Following McKinsey’s very enjoyable and enlightening “Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick“, I had a bit of an appetite for more strategy content, so I dug into a BCG book entitled “Your Strategy Needs a Strategy” I was given at a conference a while back. The presentation given at the conference was both entertaining and illuminating, so I thought the book would be a good read.

I wasn’t wrong, but I wasn’t entirely right, either. The core message of the book, that different business environments require different strategic approaches, sounds perhaps quite obvious, though in practice is often ignored, as the authors demonstrate. To help the reader avoid applying the wrong approach, the book gives hints as to how one can identify both which type of approach should be applied, as well as which approach is currently being applied. It also provides plenty of food for thought and advice for diversified companies which likely need to apply multiple types of strategies for their different businesses.

In addition to all of that, as the authors go through the various types of strategic approaches (classic, adaptive, shaping, visionary, and renewal), they provide a short history of thought-leadership for each approach, along with a short reading list. Fantastic if you really want to dive deeper.

Really, my only complaint about the book is its readability. I simply found it a grind to read. I can’t really put my finger on exactly why though. The vocabulary, while not elementary, is also not overwhelmingly academic. Sentence structures are not overly complex. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s linked to the abstract nature of the content. Regardless, I found it a bit of a slog.

Verdict: Recommend. Tough read, but probably worth it. It’s a one-stop shop for a moderately detailed introduction to five strategic approaches, each of which has probably had dozens of books written about it.