In preparation for our upcoming book on Product Strategy we have decided to launch this book to explain what strategy is and why is so important right now.

Strategy crafting in most organizations nowadays is still a wishful thinking process. We believe that strategy formulation can be significantly improved.

To this extent we wrote this book with the purpose of showing you what a bad strategy looks like, provide you with our decalogue of a good strategy and some useful tools and real-world examples.

The goal of good strategy is to fundamentally reinvent the existing competitive space or invent an entirely new competitive space in ways that delight customers and discourage competitors. Sustainable and profitable growth is the product of anticipation. In turn, in order to be able to anticipate you must learn to see.

The future does not belong to those who own a crystal ball, but to those who are willing to challenge the boundaries, assumptions and constraints of their industries and markets.

The goal is not to predict the future and make a plan to achieve it, but to imagine a future made possible by changes in technology, lifestyle, work style, regulation, global geopolitics and so on and iteratively and incrementally build capabilities and exploit opportunities as future unfolds.

This book and the next that will follow start with a fundamental premise based on our observation of the business world in last 20 years: we reached the limits of operational effectiveness. Business agility is no longer a strategic advantage, if it ever was. Getting a product to market faster, improving quality and responding to market changes quickly is not enough.

Pursuing incremental advantages while competitors are fundamentally reinventing the business landscape is not very wise.

On the other hand, doing the wrong thing very fast and nimble will send your business over the cliff.

This book is not about survival or resilience, instead we want you to think about growth and getting ahead.

Many companies have already done much of the hard work of catching up on cost, quality, speed, and flexibility. Now they are turning their attention to growth.

This book is about strategy. The intelligent adaptation over an extended period of time in the face of discouraging uncertainty. The domain of entrepreneurs not planners.

The book begins with the seven capital sins of strategy, where we explain the main mistakes many companies make when defining their strategies.

From there we jump into the second chapter, where we describe the decalogue of a good strategy. We explore every point of the decalogue with great detail and provide examples so you can grasp the concepts and put them into practice in your context.

Afterwards we provide you with a catalog of the main strategic design tools for the modern company, and we finish the guide with a strategy assessment that you can use to evaluate your company’s strategic capabilities.