Winning the Long Game Book Review
Winning the Long Game
Summary
The idea of the book is that, now more than ever, it is important to have a long term guiding strategy.
Problems:
- we live in a world of Violatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA)
- due to rapid rate of change a general framework is better then detailed planning
- you cannot copy paste the past into the future
In short: “Management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things”, Peter Drucker.
Strategy is how we do the right things. The framework for developing your strategy is:
- anticipate the future
- challenge the status quo and assumptions (reason from first principles!)
- interpret the wide array of data, avoid confirmation bias
- decide what to do with this information i.e. synthesize it into a testable hypothesis
- align with your stakeholders
- execute, learning incrementally, each activity you take is data to adjust your strategy
- repeat these steps continually
Sidebar: I appreciated two organizational aspects of this book:
- this book laid out its core premise right in the opening introduction and gave a bite sized overview of the content, this is simple but it’s surprisingly hard to get the big picture of most books just from the jacket or the introduction — I’ve largely stopped reading these books as then you are essentially panning for gold from a river of mostly useless information
- I love that there is an action oriented assessment at the end. The most effective way to enable optimal action is through an assessment. How do you know what you need to work on? What is the most valuable area? You need an assessment! This one is geared towards executives and business but I’m still impressed to see it included — we need more books like this.