Strategic Renaissance: New Thinking and Innovative Tools to Create Great Corporate Strategies...Using Insights from History and Science

Great business strategies, like great discoveries, are inspired acts of creation, brilliantly synthesizing disparate ideas into something surprising and new. In the history of science, think of John Snow's inspiration to chart London's cholera outbreak on a city map, thus pinpointing the city's water systems as the disease-spreading culprit...and founding the science of epidemiology in the process. In the world of business, look to Fred Smith's hub-and-spoke overnight delivery concept, an unheard of idea that gave birth to FedEx--and an indispensable service the world never knew it needed! STRATEGIC RENAISSANCE adds to the roster of great discoveries by linking the formation of business strategy to such fields as science, philosophy, and history--to supply an original and sophisticated new approach to strategic thinking. The book uncovers the principles and guidelines--along with an abundance of hard-hitting examples--for moving beyond an outdated "sustainable competitive advantage" model and embracing a dynamic "opportunity creation and exploitation" approach. Readers learn how to: x Dissect the four key elements of a great business strategy x Generate, test, and refine strategic hypotheses--the kind that outmaneuver the conventional approaches of competitors x Develop strategic breakthroughs, decide which to pursue, and exploit the winners x Understand how corporate culture can sabotage effective strategy, and ensure that doesn't happen x Plus 81 "do's and don'ts" on the road to a great corporate strategy.

Management consultant Dudik attempts to apply the thinking of scientific philosopher Karl Popper to corporate strategy. Popper's idea was that great theory couples explanatory power with great specificity about what observations in the real world would make the theory false. Dudik argues that this model of scientific theory should be applied to strategic thinking.
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New Thinking and Innovative Tools to Create Great Corporate Strategies ...Using Insights from History and Science

This title looks at corporate strategy by joining the history of discoveries with rigors of scientific testing. The book is a how-to guide and is aimed at senior managers and executives.

Evan M. Dudik, Ph.D. (Portland, OR) heads the consulting firm Evan M. Dudik & Associates, which helps companies create winning business strategies. He was previously a consultant with the prestigious international consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

1. What Strategy Has Learned from Astrology and What It Needs to Learn from Science 2.‛Only Make the Right Wing Stron“: The Four Key Elements of a Successful Strategy 3. Strategic Anatomy: StrategyÕs Hammer and Pivot 4. The End of an Era: The Twilight of Sustainable Competitive Advantage 5. Making Strategy Dynamic: The Dawn of Opportunity Creation and Exploitation 6. Better Tools for Better Strategies: Creating, Testing, and Falsifying Strategic Ideas 7. Strategic Breakthrough and Exploitation: Making the Right Choices and Choosing the Right Tools 8. Deploying Resources: Tools for Exploitation 9. Born Allies and Sworn Enemies: Corporate Strategy Meets Corporate Culture 10. Top Management Teamwork: Tools for Harmonizing Strategy and Culture 11. 81 DoÕs and DonÕts on the Road to a Great Corporate Strategy