My favorite books for aspiring strategic thinkers

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.

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.

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. 

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.