Customer Reviews

The Ultimate Strategy Library: The 50 Most Influential Strategic Ideas of All Time (The Ultimate Series)

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This is one of the volumes in the "The Ultimate Series" published by Capstone Publishing Limited. Previously, I reviewed Des Dearlove's The Ultimate Book of Business Thinking and Stuart Crainer's The Ultimate Business Library. The three volumes comprise an especially informative and valuable resource for busy executives as well as for those now preparing for a business career. The nature and extent of coverage of "the most strategic ideas of all time" and of the sources in which they were introduced are remarkable. For example, during the course of a 192-page narrative, John Middleton provides a briefing on a total of 50 primary sources, arranged by author in alphabetical order (from Igor Ansoff to Shoshana Zuboff) but Middleton also offers other material that, all by itself, is worth far more than the cost of this book:

"Introduction" [Note: One of the most informative I have encountered thus far.]

"A Brief History of Strategy" which includes a comprehensive timeline that begins with the pre-history of strategy (e.g. Sun Tzu's The Art of War), proceeds through a four-decade period from 1960, and concludes with six works published in 2000. Middleton also identifies a number of key themes.

[Sequence of analyses of "the most strategic ideas of all time" and those who devised them, Pages 3-192]

"Coda: The Future of Strategy"
Annotated Bibliography
Glossary of Strategy Terms

I like the various reader-friendly devices that Middleton uses so effectively throughout his narrative such as highlights of key points (e.g. Robert Baldrock's in The Last Days of the Giants?), brief excerpts (e.g. from Michael Hammer and James Champy's Reengineering the Corporation), "Zeitbites" (e.g. taken from Kenichi Ohmae's The Mind of the Strategist), summaries of key components within a methodology (e.g. Peter Senge's as developed in The Fifth Discipline and The Dance of Change), and "nuggets of wisdom" (e.g. from Sun Tzu's The Art of War). These and other reader-friendly devices energize what would otherwise be a solid but somewhat ponderous narrative.

To sum up, Middleton offers 50 different responses to an especially important three-part business question: "Where are we now, where do we want to go, and how do we get there?"

Those who share my regard for this book are urged to check the other two volumes in the "The Ultimate Series. " To supplement the sources that Middleton recommends for further reading on the subject of strategy, I presume to add Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution co-authored by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson as well as Dean R. Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, Lawrence Hrebiniak's Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change, Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris' Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, and Jack Alexander's Performance Dashboards and Analysis for Value Creation.

Cut out the crap and get to what's real. Most of the big fat expensive business books are reduced to a page to describe the core concept. Fantastic. Most able business people can fill in the rest. Glad I have this at hand.

An excellent book to start with if you want a general overview of strategic thinking (2-3 pages for every book -- in total 50 books commented).

Obviously if you really want to understand what the authors exacly wrote and the reasoning/argument behind their theories you must read the original books.

Anyway an excellent tool to have a valid list to choose your next strategy book and to save money avoiding ...avoidable purchases.