The Craft of Strategy Formation: Translating Business Issues into Actionable Strategies presents a step-by-step, focused, and fast approach for creating a new strategy at medium-sized and large businesses. It is a proven method used by top management consultants to help clients develop new strategies.

Do the top strategy consultants have a patented model that they use to help their clients set up a business strategy? The answer is no – such a marvellous, secret model does not exist. But the approach of these consultants is totally different from that of the strategy departments in companies or that of business schools. Their approach is not secret – it is described in a blow-by-blow account in this book.

The book explains for the first time how the leading strategy consultants work. It shows how they set to work in an organization that they do not know, how they bring the truth to light, how they work together with the organization to give shape to the future and how they turn cynics into enthusiasts. This is not a book filled with strategic frameworks – no 7S models, no SWOT analyses, no new theories about the core competences of the organization. This is a handbook for managers and MBA students and graduates who need to solve a problem in a short time and arrive quickly at a usable end product.

The Craft of Strategy Formation describes the approach week by week. It gives practical examples, details a case study throughout the book, warns against pitfalls and explodes myths. Read in this book:

• Why creating a strategy is more than just ‘a bit of logical thinking’, and how it is that even 10 sharp minds cannot arrive at useful insights ‘just like that’
• Why you do not always have to have a vision, and how you can have ideas without being creative
• What the difference is between a helpful and an unhelpful research question, and between a completely wrong and a more or less correct result
• What the strategic difference is between a hat and a walking stick
• How you can learn about your competitor without using industrial espionage
• What the most frequent mistakes are in a financial model and when a financial model is meaningless
• How to make sure that your results do not end up just being shoved into a drawer

Formulating a strategy is one of the most important but also one of the most difficult challenges faced by businesses: How may one translate a concern into a structured issue and the hypotheses for addressing that issue? How should one approach the designing and executing of the analyses through which these hypotheses can be tested, thus creating the insights from which new strategic options can be developed? And how can one identify the “best bets” from among the many different strategic options available, and determine how these may be translated into a coherent business strategy that the organization and its stakeholders can buy into?

This book helps to answer these questions for the senior manager responsible for company strategy; the project manager who’s been asked to chart and defend a new strategic course of action; and the student wishing to “learn the ropes” of strategy-creation. This book offers no theoretical strategy “frameworks”. Nor does it propagate a specific strategy of any kind. It is, quite simply, a “cook book” describing a step-by-step, focused and fast approach for creating a new strategy at medium-sized and large businesses. It is a proven method used by top management consultants to help clients develop new strategies.

The Craft of Strategy Formation provides a crisp account of the consecutive steps to take (and pitfalls to watch out for) when typically vague business concerns need to be translated into actionable strategy fast. Featuring the tried-and-tested analytical and organizational approach of top management consultants, this integral account of how strategy is crafted in practice offers a welcome break from traditional handbooks featuring largely isolated frameworks, tools and cases; highly theoretical academic treatises; and largely anecdotal “infotainment” books for the general reader.