The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking
Leading Your Organization into the Future
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4.2 • 13 Ratings
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
International bestselling author of The First 90 Days Michael D. Watkins presents an actionable framework for business strategy to help aspiring leaders learn to think strategically and improve their decision-making—a set of skills more necessary than ever in a world of constant change.
Pattern recognition. Systems perspective. Mental agility. Structured problem-solving. Visioning. Political savvy. For every good leader who has mastered of one of these disciplines is a great leader who knows and has mastered all of them.
Michael D. Watkins, an expert on leadership transitions and organizational success, returns to the page with a new how-to guide for leadership development. Here, he presents the six disciplines that separate the great from the good. Developed over the course of his storied career, Watkins’ results-oriented approach to strategic thinking and problem-solving—"a set of mental disciplines leaders use to recognize potential threats and opportunities, establish priorities, and mobilize themselves and their organizations to envision and enact promising paths forward"—is the model followed by some of today’s most successful first-time CEOs and new business leaders.
The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking is a comprehensive and practical guide to strategic thinking, offering a wealth of insights and management skills for leaders at all levels.
This comprehensive guide delivers the leadership skills you need to succeed:
Pattern Recognition: Identify critical threats and opportunities by seeing the crucial patterns in a sea of noise.Systems Analysis: Build powerful mental models of complex business situations to make better predictions and develop more promising strategies.Mental Agility: Master level-shifting to see both the forest and the trees, moving from the 50,000-foot view down to the critical details.Political Savvy: Understand the art of influence to navigate organizational politics and build the alliances needed to drive your agenda forward.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Impressive Read - Lots of Strong Takeaways
I was impressed with the takeaways and the learnings of this book. This is a must read for anyone who is looking to become a competitive leader.