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Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick

By: Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, Sven Smit
Narrated by: David Marantz
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Publisher's Summary

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 10-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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2018 McKinsey & Company (P)2018 Audible, Inc.

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Great for large companies

interesting listen, but found a lot of it would specific to large companies.
Provides useful actions for negative social situations in strategy meetings

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Strategy for large corporates

Great strategy book for $1bn+ companies, very practical but a little drawn out and repetitive. Gives good insight on how to overcome the office politics that lead to a lot of strategic short comings, and some statistically confirmed variables that are influential in growing your company, backed up with case studies and common sense. However this mode was only built from 40 variables which shows this was a model built to confirm an existing McKinsey framework and not an actual fact finding research assignment as the authors purport, either way still a high ranking model so stats stack up and aid in credibility of the “framework”.

Overall I enjoyed it but I most likely will not read it again.

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