Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick, partners from McKinsey channel the latest insights in behavioral economics to demystify the social side of strategy. A strategy can be sound on paper, having the right models and theories supporting it, but if there is a disconnect between leadership and employees, then the strategy is destined to fail. This book teaches leaders how to have more fruitful conversations with their teams, bridging the gap between theory and application. Ultimately even the wisest of strategies is challenged by individual behaviors and social dynamics. The team must be fully on-board with, and passionate about, the strategy to make it happen. Leaders will learn how to create and sell strategies so that they have their team's full support and their ideas are honored and implemented throughout their organization.
Synopsis
Beat the odds with a bold strategy
We've all seen hockey stick business plans before. A future where results sail confidently upward, but with a dip coinciding with next year's budget.
CEOs usually rely on their experience and business smarts to figure out which of those hockey sticks are real, and which are fake. But all too often getting to a "yes," competing for resources, and striving to claim credit, cloud the hard decisions. Another strategy framework? No thanks, we already have plenty of those, and they don't fix the real problem: the social dynamics in your strategy room.
Mining the data from thousands of large companies, McKinsey Partners Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt and Sven Smit open the windows of that room, and bring an "outside view." They found three discrete groups of companies: the bottom quintile with massive economic losses; the long, flat, middle 60 percent with practically no economic profit; and the top 20 percent to whom all the value accrues.
Some companies do achieve real hockey stick performance: but just 1-in-12 jump from the middle tier to the top over a ten year period. This does not happen by magic--there is an empirically-backed science to improve your odds of success by capitalizing on your endowment, riding the right trends, and most importantly, making a few big moves.
To make these big moves happen, you're going to have to break through inertia, gamesmanship and risk aversion. You're going to have to mitigate human biases and manage group dynamics. Eight practical shifts can help you do this, and unlock bigger, bolder, better strategies.
This is not another by-the-book approach to strategy. It's not another trudge through frameworks or small-scale case studies promising a secret formula for success. It's an irreverent, fact-driven, and humorous take on the real world of strategic decision making.
Synopsis
Beat the odds with a bold strategy from McKinsey & Company
"Every once in a while, a genuinely fresh approach to business strategy appears" - legendary business professor Richard Rumelt, UCLA
McKinsey & Company's newest, most definitive, and most irreverent book on strategy--which thousands of executives are already using--is a must-read for all C-suite executives looking to create winning corporate strategies.
Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick is spearheading an empirical revolution in the field of strategy. Based on an extensive analysis of the key factors that drove the long-term performance of thousands of global companies, the book offers a ground-breaking formula that enables you to objectively assess your strategy's real odds of future success.
"This book is fundamental. The principles laid out here, with compelling data, are a great way around the social pitfalls in strategy development." -- Frans Van Houten, CEO, Royal Philips N.V.
The authors have discovered that over a 10-year period, just 1 in 12 companies manage to jump from the middle tier of corporate performance--where 60% of companies reside, making very little economic profit--to the top quintile where 90% of global economic profit is made. This movement does not happen by magic--it depends on your company's current position, the trends it faces, and the big moves you make to give it the strongest chance of vaulting over the competition.
This is not another strategy framework. Rather, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick shows, through empirical analysis and the experiences of dozens of companies that have successfully made multiple big moves, that to dramatically improve performance, you have to overcome incrementalism and corporate inertia.
"A different kind of book--I couldn't put it down. Inspiring new insights on the facts of what it takes to move a company's performance, combined with practical advice on how to deal with real-life dynamics in management teams." --Jane Fraser, CEO, Citigroup Latin America