In the book The Craft of Strategy Formation, OC&C partners Bas Keibek and Pieter Witteveen explain for the first time how the leading strategy consultants work.  Their approach is not secret - it is described in a blow-by-blow account which gives practical examples, details a case study throughout, warns against pitfalls and explodes common myths.

The Craft of Strategy Formation is not a book filled with strategic frameworks - no '7S' models, no SWOT analyses, no new theories about the core competencies of the organisation.  This is a handbook for managers and MBA students and graduates who need to solve a problem in a short time and arrive quickly at a usable end product.

Read in this book: 

• Why creating a strategy is more than just 'a bit of logical thinking', and how it is that even 10 sharp minds cannot arrive at useful insights 'just like that'
• Why you do not always have to have a vision, and how you can have ideas without being creative
• What the difference is between a helpful and an unhelpful research question, and between a completely wrong and more or less correct result
• What the strategic difference is between a hat and walking stick
• How you can learn about your competitor without using industrial espionage
• What the most frequent mistakes are in a financial model and when a financial model is meaningless
• How to make sure that your results do not end up just being shoved into a drawer

The Craft of Strategy Formation is on sale now at wiley.com.