Best strategy and management practices

Business books provide a wealth of guidelines for business success, but are often too complicated. Raynor and Ahmed boil it down to three essential rules

- Peter Hughes

Strategy determines the future of any business. Don’t get confused. Strategy is a simple concept.

It’s what you choose to do and how you choose to do it, and, most importantly, what you choose not to do.

Any chosen business strategy, whether the outcome of formal planning or the intuition of its leaders, sets the entire team of managers and employees on a path that dictates how they will spend their time. So take great care.

Strategy selection either leads to the business prospering, or, alternatively, drains the time and energy of everyone involved, achieving little.

While the concept may be simple, strategy selection is not. There have been several excellent publications dealing with this process.

While many business books provide a framework for selecting strategies and practices, the options are so numerous it remains a daunting and risky task.

There was a need for something simpler, and Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed provided it in their book The Three Rules: How Exceptional Companies Think.

They researched thousands of companies worldwide, and boiled the selection of key characteristics down to just three simple rules:

● Rule 1: Better before cheaper:

Always choose actions that improve quality rather than reduce price or costs.