Strategic Thinking For Leaders

Be a more effective leader with strategic thinking Leading with Strategic Thinking reveals what effective leaders do differently. Eschewing the one-size-fits-all leadership model, this helpful guide outlines four general leadership types and demonstrates how each type achieves success – whether through personal vision, structured process, collaboration, or by empowering others. The authors identify the actions and skills that distinguish strategic leadership, drawn from interviews and focus groups with over three hundred leaders from around the world. Examples and case studies illustrate these concepts in action, and the provided reference materials steer readers toward more advanced information on this important topic. The disruptive forces of technology and globalization raise new challenges for leaders. This book is a manual that will help executives and aspiring leaders harness these forces and address the two central questions of strategic leadership: How do the best leaders develop their strategy? How do effective leaders drive strategic change? Becoming a strategic leader isn’t about mimicking an icon. The most effective leaders seize opportunity in a way that consciously integrates environmental requirements, stakeholder expectations, and personal ability. Leading with Strategic Thinking shows what these leaders do, and gives anyone the tools to be a more strategic leader.

A practical workbook and accompanying CD-ROM which take the user through logical stages in strategic thinking. The CD-ROM contains worked examples and blank templates.

Today’s organizations face difficult challenges in order to remain competitive—the quickening pace of change, increasing uncertainty, growing ambiguity, and complexity. To meet these challenges, organizations must broaden the scope of leadership responsibility for strategic leadership and engage more people in the process of leadership. In Becoming a Strategic Leader Rich Hughes and Kate Beatty from the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) offer executives and managers a handbook for implementing a strategic leadership process that reaches leaders at all levels of organizations. Based on CCL’s successful Developing the Strategic Leader Program, this book outlines the framework of strategic leadership and contains practical suggestions on how to develop the individual, team, and organizational skills needed for institutions to become more adaptable, flexible, and resilient. The authors also show how individual managers can exercise effective strategic leadership through their distinctive and systemic approach—thinking, acting, and influencing.

Get competitive by learning to think strategically.The inability to set good strategy can sink a company¿and a leader¿s career. A recent Wall Street Journal study revealed that the most sought-after executive skill is strategic thinking, but only three out of ten managers have this skill set.Horwath explains the three keys to strategic thinking, breaks them down into simple, attainable skills, and gives you practical tools to apply them every day, providing managers with a clear path to mastery of the three disciplines: 1. Acumen¿generate critical insights through a step-by-step evaluation of your business and its environment2. Allocation¿focus your limited resources through strategic trade-offs 3. Action¿implement a system to guarantee effective execution of strategy at all levels of your organization Based on new research with senior executives from 150 companies and the author¿s experience as a thought-leading strategist, Deep Dive is the first book to focus on the most important level of strategy¿you. Armed with this knowledge and dozens of effective tools, you can become a truly strategic leader for your organization.--Rich Horwath is the president of the Strategic Thinking Institute, a former chief strategy officer, and professor of strategy at the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management. As a thought-leading strategist, he has worked with such giants as Adidas, Amgen, and Pfizer. He is the author of four books and more than fifty articles on strategic thinking and has been profiled in business publications around the world, including Investor¿s Business Daily.

Bring strategy into your daily work. It's your responsibility as a manager to ensure that your work--and the work of your team--aligns with the overarching objectives of your organization. But when you're faced with competing projects and limited time, it's difficult to keep strategy front of mind. How do you keep your eye on the long term amid a sea of short-term demands? The HBR Guide to Thinking Strategically provides practical advice and tips to help you see the big-picture perspective in every aspect of your daily work, from making decisions to setting team priorities to attacking your own to-do list. You'll learn how to: Understand your organization's strategy Align your team around key objectives Focus on the priorities that matter most Spot trends in your company and in your industry Consider future outcomes when making decisions Manage trade-offs Embrace a leadership mindset

In Learning to Think Strategically, author Julia Sloan presents a previously unexamined account of the relationship between strategic thinking and the learning process involved — taking learning from the academic to the everyday. This book is an original primer on how successful strategists learn to think strategically. This authoritative book traces the history of strategy, differentiates strategic thinking from planning, describes the influence of culture, streamlines the roles of rationality and intuition, and identifies five key attributes for learning to think strategically. Learning to Think Strategically asserts that learning is the critical link to strategic thinking. Learning is a "conversion tool" that can transform thinking strategically into a sustainable competitive advantage.

You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? 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 helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? • When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage? • How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? • How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.

The purpose of proper strategic thinking is to eliminate top-down only communication that leads to the wishful thinking way of organizational strategy. Strategic thinking is necessary at every level of an organization. This book uses actual histories of business successes and failures to illustrate theoretical concepts in strategic thinking.

A strategic leader is essentially the leader of any organization and someone who has to steer the company in times of change, whilst motivating and inspiring their team. Strategic Leadership from the renowned leadership expert John Adair encourages leaders to focus on tomorrow rather than yesterday. It explores the nature and origin of strategic leadership, transferable skills and the art of inspiring others. It then describes the role itself and broad functions of that role such as building and maintaining a team, achieving a common task and motivating and developing the individual. It moves on to assess the skills you need to be effective, and the seven generic functions that make up the role of strategic leader which include providing direction, strategic thinking and planning, building partnerships and developing tomorrow's leaders. Full of checklists, summaries and historical examples, Strategic Leadership will encourage you to ask the right questions whilst defining the role and skills of a strategic leader.