The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking: Leading Your Organization into the Future

In this lean guide, Watkins (The First 90 Days), a leadership professor at the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland, offers advice on how business leaders can improve their ability to anticipate and respond to complex challenges. Such “strategic thinking,” he suggests, has six components: mental agility, pattern recognition, political savvy, problem-solving, systems analysis (understanding how factors in a market or organization interact), and visioning (setting ambitious, achievable goals for a company). Detailing how readers can improve at each, he outlines a five-step process for problem-solving, which involves articulating the problem to be addressed, deciding what criteria to judge solutions by, brainstorming and settling on fixes, and then deciding how to implement them. To conduct systems analysis, Watkins recommends deciding what factors to focus on, creating a diagram indicating the causal relationships between them, and then running possible solutions through the diagram to evaluate their effectiveness. Watkins’ penchant for multistep processes and enumerated lists ensures his suggestions are easy to follow, and his concise style will appeal to readers in a hurry. This no-nonsense manual gets the job done. (Jan.)