Recommended Reading
Of course this page will evolve over time.
I will try to keep this list to the very best of the best recommendations.
Business Strategy
“Playing to Win” by AG Lafley and Roger Martin
This is probably the clearest, most accessible and practical book on business strategy around. It’s the first book I think of when someone asks me to recommend a book on business or marketing strategy.
“Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” by Richard Rumelt
Like most of the books in this list, one of its great strengths is clarity. Rumelt provides a definition of “a strategy” as including:
A diagnosis
A “kernel of strategy”
A guiding policy
A set of coherent actions
From there, he uses a range of examples from his own teaching to illustrate the point from different angles and with different implications.
“7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy” by Hamilton Helmer
This book has a few things going on, and while a few of them don’t land for me, the ones that do are well worth the price of admission. Helmer defines sustainable competitive advantage mathematically, the details of which go over my head, but the principles are very sound. He then explains seven different ways a business can develop and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage.
In theory, he tries to map these seven strategies into a framework of different benefits to the business and barriers to challengers, but the framework doesn’t really add anything to the story and it’s full of gaps – feels inelegant to me.
BUT the descriptions of those seven strategies and how they work are brilliant.
Strategic Thinking
“The McKinsey Way” by Ethan M. Rasiel
This book was a revelation for me in the middle of my strategy career. Rasiel very clearly describes techniques for disaggregating problems, using hypothesis-led solution design, and presenting solutions compellingly. Along the way, he has great soft-skills advice. His suggestion to end every research interview with the question, “Is there anything I’ve forgotten to ask?” has been incredibly useful at times.
The book spawned a series of sequels – “The McKinsey Mind” and so on. They’re also worth a read.
“The Pyramid Principle” by Barbara Minto
One of the most professionally useful courses I ever took at university was Critical Thinking 105. While that gave me a strong foundation in logic, argumentation and fallacies, this book collects it all into beautiful clarity. As the subtitle suggests, while Minto presents her book as a how-to for compelling business writing, it doubles as a how-to for clear effective thinking.
“Cracked It!” by Garette, Phelps and Sibony
One thing I like about this book is that it is very practical in the “here’s what it’s like to encounter these kinds of challenges in real life” way. While The McKinsey Way details hypothesis-led problem-solving, Cracked It recognises that this isn’t always the best approach and there are trade-offs involved. Three main situations are covered – solving problems with hypotheses, solving problems without hypotheses, and making reasoned selections from among proposed options. I also quite like its TOSCA model for problem definition:
Trouble – what makes this problem real and present?
Owner – whose problem is it?
Success criteria – what will success look like, and when?
Constraints – what are the limits on the solution space?
Actors – who has a say in the way we solve this problem, and what do they want?
For those of you who have done the Strategy Without Recipes course, you’ll see a lot of parallels – perhaps an improvement on mine, as I don’t typically go into “owner” and “actors” except to note that the problem definition needs to be confirmed by anyone with the power to later tell you that you’ve failed.
“Teach Yourself to Think” by Edward de Bono
Less well known than de Bono’s “six thinking hats” model, this book lays out the TO-LO-PO-SO-DO model for creative and effective problem-solving. That is…
TO – to where are we going?
LO – look around at the facts
PO – what are the possibilities?
SO – what are the implications?
DO – what is the plan?
If you’ve done the Strategy Without Recipes course, you’ll know that these map precisely to the ten stages of problem-solving in my model, though I obviously expand LO and PO out to six or seven different kinds of activities. Many of de Bono’s books could be criticised for being him just saying the same things over and over (lateral thinking, six hats), but with this book it’s not a case of “read one, read them all”. It’s a handbook for good and creative thinking.
“Unfolding the Napkin” by Dan Roam
For a bit of a different approach, but still following the same underlying principles, this book from Roam has great advice on mapping out situations and finding solutions through sketching. We all know that images and diagrams are very useful for conveying a diagnosis and solution, but we’re missing a trick if we don’t put pen to paper while we’re doing that diagnosing and solving. One of a series from Roam that might feel a bit like milking the same gimmick over and over, but this one in particular I found very practical.
Creative Strategy
“Hey Whipple, Squeeze This” by Luke Sullivan and Edward Boches
I mean, it’s often the only book I recommend to creatives because it’s the only book I need to recommend. Hey Whipple is written by a career creative and is invaluable for thinking about how to come up with great ideas for marketing campaigns. But because Sullivan’s experience includes decades before “strategists” and “planners” were part of the typical agency roster, he has fantastic advice for the kind of work that used to be done by creatives and now sits more with strategists – looking for insights, developing simple and compelling propositions. Just a great book for anyone working in agencyland.
Marketing Strategy
“How Not to Plan: 66 Ways to Screw It Up” by Les Binet and Sarah Carter
This book is a treasure for any marketer, any agency suit, strategist or even creative. 66 lessons, often pushing back against erroneous intuitions and received wisdoms, based on research, and presented simply and clearly. No notes.
“Building Distinctive Brand Assets” by Jenni Romaniuk
This may feel a bit specialised to be on this list, but I have not come across any other book doing a really good job of explaining distinctiveness of brand assets in brand identity and providing practical ways to measure and improve them. Perhaps I include it here just because I find that DBAs are often under-appreciated and under-utilised in a lot of marketing at the moment. Great book.
“Strategic Brand Management” by Kevin Lane Keller
I read a lot of textbooks, for fun, all the time. Like, I am odd. I get it. Anyway, this is definitely one of the better ones I’ve read. Keller frames brand management around the idea of “Customer-Based Brand Equity” and provides a pretty useful, no-bullshit, research-based approach to planning and executing brand strategies.
Like most textbooks, once the author has finished explaining his favourite part of things, it does feel a little like he’s phoning in the other bits and pieces. And there is something about marketing professors and academics that make them slightly out of touch with modern digital marketing. Like, they try, but even when it’s written in 2020, it always comes across as “why in the future there could even be campaigns where customers interact with brands in cyberspace as they Ethernet their way into netizenship”. I’m exaggerating but only slightly.
This is not a complete list and I will continue to grow it!