There is no shortage of theories regarding the proper basis for a winning corporate strategy. You can set sail on blue oceans with W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, hone core competencies with C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel, and get competitive with Michael Porter, to call out just a few of the fashionable options. But how do you transform the theories into a unique strategy capable of driving your company’s long-term success?

This is the question Stanford business school professors Jesper Sørensen and Glenn Carroll address in Making Great Strategy. It’s a book about strategic due diligence. And it fills an important gap in the literature by caring not a whit about a company’s strategy per se, but rather focusing entirely on how rigorously that strategy has been formulated and how thoroughly it has been vetted.

Toward this end, Sørensen and Carroll define strategy as a logical argument that coherently articulates “how the firm’s resources and activities combine with external conditions to allow it to create and capture value.” They further assert that “the development, communication, and maintenance of a strategy argument is best achieved through an open process of actually arguing within the organization, engaging in productive debate.” Read the rest here: https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Arguing-your-way-to-better-strategy

If you have taken logic class, this book will be a breeze and wonder why strategy has been seen as an art and not looked at more formally as a science. This book provides the formal structure to strategy with examples of companies and scenarios where somethings worked as a result of all the needed conditions and not just some magic. This means that as long as you take care of all the necessary and sufficient conditions, your staretgy rules will work for you.

The book is thorough and well written. I found it well targeted to a scholarly audience, well suited as a textbook or companion to a University course. As an adult learner looking for a bit more specificity than concept and thoughts on "real world" application, the book didn't fit my needs resulting in the three-star (average) rating

This book covers a very important topic. However, it takes too much time to explain the concepts and uses too much text. More visuals and differentiated approach to text (some highlights or boxes during the explanations) would help convene the message and reduce the size of the book. Again, a very important and normally not discussed topic on how to map the strategy. More examples would also help but in a more visual appealing presentation.