Strategic Learning: How to Be Smarter Than Your Competition and Turn Key Insights into Competitive Advantage
The Way You Do Strategy Can Make Your Organization Smarter Than Your Competition!In today’s dynamic marketplace, traditional strategic planning methods no longer work. The key challenge facing managers is to build adaptive organizations able to assess the shifting environment and rapidly translate insights into winning strategies over and over again. “Strategy as a planning exercise” must become “strategy as a learning exercise.” Excelling at this capability is an organization’s only sustainable competitive advantage.Willie Pietersen’sStrategic Learningprocess gives you a practical and proven method for turning key insights about your market, customers, and competitors into action. Since Pietersen first defined them inReinventing Strategy, the concepts and tools ofStrategic Learninghave been battle-tested in the harshest economy in a generation, helping to reinvigorate a wide range of corporations and not-for-profit organizations. The strategic learning process also forms the basis for how strategy is taught in Columbia Business School’s Executive Education programs.Strategic Learningpresents Pietersen’s unique “insight to action” model. Using this cycle of four linked steps—Learn, Focus, Align, and Execute—your organization will continuously learn from its environment and its own actions, adjust its strategies to fit the competitive landscape, and consistently outthink and outperform your competition. You’ll navigate through crises while building the organizational readiness to identify the next challenge, the resilience to withstand it, and the ability to profit from it.Filled with examples showing real-world applications of its principles,Strategic Learningwill redefine how you approach strategy. Coming from one of the best minds in business, this far-reaching set of ideas equips managers at all levels to lead the way to lasting competitive advantage.