The initiation, the working and the future of every business depend on the business strategy the owners have worked. If you want your company to reach the peak of success, your policy on the ground matters the most. Moreover, the best way to learn is by reading business strategy books.
A strategic plan looks at where your present is and where you want to take your business. An excellent plan of action helps you decide where to spend your time and how to invest your capital for optimum growth. Even if you’re an established business owner, your need for business strategy is a must as it becomes difficult to accomplish goals without a proper plan.
Business strategy books are always the primary source of business knowledge. Instead of finding consultants at the start of your business to advise you about your strategy, you need to empower your mind with business strategy books.
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These books are based either on research or on experience or at times on different ideas collaborated by various “Business Gurus”. Business strategy books give you the past proved techniques that helped hundreds of businesses earlier to reach their success. You can also find strategies from books written by successful entrepreneurs.
Finding new books and resources on business strategy has become a habit for business enthusiasts. Moreover, with new trends in businesses, there’s always a lookout for new and advanced topics on business strategies.
This list will help you with building brands, building business models and innovation. You can learn plenty of insights as to how successful entrepreneurs have their business strategies on point and how you can apply those methods.�
Here are 11 best business strategy books of all time:
1) Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works
This book by A. G. Lafley & Roger L. Martin is one of the best business strategy books that you might come across. It will help you navigate brand-building techniques in the competitive space, and the strategy in it is simple but not that easy.
This book will guide you to make difficult choices than the easier ones. It will teach you about the strategy being a risky subject for business but having no policy is more hazardous.
The authors offer two more strategic tools for choosing the best strategy. One of the vital tools mentioned is a structured methodology for analysing the industry, customers and the position compared to your competitors. The second is the reverse engineering process that helps you to test the potential strategies.
If you’re able to answer this five-question framework, you are well suited to grow your business like P&G.
2) Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference & Why It Matters
Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt lays out the essential basics of having a great strategy and clears your path of the mistakes. It states the functional elements that make a good strategy. Moreover, it also shows the harmful elements that fail to yield an assessable result.�
With the framework mentioned, you can implement an excellent strategy for growing your business. It suggests that most companies that don’t have a strategy in place don’t know about the good and bad policy. With the help of this book, you will not only create a good plan but will also understand the main task of a leader is to strategise.
It teaches you about stripping all the unnecessary financial goals, slogans, buzzwords, and lets you concentrate only on growing the organisation to success.
This book offers practical wisdom rather than a perspective idea. It concentrates on concepts you can apply to your business. It doesn’t tell you what to do in your business but guides you think and implement strategies on your own that seem applicable for the growth of your business.
3) Business Strategy: A Guide to Effective Decision-Making
Written by Jeremy Kourdi, It is one of the most comprehensive business strategy books you will read. It lets the reader have better decision-making skills and increases the chances of success in the business.
If you’re starting up your company and like to know more about strategies to implement in your business, this is the book you should be reading.�
From understanding the scope of the business to the flawless execution of strategies, it provides the readers all the fundamentals of creating a good plan.
It discusses the positive effect and the implementation as well as the way to lead the business to success.
Not only it focuses on the leaders, but it also focuses on managers of the company. It also talks about how managers are responsible for the implementation of the strategy.
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4) Topple: The Rise of New Models for Explosive Growth
It provides an impactful thesis about new competitive landscapes in business. Moreover, it discusses business ecosystems and how competitive landscapes will be determined less by company-specific strategies.
Topple in a manner helps organisations learn about different business ecosystems. It preaches about leveraging the power of the ecosystems organisations thrives upon and create value for the business.
The objective of the book is to help organisations in learning their business ecosystems and the factors that make them different. It also talks about taking advantage of these factors and create value in other ways. This book is packed with practical instances and insights on the ecosystem-centric business models.
It is one of the modern-age business strategy books that excavates the various business ecosystems and is a must-read for you.
5) Go Long: Why Long-Term Thinking is your Best Short-Term Strategy
Are you having trouble planning your business strategy? Do you have a long-term plan that helps your organisation in reaching its goals and targets? This business strategy book by Michael Useem, Brian Dumaine & Rodney Zemmel inspires people to have a short-term mindset to develop long-term strategic goals for organisations. It aims to fuel the readers to create business goals to succeed and thrive in the market filled with competitors.
It provides insightful analysis and inspiring stories that showcase CEOs, boards, and investors as to how purpose-driven strategies can create significant economic and societal benefits.
If you’re starting your business and require a business strategy book that gives you compelling thoughts, you should go for this book. It not only clarifies your small doubts but gives you hold of how to plan more extended business strategies with a short-term mindset. It is one of the best books you can find in this category.
Moreover, it is the book for anyone concerned about forcing long strategic objectives for their business. It is a must-read for the CEOs and boards of all public companies. If you’re thinking to build or lead a company that is consistently growing year after year, this book is a godsend for you.
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6) Digital Transformation: Build Your Organisation’s Future
Written by Lindsay Herbert, it is one of the rare books to have in your book closet. It outlines five stages, from constructing bridges to broadcasting insights, for organisations to execute sustainable change. Lindsay learns about culture being the challenge and not tools for the digital shift of the business.�
Herbert contributes clear guidance for the critical element of the business evolution in a structured format. Besides, it answers many questions arising from leaders and consultants of digital transformation and is an unbiased guide to corporate digital transformation.
The book provides a great mix of evidence-based analysis and a clear path to follow. It gives the reader strategies to develop in the digital sector of the business.
Moreover, it acts as a guide related to the end-to-end execution of the digital transformation. It acts as a ‘how to’ guide from leadership-level strategy development to on-the-ground implementation.
7) Strategy: A History
Written by Lawrence Freedman, it is a book for the ones that want to have exciting strategic challenges, decisions and outcomes. Moreover, it is a book of startling scope, erudition and wisdom.
Arguably, one of the best book in strategy, it offers comprehensive, vigorous surveys of the plan and how they evolved.
It is a treat for the expert strategists and is still good-to-go for a general reader.
Also, this book disrupts the reader’s mind with the complete history of the evolution of strategies and the present day scenario of policies used by various organisations.
This book is for those, who like to understand the basic principles of the strategy. Additionally, it acts as a guide to understanding how policies of the past have evolved yet giving similar results.
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8) Your Strategy Needs a Strategy
This book immensely helps those who dive through an insane amount of complex questions, to find the perfect strategy. Furthermore, it is a blueprint for flawlessly executing strategy in your organisation.
It saves the readers much time and is an excellent read. You will learn everything needed to learn about strategy with the help of this book. A loved business strategy book by the strategists of the 21st century, it is recommended to read this book when you’re starting to learn a thing or two about strategy.
With the fast-paced competition, business owners need much more than a toolkit to create strategies that serve the organisation to succeed.
Moreover, it is the hardware store and consists of all the tools necessary to use for creating the best business strategy for your organisation. It is a book for every business owner, the board of members and CEOs.
9) Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes
Written by Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton, it is a book that every successful CEO speaks about at a point of time. Besides, helping businesses find a link between their intangible assets and outcomes, it gives insights on having a centralised strategy within the organisation.
This business strategy book has introduced a concept ‘strategy map’. It talks about the primary strategic goals of the organisation and the desired relationship between the execution and outcomes.
If you’re looking for having a new idea about strategies, this business strategy is an excellent book to read.
You can strengthen your perspectives as to how you can devise a plan that works the best for your business.
10) Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It
It is one of the most recommended business strategy books. Moreover, it addresses four essential areas that business owners need to develop: people, strategy, execution and cash. It speaks of freedom being the fundamental requirement of having a successful business.
With an updated strategic plan and Rockefeller Habits Checklist, it lets business owners focus on the strategy. Besides, Scaling Up helps in putting in place the disciplines that are critical to building a significant business.
Specifically, entrepreneurs, this is the book you should buy and have complete faith in the teachings of it. From cover-to-cover, this business strategy book provides the information required at each step of growing your business.
11) Blue Ocean Strategy
It is one of the business strategy books that has sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide. The step-by-step process mentioned in the book helps entrepreneurs and business owners grow their companies with practical strategies and ideas. Besides, it is a must-have and must-read book if you’re a student who wants to learn the plan of the business.
It discusses how to have value innovation at a low cost. If you’re new to strategy in general, it is advisable to read something more widespread at the start.
Furthermore, this business strategy book discusses to create a blue ocean for your business and create barriers for others to copy. There is four priority learning from this book: alignment barrier, brand barriers, cognitive and organisational barrier, economic and legal barriers.
There you have the top 11 business strategy books that will help you grow your business. When are you reading them?
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