Rating: 
Summary: Nothing impressive
Review: This book provides bascially no new ideas for strategic decision makers. The only idea it has is to distinguish uncertainties into four levels and this book uses the four-level frame in all its following discussions. If you want to read it, maybe you can stop before chapter three and you won't miss any precious insight by skipping the rest of it.
Rating: 
Summary: Finally a McKinsey Book that walks the talk
Review: Would highly recommend this book to anybody who is looking to find strategic tools that help resolve problems under uncertain contexts. Most books out there (Porter's Competetive Advantage, Co-opetition, Competing for the future, Decision Analysis books, and many more) talk about one tool/methodology or one way of resolving the strategic problem. This book takes a different path in that all good tools are used together and it is hoped that by viewing the well defined structured problem using these tools would help you come to conclusions in differing levels of uncertainity (obviously the problem context has levels of uncertainity or risk). Four levels of certainity are defined and tools that would help under those circumstances are clearly listed. For most of the tools - how to use those tools is upto you to figure out. However, having said that the Appendix section does lists further reading, that would help you get started in learning about _some_ of the tools used in the book. I found the tools lists to be very useful. After reading the book I knew _exactly_ what tools to use under my circumstances. If you have spent time reading strategy (Mintzberg, Ghemawat, Hamel, Kaplan et al, Porter, Prahalad, Day, systems engineering approaches...), you'll find good use on how to put togther all those analysis methodologies into one framework and come to conslusions. I wish the book actually walked through some cases and used the tools listed to arrive at conclusions. Cases in differing levels of uncertainity would have been very helpful (hence 4 stars). Finally, this is my first McKinsey book (McKinsey brand leveraged book) among others that walk the talk (others being Valuation and the McKinsey Way/McKinsey Mind). Recommended.
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