on Strategy Dynamics to spread this powerful solution for many of the field’s problems. He has an MBA and PhD from London University and is author of Strategic Management Dynamics.
Kim says “I long ago lost patience with the poor strategy methods currently available and am also increasingly angered by the constant strategy mistakes. When people mess up strategy, they mess up your life, whether you are an employee, a customer, have a pension, or are just a regular citizen.
There are outstanding exceptions – skilled and thoughtful executives, consultants with sophisticated and valuable knowledge, and professors who are awesome thinkers and educators – but they are the exceptions! So I take a scalpel to the practice and principles of strategy to figure out exactly what the problems are, where they came from and why, and how they might be fixed.”
Critical to solving the crisis in strategy is a rigorous theory and models of what an enterprise actually is and how it works as a functioning system – see The Power of Living Business Models.
Chapter Links
The numerous reference links in the book
are supplied on this site for convenience
Chapter 1 – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Chapter 2 – True Professionalism
Discussion Options
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