Book Reviews

Strategy In Action -
The Execution, Politics, and Payoff of Business Planning

By Boris Yavitz and William H. Newman

Reviewed by Steve Buchwald, CIRM

This book review concerns a relatively new addition to the CIRM reading material for the Integrated Enterprise Management module. The purpose of this book was to move the literature of strategy out of the realm of formulation only and into the realm of effective execution. The book, as discussed in the preface, "...focuses on ways to close [the] gap between expectations and actual results....To implement a new strategy: thrusts must be programmed, organization needs to be refocused, committed executives have to occupy key posts, and incentive packages have to be redesigned and control systems realigned to match the revised goals. Many failures of strategy can be traced to absence of such matching of structure and strategy." However as the authors go on to say in that same preface that "this is the heart of the book - as we first conceived it. We soon discovered, however, that strategy could not be given the terse treatment we originally intended." Therefore part one of the book, the first six chapters deal with the development of strategy and strategic focus. Part two then, chapters seven through twelve, deal with the execution of strategy. The authors refer to this as "Propulsion: Translating Strategy Into Action. The third part, integration, deals with the incorporation of business unit strategy and corporate strategy, as well as the dichotomy of building a dynamic, focused, successfully executable strategy in light of the fact that market conditions are always changing. Indeed, this is a problem and the authors tried to address it in their last chapter called "Hitting a Moving Target in a Rough Sea."

If you are thinking, the outline above sounds like a lot for one book to try to cover effectively, I would agree. Add to this the fact that the book is over twelve years old, and one must question why APICS has it as part of the CIRM reading material. If APICS wants to use this book for CIRM, one would think that the subject matter treatments would be cursory. However, I never felt comfortable with who the audience was. In addition, the disclaimers in the preface and the ensuing additions to the original concept of the book led me to believe that the authors were never really in control of this book. It was as if the book controlled them. The book itself was not easily read. For me it was like trying to read a high school text book where everything ever written on a subject is mentioned just so we will have an exposure to it. Nonetheless, I feel a paradox here because some of the information presented is important information. For example, a senior executive in charge of strategy formulation and direction for a company would certainly be able to gain insight from the arguments for marrying formulation and execution. Further, any line manager entrusted with the actual execution of strategy will be able to gain from the pitfalls discussed here.