Robert Bradford and Peter Duncan have written a breakthrough book on strategy. Throughout my 25 year career as a business school professor first at Columbia University and then at the University of Michigan and as a practitioner including my stint in the 1980’s heading up GE’s world renowned leadership development center, Crotonville, I have wrestled with teaching and coaching MBA students and executives around strategy. What makes Simplified Strategic Planning such a breakthrough is that it provides the intellectual and practical guidance for business leaders to get on the with task of setting a winning strategy.
In the book on my GE experiences, Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will: How Jack Welch is making General Electric the World’s Most Competitive Enterprise, Jack Welch states, “I chose one of the simpler professions in life, business, it is not rocket science regarding what people do, execution is the name of the game.” He also points out that strategy follows people. In Simplified Strategic Planning, Peter and Robert drive the same point: get the people dimension right, keep strategy simple and execute for results.
Simplified Strategic Planning presents a straightforward, no nonsense formula for developing winning strategies that get successfully executed. The process is not rocket science, but that is the genius. As Jack Welch points out, it takes self-confident leaders to be simple, which is what gives them the focus and speed in the market place. By reading Simplified Strategic Planning each of you will be able to develop your own framework set of guiding principles for leading strategy.
This book will teach you how to develop your own approach to strategic planning, one that captures the spirit of what Welch so clearly embodies in his leadership. Drawing on over 30 years of experience coaching and mentoring business leaders, Peter Duncan and Robert Bradford have written an invaluable guide to your success as a business leader. Simplified Strategic Planning provides you with a template and practical tools for insuring a winning strategy and a process that can continuously reinvent your organization for tomorrow’s competitive landscape.
Noel Tichy
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI