The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs
Cynthia Montgomery

Strategy is about identifying why your business matters, not just analysing the competition. Cynthia Montgomery reveals how leaders can embrace the crucial role of The Strategist to really define and drive the objectives and advantages to power their companies forward.

Based on her legendary strategy course, one of the most oversubscribed executive courses at Harvard Business School, Cynthia Montgomery offers a radically new perspective on a leader’s most vial role.

Montgomery’s course teaches seasoned executives, owners and CEOs a totally new way to understand how to lead with vision and values, a way that fuses leadership with strategy. She shows that strategy is not just a tool for outwitting the competition – it is the most powerful means a leader has for shaping a firm itself.

Montgomery takes the readers through the paces of her world-renowned course, teaching them how to develop the skills and sensibilities that living strategy and real leadership demand.

No other book marries strategy and leadership in the same way – a way readers will find challenging, intriguing, and ultimately, inspiring.

The Strategist

Be the Leader Your Business Needs

Cynthia A. Montgomery

Harvard Business School

Dedication

TO

ANNEKE, MATHEA, AND NILS

THAT YOU MAY FIND PLACES WHERE YOU

CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE THAT MATTERS

AND TO BJØRN, FOREVERMORE

Epigraph

IN THE END, IT IS

IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER

THAT WE CANNOT BECOME

WHAT WE NEED TO BE BY

REMAINING WHAT WE ARE.

MAX DE PREE, CEO OF HERMAN MILLER,

IN LEADERSHIP IS AN ART

Contents

Cover (#u904df114-a0c8-5dbd-8953-7cdd9e2c1abd)

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction: What I Learned in Office Hours

1 Strategy and Leadership

2 Are You a Strategist?

3 The Myth of the Super-Manager

4 Begin with Purpose

5 Turn Purpose into Reality

6 Own Your Strategy

7 Keep It Vibrant

8 The Essential Strategist

Author’s Note

Frequently Asked Questions

Recommended Reading

Notes

Searchable Terms

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

WHAT I LEARNED IN OFFICE HOURS

YOU’RE ABOUT TO get a revisionist view of strategy. It’s not that what you’ve learned is incorrect. It’s that it’s incomplete.

Strategy is a fundamental course at nearly every business school in the world. I have been privileged to teach variations of it for more than thirty years—first at the University of Michigan, then at the Kellogg School at Northwestern, and for the last twenty-plus years at the Harvard Business School.