Thomas Wunder - Essentials of Strategic Management: Effective Formulation and Execution of Strategy in the Era of Sustainability

Regardless of their position, career aspiration, role or department, most practitioners must deal with aspects of strategic management either in making or in supporting strategic decisions. This book provides the essentials to master this task successfully. It is written for students who are on their way to becoming practitioners as well as for practitioners who want to lookagain or for the first timeat the most essential and practical aspects of strategic management.

A general trend for textbooks on strategic management is that authors try to address all theories and research areas and skip nothing which is covered by other textbooks on this subject. Furthermore, the sustainability context is rarely fully integrated but typically covered in special literature or a separate chapter on this topic. Finally, there is a general tendency in mainstream strategic management textbooks to focus more on strategic analysis and on formulating strategies but less on executing them. This book takes a different approach in three ways:

• First, the guiding principle in deciding what to include and what to leave out is to answer two key questions. Is it actionable and does it have a significant impact? Instead of providing an overview over all theories and aspects of the academic field, the book provides a selection of scientifically grounded approaches, methods and ideas that promise to be practical and to make a difference in business and society.
• Second, the topic of ecological and social sustainability is covered in depth and integrated in various chapters throughout this book. This reflects the increased relevance of sustainable strategizing for achieving economic prosperity, ecological integrity, and social equity. In mainstream strategic management, there has been relatively little concern for a companys impact on sustainability matters of the socio-ecological environment.
• Third, knowing that a great portion of strategies fail due to bad execution, great emphasis is put on this area. In practical strategy work and literature, strategy execution and transformation typically get relatively little attentionsometimes even viewed as graveyard of strategyalthough it is one of the biggest strategic management challenges of today and key to make corporate transformation happen.

This book is intended to provide students and practitioners with a selection of practically applicable methods at a level of detail that is necessary to make a positive impact in their future or current job situations. With this focus, the book should be particularly relevant for students of applied sciences . For practitioners the book provides actionable approaches to deal with their strategic situations in a systematic and comprehensive, yet pragmatic way. I focus on the essentials of strategic management drawing from state-of-the-art literature and own experience aided by the fortune of spending more than 20 years supporting leaders of mainly large and medium size multinational companies to refine and execute strategies. Having spent more than half of my professional career in the United States of America, I had the chance to not only consult on the topic but to practice [9] it myself at the helm of a small U. S. subsidiary where I had to develop and execute my own business strategy. For six years I was a direct report to the CEO of an international management consulting firm, from whom I learned many essentials about strategy and leadership.