This is a book review of The New How:  Creating Business Solutions through Collaborative Strategy by Nilofer Merchant.

How I got the book:

I received a review copy from O’Reilly Media.

Background:

Nilofer Merchant is a CEO, strategist and author with years of experience working with companies of various sizes.  She has written The New How from her learnings working with companies to design and execute business strategies.

In a nutshell, The New How is concerned with the development of business strategy.  Merchant’s argument is that business strategy is often developed with a top-down approach.  General statements of intent and high level goals are formulated at the most senior levels of company management and then are handed down the bottom layer to execute.  In between these layers is what she calls an Air Sandwich, a metaphor to emphasize the lack of connection and input that the rank and file of a company normally to strategy development.  Merchant’s solution is a more collaborative process where employees from virtually all levels of a company work together to craft business strategies at all necessary levels of detail.

The strengths:

There is no doubt that this book is well written and crafted with great care.  It is full of great description, explanation, diagrams, charts, and tables.  It’s clearly written and offers many great suggestions for collaborative strategy development.

The areas for improvement:

There are two areas that could have been improved a bit to make it a bit more readable and interesting.

1.  This book is a bit of a dry read.  Strategy is not the most gripping stuff to read about at the best of the times.  This book is not a horrible, boring read:  it just struggles with subject matter that isn’t that exciting to most people.

2.  The book is rather theoretical and lacking in real life examples.  True, there are references to real companies, but they are cloaked in anonymity.  There isn’t much in the way of case studies that can be used to back up the material in the book.

I’m quibbling a bit with this criticism because this book clearly isn’t intended for everyone, but I think these are valid points to consider.

Other points of interest:

There are great original drawings by Hugh MacLeod of GapingVoid.com throughout the book.

Verdict (out of 10): 8 (recommended; great information about how to collaboratively develop strategy)

My methodology for book reviews and affiliate links: I’ll provide an Amazon.com affiliate link (or other related affiliate link) for content if I think it’s worth buying and reading. If I don’t, I won’t provide an affiliate link. The affiliate link helps fund my content creation activities.

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