The Future of Strategy:A Transformative Approach to Strategy for a World That Won’t Stand Still

Leaders today are inundated with strategic opportunities, besieged by business disruptions, and pressured to innovate -- to do things better, faster, or differently. The answer used to be found in strategy. But in the past decade, the commonly deployed large-scale strategic exercises were largely discredited. Our summary of The Future of Strategy brings strategy back from those big top-down plans and will enable you to question your ingrained beliefs and to devise a winning strategy to capture new opportunities.

Leaders today are inundated with strategic opportunities, besieged by business disruptions, and pressured to innovate -- to do things better, faster, or differently.

The answer used to be found in strategy. But in the past decade, the commonly deployed large-scale strategic exercises were largely discredited. They were slow and elaborate and did not deliver the expected returns, let alone help make sense of a glut of initiatives or cope with an increasingly unpredictable future.

Our summary of The Future of Strategy, by Johan Aurik, Martin Fabel, and Gillis Jonk, brings strategy back from those big top-down plans. It is about reversing course and repositioning strategy in its rightful place as the overarching management system.

Aurik is A.T. Kearney's managing partner and chairman of the board. Fabel is an A.T. Kearney partner and global head of the firm’s strategy practice. Jonk is an independent strategy consultant and business innovator.

The authors synthesize three fundamental principles that, when combined, provide the means to reclaim strategy:

1. Take direct cues from fundamental trends affecting the company going forward.
2. Engage people across the company to translate these cues into strategy. And,
3. Capture the output as competitive opportunities.

This summary will enable you to question your ingrained beliefs and to devise a winning strategy to capture new opportunities.