Strategic Learning: How to Be Smarter Than Your Competition and Turn Key Insights into Competitive Advantage - Hardcover

Pietersen, Willie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470540699 ISBN 13: 9780470540695

Publisher: Wiley, 2010

Synopsis

How to use Strategic Learning to rapidly respond to change and gain a sustainable advantage over your competitors

What's even harder than creating a breakthrough strategy? Making it stick. As companies are fighting to survive in a tough economy, this new book by Willie Pietersen demonstrates the power of the Strategic Learning process, a four-step dynamic cycle guaranteed to create and sustain winning performance. Adopted by a wide range of corporations and not-for-profit organizations, the Strategic Learning process builds on eight years of practicing, adapting and honing the original concepts Pietersen first introduced in Reinventing Strategy to explain how organizations can generate superior insights about their customers and competitors, craft a Winning Proposition, focus on a vital few key priorities, create buy-in throughout the organization and achieve success – again and again.

• Teaches organizations to make smarter decisions that help them win customers and earn superior profits
• Explains how to instill a culture of openness, learning, and courage that can face and respond to the constantly changing business environment
• Is a tool that can benefit leaders at all levels, in organizations both large and small, global and domestic, for-profit and not-for-profit
• Author Willie Pietersen, a former president of Tropicana and Seagram USA, is a professor of management at Columbia Business School, and the author of Reinventing Strategy, from Wiley

Strategic Learning shows you how your business or nonprofit organization can develop better, more effective strategies for long-term competitive advantage.

About this title

About the Author

Willie Pietersen was raised in South Africa and received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. After practicing law, he embarked on an international business career, serving as the CEO of multibillion-dollar businesses such as Lever Foods, Seagram USA, Tropicana, and Sterling Winthrop's Consumer Health Group. Since 1998, Pietersen has been Professor of the Practice of Management at the Columbia University Business School. He has served as teacher and advisor to many global companies, including Boeing, Deloitte, DePuy, Ericsson, ExxonMobil, Novartis, SAP, and the Girl Scouts of the USA. He is the author of Reinventing Strategy, which is widely used by organizations as a guide to the creation of winning strategies, and has been translated into Spanish and Chinese.

For more information about the application of Strategic Learning, visit www.williampietersen.com.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Strategic Learning

"Strategic Learning has become a vital element of how we think about the future in Ericsson. The wisdom of Willie Pietersen's approach to strategy has helped us move from planning rituals to strategy as learning, and has made a big difference to the way we work."
―Hans Vestberg, President and CEO, Ericsson

"Strategic Learning is the best method I've ever found for creating winning strategies."
―Michael Mahoney, Company Group Chairman, Johnson & Johnson

"Pietersen's focus on creating highly adaptive and dynamic strategy is essential for our turbulent times. His Strategic Learning process forces companies to confront difficult truths presented by the marketplace and helps them thrive amid uncertainty."
―Jill Spencer, Executive Vice President, Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta

"Strategic Learning and Willie Pietersen have had an amazing impact on the Girl Scouts, helping us create a transformational strategy to bring relevance to a ninety-seven-year-old organization. We are confident that we are now focusing on the few things that are making the biggest difference."
―Kathy Cloninger, Chief Executive Officer, Girl Scouts of the USA

"Willie Pietersen's deep insights about strategy and leadership have helped our commercial and medical leaders understand how we can move from merely doing strategy to excelling at it."
―David Epstein, President and CEO, Novartis Oncology, Novartis Molecular Diagnostics

From the Inside Flap

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’s Strategic Learning process gives you a practical and proven method for turning key insights about your market, customers, and competitors into action. Since Pietersen first defined them in Reinventing Strategy, the concepts and tools of Strategic Learning have 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 Learning presents 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 Learning will 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0470540699
• ISBN 13: 9780470540695
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256