Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Smart Strategy Book 5th Anniversary Edition: 50 ways to solve tricky business issues
    The Smart Strategy Book 5th Anniversary Edition: 50 ways to solve tricky business issues
    The Smart Strategy Book 5th Anniversary Edition: 50 ways to solve tricky business issues
    Ebook186 pages1 hour

    The Smart Strategy Book 5th Anniversary Edition: 50 ways to solve tricky business issues

    By Kevin Duncan

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Most strategies are too long and boring. Far too many contain language that most of us can’t understand.

    Bestselling business author Kevin Duncan has read over 500 business books, and much of that wisdom is celebrated in this 5th anniversary edition. Here he covers seven of the most common strategic areas: commercial, brand, customer, sales, people, innovation, and communication.

    His trademark no-bullshit approach debunks strategic nonsense and provides any strategist with a brilliant handbook to generate smart strategy at any time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLID Publishing
    Release dateMay 19, 2022
    ISBN9781911687238
    The Smart Strategy Book 5th Anniversary Edition: 50 ways to solve tricky business issues

    Read more from Kevin Duncan

    Related to The Smart Strategy Book 5th Anniversary Edition

    Related ebooks

    Professional Skills For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Becoming an Authentic Brand

      Sep 11, 2020

      Becoming an Authentic Brand
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Next Big Trick

      Jun 18, 2017

      The Next Big Trick
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Best Marketers Are Farmers, Not Hunters: Marketing In A Globalised World And How It’s Changing

      Sep 23, 2019

      For many years, marketers identified themselves as advertisers, responsible for promoting the company – broadcasting a message and convincing people to buy their brand. While advertising is still an important part of marketing, the playing field has

      8 min read

    • Article

      Strategic Thinking

      Aug 15, 2018

      DANIELLE HANSON is the author of Fraying Edge of Sky (Codhill Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Codhill Poetry Award, and Ambushing Water (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017). She is a former marketing executive at AT&T and a member of the Southeast Atlant

      8 min read

    • Article

      Flipping the Value Creation Model

      May 1, 2018

      HISTORICALLY, MARKETING has been based on an ‘Industrial Age’ approach. Marketers saw what they believed to be a customer need, developed a product bearing what they considered to be ‘value’, and then tried to find buyers seeking that value. This ‘su

      5 min read

    • Article

      New Breed of Buyers

      Oct 29, 2020

      Luxury — just like the internet — is a truly global phenomenon. Its sellers are global. Its buyers are global. Even the aspirants are truly global. Luxury goods are often bought by buyers outside their home countries because shopping is such an inali

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Tools Of Attention

      May 15, 2019

      The technology of the day is of vital importance to marketers. It doesn’t just define how we make what we sell, it defines how we connect with those we sell to. Modern marketing has only been around for a little over 100 years. What many believe to b

      4 min read

    • Article

      Hang A Left

      Jul 9, 2020

      Hang A Left
      2 min read

    • Article

      All About The Pitch

      Jun 14, 2021

      For this column, I chose to speak to an editor at Condé Nast’s WIRED because it focuses on the transformative effect of technology on people’s lives (and who isn’t touched by the constant lure of our cellphones)? I also cover what not to pitch. My Es

      5 min read

    • Article

      Sell Your Services, Not Your Soul

      Jul 11, 2019

      As Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom argued, “Before Shakespeare there was characterisation; after Shakespeare, there were characters, men and women capable of change, with highly individual personalities.” Centuries later, characterisation – men an

      4 min read

    • Article

      How To Get Sponsored

      Nov 4, 2021

      How To Get Sponsored
      5 min read

    • Article

      PRODUCT REVIEW Cutting Edge and Innovative Products for Your Home Office

      Sep 29, 2022

      Having a smelly car only creates stress and anxiety — freshen up your ride with the minimalistic and all-natural PURGGO car air eco-purifier & freshener! It's made with pure and sustainable natural bamboo charcoal, which absorbs & eliminates odor ins

      3 min read

    • Article

      'People Are All That Matter'

      Dec 23, 2017

      'People Are All That Matter'
      5 min read

    • Article

      Mindset Matters in Business

      Apr 25, 2022

      Mindset Matters in Business
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Smart Strategy Book 5th Anniversary Edition

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Smart Strategy Book 5th Anniversary Edition - Kevin Duncan

      PREFACE

      Kevin Duncan reads business books. A lot of them. More than most business people could read in 11 lifetimes. And, best of all, he can write entertainingly about them.

      Here he highlights ideas from 57 fascinating books – a veritable Cook’s tour of business insights. Influential authors stand shoulder to shoulder and cheek by jowl: Thaler and Sunstein next to Lafley and Martin; Radjou and Prabhu next to Dixon and Adamson; Downes and Nunes next to Goffee and Jones. You’ll find Sinek, Godin, and Gladwell; Lencioni, Kahnemann, and Trott; the Heath brothers, Bannerman, and Pink. It’s interesting to see what happens when the best ideas of each bump against those of the others. They seem to produce offspring.

      Duncan is superb at pulling out the most telling details. Paraphrasing from Greg McKeown’s Essentialism, he says that if your commercial strategy boils down to a number, then the chances are it isn’t one. Strategists who don’t take time to think, he says, are merely planners.

      Each chapter contains the essence of one or two well-regarded books. First he sums up the author(s)’ wisdom, then he adds his own thoughts – always delightfully opinionated – in the form of a ‘Smart Strategy Warning’.

      Speaking through his favourite authors, Duncan pokes holes in a lot of brightly coloured business balloons. Take, for example: Most things aren’t worth doing. All models are wrong. Ignorance has tremendous value. Do everything at once. A disadvantage is an advantage. Most market research is flawed. Leaders eat last. And possibly my favourite – antelopes don’t have hobbies.

      You’ll learn how to zoom in, zoom out, and ‘ooch’ your way to a workable theory. With experience, you’ll begin to recognize the ‘caramba moment’, and on the way learn to avoid the perils of ‘WYSIATI’ (What You See Is All There Is). You’ll soon be harnessing the power of ‘clevers’ and using ‘service recovery’ to turn mistakes into customer loyalty.

      I won’t spoil the adventure for you. Dip in, dip out, let the ideas bump together. Who says strategy has to be boring?

      Marty Neumeier

      Author of Scramble: A Business Thriller

      INTRODUCTION

      It’s always fun to review a book seven years on.

      The author never quite knows what the public reaction to a book might be, so it’s good to report that this one has been well received, particularly when training hundreds of people.

      Strategy is a much-abused subject.

      An online search of the word alone produces over 2 billion references, so a lot of people are interested in it.

      A similar search on a popular retail site shows that there are over 120,000 books written about it.

      So, there is no shortage of opinion on the topic, but are they any help?

      How many times have you bought an earnest book on strategy and not finished it because it was too long-winded?

      My intention here is to get you to intelligent solutions, quickly.

      A good strategy needs to be short, clear, and easy to understand.

      Smart and original, if possible.

      This book offers 50 ideas to help you arrive at decent strategic thinking as quickly as possible, and presents it in a way that we can all understand.

      It covers seven of the most common strategic areas that affect businesses: commercial, brand, customer, sales, people, innovation, and communication.

      Be aware, however, that this is not a method where you slavishly follow the steps in a sequence.

      In fact, some of the suggestions may seem to contradict each other. That’s intentional – giving the reader many different perspectives from which to look at the business challenge.

      All the approaches here have a use in one context or another, and have been tested many times on real business problems.

      Overall, it means getting the initial big idea right, working all the way through every aspect of what the product or service can do, and then explaining it well.

      Find some new angles for your thinking, and don’t forget to heed the smart strategy warnings at the end of each idea, because the whole area is fraught with pitfalls.

      I hope you enjoy this new paperback edition. Let me know how you get on.

      Kevin Duncan

      Westminster, 2024

      IDEA 1: WHAT IS STRATEGY, ANYWAY?

      This book looks at seven strategic areas, with seven suggested approaches in each part. So that’s 49 possible approaches.

      But there is one thing that underpins them all: a clear definition of what strategy truly is.

      A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.

      It is what you have decided to do.

      That’s it.

      If anyone tries to tell you it’s more complicated than that, then they are trying to mislead you.

      There are many areas where a decent strategy will be of use.

      Here I have tried to cover the most universal themes:

      • Commercial : is it going to make money?

      • Brand : have we created a good one that people want to be associated with?

      • Customer : do we have a plan to reach them effectively?

      • Sales : can we generate enough and, if so, how?

      • People : how will our staff make all this thinking happen?

      • Innovation : can we come up with intelligent new ideas to help growth?

      • Communication : how will we explain all of this to colleagues, staff and customers?

      All of this should be explainable on one sheet of paper, and sometimes even on a postcard.

      What a strategy is not:

      • a long-winded discourse

      • a series of impenetrable charts

      • a drawing of the Parthenon populated by a long list of adjectives

      • a series of tactics cobbled together to suggest a unified thought

      • a verb, as in ‘to strategize’.

      A strategy states intention and direction in such a clear way that everybody knows what they are doing.

      So that’s point number one. Now let’s look at the other 49.

      A NOTE ON THE MILITARY METAPHOR

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1