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Chris Argyris, professor emeritus of education and organizational behavior at Harvard University, argues that most business advice given to managers by experts is impossible to execute. By becoming better judges of the limitations and value in business advice, managers can get more value from it. This book is not easy reading, but is well worth the effort.

Based on the idea that strategy is often situational, University of Texas's McAfee delivers an impressively encyclopedic selection of strategic concepts. The tools cover a wide range of purposes (industry analysis, labor bargaining, pricing, compensation and incentives, product life cycles, etc.), include technical instructions for use, and are illustrated with short case studies.

Drawing on the work of leading consultants, business school professors, social scientists, and organizational theorists, Lowy and Hood, consultants in information systems, pervasive computing technologies, and multimedia, demonstrate how to apply the 2x2 matrix, a ubiquitous representational tool, to a range of business challenges. They present 55 2x2 frameworks, created from interviews with outstanding practitioners and real case material.
Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Editor's Note: read a free chapter at the book's official site
http://www.2x2matrix.com/pages/home/

The second edition of Peter Block's Flawless Consulting gracefully updates what many consider the best resource of its kind. New chapters on implementation, "whole-system" strategies, and ethics are included, but in general it simply fine-tunes Block's proven advice to match the transformations that business and society have undergone since initial publication two decades ago. "The days of long studies and expert-driven answers are passing," the author proclaims in his new preface. "The task of the consultant is increasingly to build the capacity of clients to make their own assessments and answer their own questions." He then subtly modifies his established recommendations accordingly for every step, from the initial client meeting and problem diagnosis through data collection and the execution of solutions. In the section on "Conducting a Group Feedback Meeting," for example, he advises: "Treat the group as a collection of individuals.... Ask each person what he or she wants from the meeting. This will surface differences and force the group to take responsibility for some of the difficulties that may arise." --Howard Rothman

Following on the heels of the best-selling Flawless Consulting comes The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion. Whether you work as a consultant or you work with consultants, this relentlessly practical guide will be your best friend as you discover how consulting influences your business- and real life-decisions and those of others.

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion is packed with:
* Sample scenarios
* Case studies
* Client-consultant dialogues
* Hands-on tools
* Action plans
* Implementation checklists

In what amounts to a vigorous defense of management consultants, Kiechel explains how business became an intellectual endeavor over the last half century, maturing from commonsense practice to theory-driven discipline, and how ideas now underpin the way corporations function today. “What companies didn’t have before the strategy revolution,” he writes, “was a way of systematically putting together all the elements that determined their corporate fate.”

In the same way that Peter Drucker “invented” management in the 1940s, consultants invented corporate strategy as “the first comprehensive paradigm that pulled together all the elements most vital for a company to take into account if it is to compete, win, and survive.” Kiechel offers a history of the ideas that coalesced into “strategy” and of the people and organizations that struggled to put them into practice; helpfully, he puts particular scholars and theorists in context—for instance, Henry Mintzberg’s organizational learning versus Michael Porter’s positioning.

Kiechel, a veteran of Fortune and Harvard Business Publishing, writes clearly and brightly, but The Lords of Strategy isn’t all that easy a read, perhaps due to the author’s broad scope and extensive information-gathering—for each concept and case study, he brings together its history, practitioners, applications, and importance, in prose driven by personalities, dialogue, and anecdotes. The book’s structure feels looser than perhaps intended, and readers hoping to skim may find themselves occasionally at sea while negotiating market segmentation, the experience curve, the growth-share matrix, reengineering, core competencies, and the five-forces framework. But Kiechel has done a real service—and not only for McKinsey and BCG—in bringing his subject to life. The book serves as a primer as well as a history, and as such almost any executive or B-school student would do well to pick it up. —Matthew Budman [The Conference Board Review]