The Mind of the Strategist: The Art of Japanese Business

The way you think in the lab and the office really can directly impact innovation. Even though this book was written about business, I have learned how to reapply its lessons to innovation - specifically Kenichi helps to define and measure success and define the "deliverables" or "outputs" that innovation has to produce in order to become a reality. Kenichi has a clear description of the biggest factors (the 3 C's) impacting your success in business - the company, the competition,and the customer/consumer. If you look at innovation in this context, Kenichi is actually also helping us innovators define "what success looks like": the product/technology the company makes, how technically different or better it is than competitive benchmarks or alternatives in the marketplace, and whether conusmers like it and want it. On the projects I have worked on, advised others on, or simply observed the ones that make consistently hit at least all 3 of these deliverables and often additional deliverables to. Those that fall short of all 3 consistently fail. Hope this helps scientists, managers, entrepreneurs, and anyone with a creative or problem solving mind. Dr. Ali Alwattari Innovation Author and Practitioner

I have over 30 years of experience with strategic thinking as a consultant and planner. I constantly find that people have totally different concepts of what strategy is all about. Each tends to be either too focused in one area, or incomplete in some aspects. As a result, people logically arrive at some pretty bad strategic conclusions. Typically, this involves a strategy that the organization cannot execute well or which the competitors will quickly negate. What I like about this simple book is that it nicely summarizes the case for a balanced perspective of customer, competitor and your own company. Although most American companies will believe that they do this, the American approach is much more superficial and incomplete than the Japanese one. For example, if a Japanese company wants to add a new product, the evaluation looks heavily at how well the customer will be able to use the product and how effectively the company will be able to provide it in the context of probable competitive offerings. An American analysis will feature financial analysis of a forecast that is often based on little more than spreadsheet doodling. The weakness of the Japanese model is that they typically look too little at the business environment (notice how often they buy American businesses and properties at the top of the market for inflated prices), and are relatively insensitive to financial implications. In fast moving technology markets, the Japanese consensus-building process also tends to slow down time to market. Clearly, there is no perfect model for strategic thinking that fits all situations. A major weakness of many efforts is to assume that the future can be precisely forecast. That is patently wrong. Typically, the relative importance of the elements considered needs to be adjusted to fit the circumstnace. That seems to be an art rather than a science at this point. Although this book has its limitations (as suggested above), it is a valuable perspective on strategy thinking that will be helpful to most American business people if they think about the concepts in a more thorough way. To balance the perspective here, I suggest you also read Profit Patterns to get a sense of how circumstances play a role in profitability. Good thinking! May this book help you overcome any stalled thinking you have about not doing your home work in thinking about outperforming competitors to provide benefits that matter a lot to customers.

The mind of a strategist: Business Planning for Competitive advantageA ground-breaking approach to strategic planning in the world of business, Ohmae goes beyond the standard formula for success into the mind of the creative corporate thinker.It is Dr. Ohmae's contention - supported by facts and figures from companies such as Sony, Nissan, Honda and Yamaha - that in today's market strategic thiking is the key to success. He shows the creative planner in action - dissecting the market, weighing the competition's strength's and weaknesses, questioning the prevailing assumptions of an industry, discovering the actual needs and wants of the customer, and finally, implementing the strategies that mean success in the marketplace.

This is the best book I have ever read about Strategic Thinking. What is different and not existing in other popular books as 'Thinking Strategically, Co-opetition, Leading the Revolution, Competitive Strategy...' etc is HOW to think instead of WHAT to think. The book's main chapter's include the following competencies:Part I-The Art of Strategic Thinking: --> What is strategy? <br> --> What can be the possible ways to overcome competitor?<br> --> How strategic mind should work? <br> (Instead of analysis to idea, idea to analysis) <p>Part II-Building Successful Strategies:<br> --> Define yourself - the corporation<br> --> Define the others - the competition<br> --> Define the rewarders - the consumers<br> --> And finally define the above 3C in one map <p>Part III-Modern Strategic Realities:<br> --> What is the affect of economic environment to 3C's?<br> --> How to cope with strategic changes?<br> --> A case analysis: A nations strategic gain: Japan<br> --> How to project the future 3C's?<br> --> And finally is there a strategic success formula?<p>The main thing I captured from the book is: strategic thinking is a way of life, not a special time event. Working in a US multinational for years, I am more and more aware of the facts and success path defined by Mr. Ohmae - McKinsey guru. Especially, determining the strategic degrees of freedom of any issue (can be a business issue, or a weekend tennis journey, or even life -I applied-) and determining the actions to take to get the determined result is the best thing I learned.<p>This is a short book (wrt to other strategic management books) but it teaches how to think instead of popular strategy methods.<br>It is a must read & can be taken as foreword of all business books.

Kenichi Ohmae was Chairman of the Japan office of McKinsey & Company, the world-famous strategy consulting firm. He has been described as "Mr. Strategy" and has written several books and articles on strategy-related topics.Kenichi Ohmae believes that successful business strategies do not result from rigorous analysis but from a particular state of mind. "In what I call the mind of the strategist, insight and consequent drive for achievement, often amounting to a sense of mission, fuel a thought process which is basically creative and intuitive rather than rational." He uses theoretical knowledge from the various academic scholars and puts them in its place - "a place distinctly secondary to creative intuition in the tool kit of the successful strategist." The book split up in three parts, each consisting of 5 to 7 chapters.In Part I - The Art of Strategic Thinking, the author concentrates on the basics of the mental process. In Chapter 1 - Analysis: The Starting Point, Ohmae introduces the strategic thinking process. He introduces various useful diagrams and flow processes for a more reliable recipe for success: "the combination of analytical method and mental elasticity that I call strategic thinking." In the chapters 2 to 6, the author explores the different directions the strategic thinker can pursue in quest of innovative strategies. In the final chapter of Part I, Ohmae explains how the right mindset for strategic thinking and how to develop the required strategy.In Part II - Building Successful Strategies, Ohmae shifts his focus from process to content. "In the construction of any business strategy, three main players must be taken into account: the corporation itself, the customer, and the competition." He refers to them as the three C's or the strategic triangle. Within the next three chapters, Ohmae discusses the strategies based on those three C's: (1) "Customer-based strategies are the basis of all strategy. ... There is no doubt that a corporation's foremost concern ought to be the interest of its customers rather than that of its stockholders and other parties. In the long run, the corporation that is genuinely interested in its customers is the one that will be interesting to investors." (2) "Corporate-based strategies are functional. Their aim to maximize the corporation's strenghts relative to the competition in the functional areas that are critical to success in the industry." (3) "Competitor-based strategies can be constructed by looking at possible sources of differentiation in functions ranging from purchasing, design, and engineering to sales and servicing. The main point to remember is that any difference between you and your competitors must be related to one or more of the three elements that jointly determine profit: price, volume, and cost." In the final chapter of Part II, Ohmae discusses corporate strategy. He claims that corporate strategy needs to address two issues: First, the integration between the individual b