STRATEGY MATTERS

Gary P. Pisano, Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation (PublicAffairs, 2019)

Rita McGrath, Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019)

A TOP SHELF PICK

Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch, Connected Strategy: Building Continuous Customer Relationships for Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019)

Leaders of large companies are typically not short on confidence — until it comes to their own strategy. In research conducted by Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting group, we find that 65 percent of executives across industries don’t think their company has a winning strategy. And who could blame them? The media and stock market tell us that the biggest incumbents are simply too large to innovate effectively in the face of disruption, that they can’t recognize the oncoming wave until it swamps them. And even if they are able to grasp the existential challenge they face, it is really hard to come up with a holistic functional strategy on the fly.

But this year’s crop of best business books on strategy — vivid, practical, and dynamic — offers solace and inspiration to the denizens of the C-suite. In Gary P. Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School, makes a compelling case that large companies can, in fact, thrive in a world of change. In , Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School, describes how leaders can set up early warning systems to detect disruption and get ahead of it. And , by Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch, professors at the Wharton School, offers