Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick

People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds

By: Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, Sven Smit

Narrated by: David Marantz

Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

Beat the odds with a bold strategy

We’ve all seen hockey stick business plans before. A future where results sail confidently upward, but with a dip coinciding with next year’s budget.

CEOs usually rely on their experience and business smarts to figure out which of those hockey sticks are real, and which are fake. But all too often getting to a “yes,” competing for resources, and striving to claim credit, cloud the hard decisions. Another strategy framework? No thanks, we already have plenty of those, and they don’t fix the real problem: the social dynamics in your strategy room.

Mining the data from thousands of large companies, McKinsey Partners Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit open the windows of that room, and bring an “outside view”. They found three discrete groups of companies: the bottom quintile with massive economic losses; the long, flat, middle 60 percent with practically no economic profit; and the top 20 percent to whom all the value accrues.

Some companies do achieve real hockey stick performance: but just 1-in-12 jump from the middle tier to the top over a 10-year period. This does not happen by magic - there is an empirically-backed science to improve your odds of success by capitalizing on your endowment, riding the right trends, and most importantly, making a few big moves.

To make these big moves happen, you’re going to have to break through inertia, gamesmanship, and risk aversion. You’re going to have to mitigate human biases and manage group dynamics. Eight practical shifts can help you do this, and unlock bigger, bolder, better strategies.

This is not another by-the-book approach to strategy. It’s not another trudge through frameworks or small-scale case studies promising a secret formula for success. It’s an irreverent, fact-driven, and humorous take on the real world of strategic decision making.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2018 McKinsey & Company (P)2018 Audible, Inc.

Worth listening to while reading

The arguments and supplied data and visuals are quite compelling. It is what you would expect from team McKinsey. There is quite a bit of repetition throughout, but again, they're consultants. The book is practically a demonstration of what they can offer as an engagement, because it's more of a "Here's the problem" argument than a "Here's the solution" manual. Some readers might disagree and argue, "I'm not sure what you mean because the entire book consists of data illustrating the solution and further recommendations on taking insights from that data and applying them to ones own organization." My response is that if you can readily implement the insights and the plan of action for such a strategic superstructure, then you probably are already a strategic management consultant and you just didn't have this data and argument in your tool kit. This book is definitely for such readers. For executives looking for "strategy answers" Who are more narrowly focused on the internals of their own company and industry, this is a great book for showcasing why it might be worth the expense to hire one of the aforementioned - and how to know if they're worth their salt. As my review scores indicate, I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it worth reading and using. The visuals are rich, and so you shouldn't listen without looking at them or you miss a lot. Also, be sure not to skip the Appendix more thoroughly describing the study methodology.

Ok beginning, superb finish

The beginning section and the social drama of strategy could have been shorter, but The five strategy levers discussed in the second half gave me lots of nuggets and insights, will read again.