Review: Making Big Decisions Better: How to Set and Simplify Business Strategy

Making Big Decisions Better: How to Set and Simplify Business Strategy by Tim Lewko
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Author Tim Lewko starts his book on strategy with a story about how he starts his consulting gigs on strategy, by asking people to define what strategy is. The answers he gets are varied, and this discrepancy points up one problem companies have with strategy – they don’t agree what strategy is. Lewko starts his suggestions from that point, working with companies to come up with a common understanding of strategy, then diving in to creating strategies based on the business’ needs. Lewko uses this book to describe the process used in strategic consulting, and makes the case that his company does things differently. At its core, this is one of those books that describes the tools and processes used by a consultancy. Many of these kinds of books are thinly veiled advertisements for the author’s consultancy. In this case, Lewko does include more specifics that would allow the reader to actually use the tools and processes for their own strategy development, so this is better than many.

I was pleasantly surprised to find the consultancy here was founded by Chuck Kepner. I had many years using tools designed by Kepner for decision making, the famous Kepner-Tregoe Matrix. This book continues that legacy of tools and processes for decision making expanded to strategy making. I was also pleased with the discussion of blindly using “best practices”, often suggested by consultants, when a company hasn’t actually done the work to figure out if those “best practices” have any relevance to the company’s situation. Reasonable advice.

There was one aspect of the book that I didn’t like, but I understand why the book was written this way. A large majority of the examples of strategy development do not mention the client’s name. Without knowing the name, you are feel like you are just being given a hypothetical example in that you can’t place the context of the business being described. This method of writing makes it harder to connect to the examples, but I suspect this reflects the anonymity required by these consulting customers. I would rather read about companies that I know and can relate to.

Overall, this book seems to be useful, especially for building strategies for small and midsized companies wanting to complete at least some of this work themselves.

View all my reviews