One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making

By Steven Sinofsky and Marco Iansiti

Book Overview

Learn from the concepts, capabilities, processes, and behaviors that aligned around one strategy with the hard-won, first-person wisdom found in One Strategy.

Challenging traditional views of strategy and operational execution, this book-written by Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky with Harvard Business School professor Marco Iansiti-describes how you can drive innovation by connecting the potential of strategic opportunities to the impact of operational execution.

Lessons from the unique combination of real-world experience managing a large scale organization with academic research in strategy and innovation Reveals what it takes to align a complex organization around one strategy, manage its execution, and reach for "strategic integrity" Written by Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky with Harvard Business School professor Marco Iansiti-a combined forty years of management and research experience A unique perspective on strategy development, alignment, and execution

Drawn from Sinofsky's internal Microsoft blog where he communicated some of the management processes the team put to work while developing a 4,000 person, multi-year project-Microsoft Windows 7-One Strategy shares the hard-won insights you can use to successfully make the leap from strategy to execution.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0470560452
• ISBN13: 9780470560457
• Release Date: November 2009
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Great book for thinking through how to align orgs to strategy

I only have a handful of business books that I would recommend to others - and this one is definitely high on that list. It's the most cohesive, clear and thoughtful discussion of how to think about getting people in an organization aligned on a strategy, how to structure the organization to support the strategy, how to manage the people in that org in a way that enables them to do their best work against the strategy and how to manage the projects (the execution) related to the strategy. While the book uses the Windows 7 development effort to accomplish these goals, the content is relevant to any large complex effort that has has multiple internal and external stakeholders and requires the people working on it to have responsibility (and accountability) for the effort. I found myself highlighting many sections on my Kindle and I expect to go back to it. Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft but I do not work with or for Steven. I just think is is a particularly good book.

The End of "Top-Down" Strategy Development

I picked up One Strategy this past week while on holiday vacation and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The book covers a range of topics related to product strategy, specifically addressing the ways in which you can align the constituents within an organization (executives, managers, individual contributors), develop a compelling shared strategy, and then execute on that strategy. Since I work at Microsoft, a lot of the concepts in this book were familiar to me, but Steven Sinofsky and Marco Iansiti dive deeper into the concepts to explain why they're important, how they tie together, and provide practical examples that crystallize the concepts into reality. The book combines blog posts from Steven's internal and external blogs with contextual information, theory, and summaries provided by Marco. This format works well and provides a great balance between theoretical and practical explanations. The book sets out to dispel a number of strategy myths, a number of which I believed when I picked up the book. A subset of these myths included: (1) Strategy is defined by executives (2) Planning makes organizations less agile (3) Innovation can't be planned You'll learn why top down strategy development isn't effective, why having a plan actually makes an organization more agile, and how plans support the invention of high impact products. The book also touches on subjects relevant to strategy, including what effective management looks like, what mangers "really" do, thoughts on managing your career, and more. One Strategy is a great read for everyone from executives to managers, engineering to support, sales to marketing. I highly recommend it.