Chapter One:

What Strategy has Learned from Astrology...What it Needs to Learn from Science What Strategy has Learned from Astrology...What it Needs to Learn from Science Today corporate strategic thinking actually has more in common with astrology than a scientific foundation for corporate action. No wonder many executives experience both enthusiasm and doubts about their company’s strategy. Today’s hyper-competitive world requires us to throw out misleading ideas about what makes strategies trustworthy. To regain confidence in their strategy, we must rebuild them on the firm scientific foundations of hypothesis creation, testing, and most important, falsification.

Chapter Two:

"Only Make the Right Wing Strong": The Four Key Elements of a Successful Strategy Great corporate strategies are creative masterstrokes of hypothesis generation similar to great scientific theories. But examination of strategies in military and business history goes further It shows they need to meet the test of encompassing four crucial elements: being Vital, being Conditional, embracing a Pivot and a Hammer, and being Complementary.

Chapter Three:

Strategic Anatomy: Strategy’s Hammer and Pivot Anatomical inspection of great strategies reveals the importance of the Hammer and Pivot and uncovers their two supporting elements: the Hammerhead and the Bearing. Confidence in your company’s strategy requires a firm grasp of these elements. At the same time, choice of a competition-centric strategy will focus your efforts on attacking the competition’s Pivot and Bearing - bringing clarity and practicality to the concept of judo-like strategies in the world of business.

Chapter Four:

The End of an Era: The Twilight of Sustainable Competitive Advantage For years, the idea that the worth of a strategy was its ability to create a sustainable competitive advantage (SCA). But SCA is now, for most (not all) industries and companies, an out-moded and quite possibly dangerous idea. In today’s world, executives need a new vision of strategy to replace SCA.

Chapter Five:

Making Strategy Dynamic: The Dawn of Opportunity Creation and Exploitation Strategy should be shaped a deeper understanding of the inherent randomness in today’s business environment. By segmenting business environments based on the four degrees of randomness, companies are equipped to embrace a dynamic vision of strategy: Opportunity Creation and Exploitation, or OCE. OCE celebrates the fact that strategies have a predictable life-cycle. By locating themselves in the strategic life-cycle, managers are finally equipped to orchestrate company people and resources in a way that can confound less clear-sighted competitors.

Chapter Six:

Better Tools for Better Strategies: Creating and Testing Strategic Ideas To obtain great, testable competition-beating strategies requires creativity of a high order. Experience suggests however, that companies expect both too much and too little from market research and consultants. And companies tend to use them to do the wrong things. This chapter investigates how to get the most out of each and recommends specific tools, techniques and attitudes so executives won’t ever again have that vague, uneasy feeling when that last market research or consulting invoice is paid.

Chapter Seven:

Strategic Breakthrough and Exploitation : Making the Right Choices and Choosing the Right Tools A beautiful strategy is nothing without that initial exhilarating real-world breakthrough and exploitation of that breakthrough. Managers have two crucial alternatives as to how they can seek breakthroughs. And they have two alternatives as to how to exploit those breakthroughs. These choices will shape the company’s future and its competitiveness, so they must be done right.

Chapter Eight:

Making the Most of Strategic Resources: Tools and Choices for Strategic Exploitation Assigning the right resources to exploit a strategic breakthrough is a moment of opportunity, danger and crisis as well as a time for wild optimism. In accordance with the insights of OCE, management often needs to create highly flexible reserves, and not just the financial kind. It needs and "extended balance sheet" and a budget cycle that will drive Wall Street crazy.

Chapter Nine:

Born Allies and Sworn Enemies: Corporate Strategy Meets Corporate Culture A company’s strategy and culture are often twins, born nearly at the same moment. However they drift apart very early. Often culture becomes the insidious enemy of a company’s strategic success. Here’s the diagnosis...

Chapter Ten:

Top Management Teamwork: Tools for Harmonizing Strategy and Culture ... And here’s the most crucial part of the cure. Making the culture meet strategy’s imperatives is the work of the Top Management Team. History and psychology provide eight concrete tools for creating top management team cohesion to maximize the chances of strategic success.

Chapter Eleven:

81 Do’s and Don’ts on the Road to a Great Corporate Strategy No matter what you’ve read elsewhere, there is no silver bullet, there is no royal road to great strategic success. It’s a matter of inspiration, insight, falsification, and perspiration. Nevertheless, there are crucial do’s and don’ts that can maximize your chances of success.