Book Review: ''Strategic - The Skill to Set Direction, Create Advantage, and Achieve Executive Excellence''

Jul 17, 2024

4 min read

“A top 4 must-read business book for 2024” — Inc. Magazine

DETERMINE YOUR POSITION, SET DIRECTION, AND NAVIGATE YOUR BUSINESS

Rich Horwath, a dear friend and a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, has once again delivered an exceptional resource for leaders with his book, Strategic - The Skill to Set Direction, Create Advantage, and Achieve Executive Excellence. This national bestseller is an essential guide for any executive committed to enhancing their strategic thinking and leadership skills.

Horwath introduces readers to the Strategic Fitness System, a revolutionary platform designed for continuous executive development. This state-of-the-art system offers unlimited access to over 50 strategic workouts and 200+ resources, including book chapters, white papers, videos, templates, journals, and other tools. It’s a comprehensive toolkit for practicing how to think, plan, and act strategically, based on twenty-five years of real-world experience and insights from helping over a quarter-million leaders.

1. Strategy Fitness:

Develop Strategic Direction: Horwath provides a clear, consistent definition of strategy and practical steps to develop it at all levels.
Resource Allocation: Learn techniques to make strategic trade-offs and focus resources effectively.
Decision Making: Gain clarity on decision rights and tips to increase delegation.
Create Competitive Advantage: Assess competitors and develop strategies to stay ahead.

2. Communication Fitness:

Facilitate Strategy Conversations: Use dialogue, discussion, and direction to guide your team.
Foster Collaboration: Maximize cross-functional teamwork and span silos.
Convey Value to Customers: Tools for managing both internal and external stakeholders.
Design Productive Meetings: Lead more effective and productive team interactions.

3. Leadership Fitness:

Craft Your Leadership Philosophy: Define and develop your personal leadership style.
Maximize Personal Performance: Keys to enhancing your individual value.
Build Mental Toughness: Adopt habits that strengthen your mental resilience.
Control Your Calendar: Techniques to manage your time and maximize productivity.

4. Organization Fitness:

Optimize Organizational Structure: Insights into shaping your organization’s structure, purpose, and culture.
Evolve Business Models: Simple formulas to create, deliver, and capture more value.
Develop Talent: Principles and tools for growing and developing your team.
Foster Innovation: Techniques to generate, capture, and transform insights into new value.

Horwath’s book is rich with practical tools and exercises that can be accessed year-round, ensuring that executives can continually refine their strategic thinking and planning. The Strategic Fitness System includes features like:

Daily Insight Practice (DIPS): A new quotation each day to inspire and apply to your business.
Forum: Interact with Rich Horwath and other members to ask questions, share ideas, and develop best practices.
Strategic Side Blog: Regular updates with fresh concepts, tools, and techniques to elevate your strategic game.

Insights from the Book

“Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.”

- Peter Drucker, Professor of Management, Professor, Harvard Business School

Horwath emphasizes the critical nature of strategic acuity, a sentiment echoed by Indra Nooyi, former CEO of Pepsi, who states, “To me, the single most important skill needed for any CEO today is strategic acuity.” This assertion is supported by research indicating that nearly 80% of workers do not believe their leaders have a clear direction for the organization, highlighting the gap that Horwath’s book aims to fill.

The book is filled with actionable insights and practical guidance. For example, in the section on Leadership Fitness, Horwath discusses the importance of mental toughness, providing specific habits and routines to build resilience. Similarly, the Strategy Fitness section offers detailed steps for resource allocation, helping leaders make informed strategic trade-offs.

By integrating these elements, Horwath’s book not only educates but also equips leaders with practical tools to continually develop their strategic fitness, making it an essential addition to any executive's library.

About Rich Horwath

Rich Horwath is the founder and CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute where he serves leadership teams as a strategy workshop facilitator, strategic executive coach, and keynote speaker. His mission is to help executive teams think, plan, and act strategically to set direction, create advantage, and achieve their goals. Rich is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today national bestselling author of eight books, and his work has been featured in publications including Fast Company, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review. He has been described by Chief Executive Magazine as “the world’s foremost expert on strategic thinking.”

As a former chief strategy officer and professor of strategy at the graduate level, he is able to bring a practical, real-world approach based in strong foundational principles to help executives develop their strategic capabilities. Rich has appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX TV to share his perspectives on current business strategy issues. In addition to his work facilitating strategy workshops for leadership teams and providing executive coaching services and strategic counsel, he is a highly sought-after keynote speaker for groups ranging from 10 to 10,000. Rich has helped more than a quarter million leaders around the world develop their strategic capabilities in pursuit of his vision to teach the world to be strategic.

Rich served as a professor of management at the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, where he was consistently ranked a top strategy professor by students. He earned an MBA with Distinction from the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul University and has completed postgraduate courses in strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College. He resides in Barrington, Illinois.

From Rich

“I was inspired to start the Strategic Thinking Institute by a single question I received during a break at a strategic planning off-site meeting I facilitated twenty-five years ago: ‘How can I become more strategic?’ At that moment in time, there was no road map to help leaders move from tactical to strategic. So, I created one. During the past several decades, I have helped more than 100,000 leaders become more strategic. The question is: ‘Are you and your team ready to maximize your strategic leadership potential’?”

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