Strategic Renaissance: New Thinking and Innovative Tools to Create Great Corporate Strategies Using Insights from History and Science

by Evan Matthew Dudik

If your company needs to develop a more scientific strategic approach - one that's sophisticated and creative, yet rigorous and results-oriented - this book is for you.
You've probably discovered that the old strategic approaches, including the pet concept of sustainable competitive advantage, just aren't working. Traditional companies - maybe yours? - find themselves being pushed into risky mergers and other catch-up moves to stay afloat in roiling seas.
The preferable way is to set your own course by systematically creating and exploiting opportunity. That is what visionary thinkers have always done, and it's what Strategic Renaissance shows you how to do. This guide is packed with models of corporate strategies, based on revolutionary concepts drawn from science, philosophy, military and political history, and business history - strategies with surprising lessons for your organization's success.
Evan M. Dudik shows you how to apply the key elements of great business strategy. You'll learn how to objectively assess business conditions (be prepared to trash most of what you know about market research!), formulate and test a resulting if-then hypothesis, and proceed with strategies that can truly change your company's direction.
Here are all the tools you need to analyze your company's current strategic efforts and create new ones with greater chances to succeed.

Genres: Business

259 pages, Hardcover

First published May 10, 2000

Reviews

[Jaime Portillo De la O · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one of my all-time favorites. I bought it in a bookstore in Boston, Massachusetts, and I loved the feeling of our now ancient way of purchasing books.

There it was, in the business section, provided by a not-so-known editorial at the time. Its groundbreaking concept of the pivot and the hammer provides a simple metaphor for growth, as well as unique insights into strategy applied to the business world.

Thank you so much, Evan Matthew Dudik.

[Abdul · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a heavy book loaded with hard stuff as talks about a scientific approach for formulating robust corporate strategies. Having read Soundview's summary of the book, I came to understand the high level concepts as it didn't show how to formulate a strategy a step-by-step.

The 4 elements of a successful strategy are:
1- The strategic hypothesis. The strategy is about hypotheses.

2- The if-then statement. "If" represents the condition and "then" represents the result.

3- The pivot and the hammer.the pivot is the part of your business on which you can rely (defensive, chrysler). The hammer is where the force of a strategy is focused (offensive). The hammerhead is the part of the hammer that transmits the force (Tupperware) and the bearing is what makes the pivot a pivot ( manager of the succesful retail buyers).

The strategic competitve advantage is replaced with opportunity creation and exploitation.

[Lori Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A should-read book on innovation for knowledge workers and entrepreneurs.