I have devoted my career to helping leaders navigate challenging transitions into new roles, build their teams, and transform their organizations. Strategic thinking is a key foundation of my work as an executive coach and advisor at Genesis Advisers and a professor at the IMD Business School. Whether executives are taking new roles or driving large-scale transformations, they must be able to rapidly analyze the context, craft good visions and strategies, and mobilize people to realize them. I try to equip the leaders I work with with the mental frameworks, tools, and skillsets to adapt and succeed in the first 90 days and beyond.
I wrote...
The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking: Leading Your Organization Into the Future
In today's turbulent economic, political, and social landscape, strategic thinking is essential for success. To enable their organizations to thrive amid the chaos, leaders must focus on what really matters and make the right decisions at the right times in the right ways for the right reasons.
Strategic thinking consists of the mental disciplines that leaders use to recognize emerging threats and opportunities, establish the right priorities, and mobilize their organizations to envision and enact promising paths forward. To build strategic thinking capability in themselves and their teams,
leaders must foster an environment that encourages collaborative
inquiry, embed strategic thinking in their operating rhythms, and invest
in programs and tools that enhance their ability to shape the future.
I really appreciated Rumelt's practical approach to creating strategies. As he points out, too often, strategies can not be clear enough or get overly complex.
I liked how his book went beyond the surface level to focus on what matters–identifying the core challenges, crafting actionable responses, and leveraging strengths to create competitive advantage. This aligns with the advice I give to the leaders I coach and educate about the importance of strategic focus and thinking. That’s why we assign this book in the executive programs we teach.
When Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy was published in 2011, it immediately struck a chord, calling out as bad strategy the mish-mash of pop culture, motivational slogans and business buzz speak so often and misleadingly masquerading as the real thing.
Since then, his original and pragmatic ideas have won fans around the world and continue to help readers to recognise and avoid the elements of bad strategy and adopt good, action-oriented strategies that honestly acknowledge the challenges being faced and offer straightforward approaches to overcoming them. Strategy should not be equated with ambition, leadership, vision or planning; rather, it is…
I found this book fascinating because it helped me understand how our brains work, especially when to trust gut-driven judgments and when to question them. This informed writing I was doing on pattern recognition and its importance in strategic thinking.
Leaders have to make judgment calls quickly, but it's important to know when one’s thinking isn't reliable enough. Learning about the two contrasting thinking systems helped me be more thoughtful about my own choices and how to advise the leaders I coach and educate about making better decisions.
The phenomenal international bestseller - 2 million copies sold - that will change the way you make decisions
'A lifetime's worth of wisdom' Steven D. Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics 'There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Thinking, Fast and Slow' Financial Times
Why is there more chance we'll believe something if it's in a bold type face? Why are judges more likely to deny parole before lunch? Why do we assume a good-looking person will be more competent? The answer lies in the two ways we make choices: fast,…
This book deepened my understanding of cognitive biases, complementing what I learned by reading the prior recommendation and giving me more insight into how they can contribute to bad decisions. I realized even more deeply how important it is to think carefully and critically when facing complex problems.
I came away from reading this book trying to do a better job of stepping back, challenging my assumptions, and not acting on my first impressions. It contributed to the work I was doing on structured team problem-solving. It also helped me to help the leaders I work with to understand that their intuition often isn’t based on solid thinking.
This book helped me understand more about the causes of bad decisions and how to overcome them, which was important for the work I was doing on structured team problem-solving.
I especially liked the focus on framing problems well, which contributed to the recent Harvard Business Review article I wrote with a colleague on approaches to reframing problems. I also gained more insight into common decision traps and how to avoid them, which was helpful in my work with leaders taking on challenging new roles.
Just making a decision can be hard enough, but how do you begin to judge whether it's the right one? Chip and Dan Heath, authors of #1 New York Times best-seller Switch, show you how to overcome your brain's natural shortcomings.
In Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath draw on decades of psychological research to explain why we so often get it very badly wrong - why our supposedly rational brains are frequently tripped up by powerful biases and wishful thinking. At the same time they demonstrate how relatively easy it is to avoid the pitfalls and find the best answers,…
I liked that this book highlighted how supposedly tried-and-true approaches to innovation fail to deliver results.
The book’s insights about how to drive radical innovation informed the advice I now give executives about how to approach organizational transformation, starting with an ambitious vision, communicating the “why,” and enlisting great people to go on the journey with them.
It helped me to understand that building organizations to develop disruptive technologies requires leaders to envision things that may sound crazy until they are realized.
What Valuable Company Is Nobody Building? The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there. "Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how". (Elon…
Few of us take the time to analyze our financial needs and goals to answer that pressing question. In Wealth Odyssey, author Larry R. Frank Sr. uses his extensive financial background to provide a universal road map that will help you determine the wealth you need to support your chosen lifestyle.
Frank discusses such topics as the wealth rule, the earning-spending-saving formula, using debt wisely, and risk management.
Wealth Odyssey is authored to be timeless; it does not matter what the market has done, or will do. This is a practical, no-nonsense guide that will help you develop a personal definition of wealth and create an effective strategy for long-term financial success.
Wealth Odyssey: The Essential Road Map for Your Financial Journey Where Is It You Are Really Trying to Go with Money?
"Frank, a Certified Financial Planner in California, offers a concise, precise guide to "prudent thinking" about personal finances, along with simple tools to estimate how much is required for a comfortable retirement." "A sound guide designed to help people make sensible plans for a successful retirement" - Kirkus book review "First let me tell you Larry Frank knows his stuff. He has a procedure that many will find worth taking the time to implement.” " The book is full of good advice." - Armchair interviews "Larry Frank Sr, gives you a guidebook or "road map" for your financial goals or…
