WILEY Becoming a Strategic Leader – Your Role in Your Organization′s Enduring Success, Second Edition

Good value, was ship blazing fast. Perfect fit

Leaders can benefit from frameworks designed to help them set direction and guide their business. In this book, the authors do an admirable job of providing a framework for strategic leadership. The framework includes factors such as assessing the environment, identifying purpose (mission, vision, values), business drivers, business strategy, leadership strategy, and execution. They then provide relevant examples for each of the phases using well-known companies and leaders such as Starbucks, Cirque de Soleil, Colin Powell, and Barack Obama. What's missing are the specific tools used to generate strategy beyond the typical questions posed regarding market trends, political factors, etc. This is a good complement to books such as Blue Ocean Strategy which provides the Strategy Canvas Tool and StrategyMan vs. The Anti-Strategy Squad, which introduces dozens of tools including the Contextual Radar. Overall, a solid reference to an abstract but important part of growing a business: strategic leadership.

This book is okay, but there are several aspects that are lacking. For one, it takes an entire chapter to define what strategic leadership is, but then it still is not able to actually pinpoint it. The ensuing chapters attempt to define behaviors, but again are very soft in definition and any solid guidance or action plan.The second is that this book, like many others, like to hold up Jack Welch as an example. Jack Welch never really fits the definition of a good leader to begin with. He was a bully who ran his business like a slave empire. His most favorite saying is that "people get in the way of doing business". This is an example of leadership? No, it's not. Folks who had the misfortune of actually working for him know how poor of a leader he actually was. He may have done great things for the investors of GE, but he was certainly not a leader of people.The third is that many of the examples of strategic leadership were more of the variety of folks being in the right place at the right time, as opposed to real strategy. There are several examples of leaders who made extremely poor decisions, but that's what turns people into leaders to begin with. One might get the impression that if you aren't always right on with emerging trends, then you're automatically a failure. Most folks who are considered to be "good" leaders are wrong at least 50% of the time. So this book would tend to label most of those folks failures.I'm not impressed.

il testo e' molto interessante per via dell'approccio illustrato e suggerito dagli autori, frutto di anni di esperienza sul campo e di incontri e sessioni di lavoro con migliaia di manager e aziende.

Great book!!!