Profiting from Uncertainty	Uncertainty is an integral part of business today. Yet, it is often poorly managed, causing companies to be surprised by "unlucky" reversals of fortune or to miss opportunities. Profiting from Uncertainty describes the traps that lead to this situation – tendency to project the past onto the future, over-confidence in one’s own guesses about the future, etc. Developing a set of future scenarios is largely recognized as a good eye-opening technique. In this book, the author goes into great detail in describing how to use this approach to build a strategy that will help managers cope with the stakes of uncertainty.
Paul J.H. Schoemaker, The Free Press, 2002.
20/20 Foresight	Who would deny that the economic environment is increasingly uncertain? Yet very few companies truly take this uncertainty into account when building their strategy. Instead, they often try to predict the future. 20/20 Foresight suggests making uncertainty a core element of strategy development. The author, a McKinsey consultant, points out that there are several levels of uncertainty and indicates which decision-making tools to use for each. He also emphasizes how the level of uncertainty influences strategic choices, such as the timing of decisions and the risk management policy.
Hugh Courtney, Harvard Business School Press, 2001.
The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning	This book pleads against traditional strategic planning, which is considered to force a narrow, conservative, and rigid thinking framework upon operational staff. The author argues for an approach more closely geared to operational players that would require companies to: identify emerging organizational strategies; encourage operational managers to think strategically; explain organizational strategies; program strategies, i.e. make them operational; communicate strategies to both internal and external players.
Henry Mintzberg, Prentice Hall, 1992.
The New Strategists	This book shows how and why employees can and should participate in defining strategy. The authors begin by reviewing the fact that strategy results as much from implicit everyday choices of line staff as from deliberate executive decisions. They then explore ways that companies can take advantage of this state of affairs by formally involving employees in the strategic thinking process.
Stephen J. Wall and Shannon Rye Wall, The Free Press, 1995.
The Search Conference	Developing strategy in conjunction with concerned employees is a powerful means to ensure their later support when the strategy is effectively implemented. This book details a proven participative strategy method, i.e. the search conference, which consists of organizing a two- to three-day conference where employee representatives meet to develop a strategic action plan.
Merrelyn Emery and Ronald E. Purser, Jossey-Bass, 1996.
The Strategic Middle Manager	Most theories now in vogue recommend reducing the number of hierarchical levels. However, many companies are now going to extremes in paring down their middle management ranks, considered henceforth to be excessively costly and obstructive to creativity. This book warns that this approach has its limitations, and explains the critical operational role played by middle managers.
Steven W. Floyd and Bill Wooldridge, Jossey-Bass, 1995.
The Quest for Value	This book is a work of reference on the concept of EVA (Economic Value Added), which aims to provide a more faithful reflection of how well companies create value than traditional profit or dividend measures. The author specifically recommends using EVA as the basis for calculating the variable portion of executive compensation, and suggests that financial restructuring can create value in two ways, by promoting aggressive debt utilization and delegating financing to business units.
G. Bennet Stewart, III, Harper Business, 1992.
Competing on the Edge	Continuous, unpredictable change is now an integral part of the context in which companies must operate. The authors show that organizations hoping to succeed in this turbulent environment must strike a balance between chaos and bureaucracy by combining the ability to absorb continuous change and maintain a degree of consistency required for effectiveness. The book thus explores four arenas where this delicate balance can be found, namely, organizational choice, management of synergies, valuing of experience, and forecasting.
Shona L. Brown and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, Harvard Business School Press, 1998.
The Self Managing Organization	To answer the question of how to foster the autonomy of operational teams, this book describes two tools that have proven their worth, i.e., the search conference and participative design. The first of these methods allows all employees to participate in developing corporate strategy, thus giving everyone more autonomy during implementation. The second method helps entrust organizational design to to the operational staff who will then be in charge of managing it once it is up and running. The author describes these two tools using concrete illustrations of companies that have successfully implemented them, such as Microsoft, Motorola, etc.
Ronald Purser and Steven Cabana, The Free Press, 1998.