Reinventing Strategy: Using Strategic Learning to Create and Sustain Breakthrough Performance

Rating:
Summary: Business strategy as it should be written
Review: Here is book that takes a practical look at business strategy and helps the business person to streamline his/her thinking.
Written in Willie Pietersens highly readable style,it has heft as well as humor, theory as well as practical examples. Oh that our Business School text books had been written thus!
I would recommend this book to anyone who sells anything.
Read the introductory chapters,grasp Pietersen's premise the go to any of the rich chapters. Concepts are clearly tagged, each making for a delicious informational meal that forces reflection.

Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: I am a management consultant, a trainer and an executive coach and business strategy is one of my core interests. I have found this book by chance browsing on Amazon.
This is the book I would have loved to write myself.
It is an outstanding synthesis of what is business strategy nowdays.
The author wonderfully combines a solid theoretical framework (he is a professor at Columbia University now) with a very practical approach (he has been running a company as CEO beforehand and it definitely shows!).
It is very well structured, down to earth, straightforward and still accurate and full of in-depth reflections.
It is a rare demonstration (especially in business literature) that a book can be essential and to the point, without boring repetitions (typical in business books). It shows there is a real understanding and mastery of the subject matter.
A serious business book written with both the head and the heart. Thank you Mr Pietersen!

Rating:
Summary: Every Manager Should Read This Book
Review: I am VP at a large consumer products company in Ohio and I found this book very insightful in the areas of creating strategy and leadership. I read a lot of business books and most are very slight in what they have to offer -- a few thoughts, old stories or worn out sayings. However, "Reinventing Strategy" is a real how-to-book and goes through running a successful business step-by-step. This book will definitely help my division be more profitable! In fact, I would love to go and take one of Prof. Pietersen's courses at Columbia University.

Rating:
Summary: Every Manager Should Read This Book
Review: I am VP at a large consumer products company in Ohio and I found this book very insightful in the areas of creating strategy and leadership. I read a lot of business books and most are very slight in what they have to offer -- a few thoughts, old stories or worn out sayings. However, "Reinventing Strategy" is a real how-to-book and goes through running a successful business step-by-step. This book will definitely help my division be more profitable! In fact, I would love to go and take one of Prof. Pietersen's courses at Columbia University.

Rating:
Summary: A survival guide for business
Review: Willie Pietersen has managed to pull together what's really important to achieve breakthrough performance. He's done this by telling clearly and convincingly the lessons learned from his years as a chief executive, but explained them from his new role as a Professor of the Practice of Management at the Columbia Business School. I've had the personal pleasure of watching Pietersen in action with business leaders from around the world who have participated in Columbia's Executive Education programs. The overriding comment from these executives is "this guy makes sense and has shown we how to face up to the challenges to my business' survival." Reinventing Strategy: Using Strategic Learning to Create and Sustain Breakthrough Performance is the next best thing to the live program.

If you want to move from Strategy theory to action and have your business survive in the process, read this book.
William M. Klepper, Ph.D.
Academic Director, Executive Education
Columbia Business School

Rating:
Summary: Willie Pietersen gives us great strategy AND great practice
Review: Willie Pietersen's Reinventing Strategy contains the basics of strategy, i.e., how to win, how to align the organization behind the chosen strategies, how to be sure that superior insights drive the strategic process. If that alone were his contribution, this book would be a significant contribution to the strategy literature.

But Pietersen goes much further than that. He shows us how, exactly, to develop these strategies, how he himself developed such strategies and what he learned about leadership in the process.

This book is about strategy, implementation and one man's journey as a leader and life-long learner. The result is an immensely human business book. The singular voice of the author comes through with clarity and humility. I know of no other business book that combines theory and practice with such a strongly personal view. Pietersen talks about the value of developing a leadership credo in his book. This book is, in essence, his own credo from a lifetime of leading and learning.