28 Jan 2025
8 MIN READ
Top 15 Business Strategy Books
1. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
Originally published in 2004, Blue Ocean Strategy is a book for those who are seeking an eccentric business strategy. Authored by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, the book identifies new markets as the “blue ocean” and old markets as the “red ocean”. Argued blue ocean is as uncontested market where demand can be created, a strategy where growth opportunities and profit are as the ocean.
2. Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
Published in 2011, Richard P. Rumelt’s Good Strategy Bad Strategy serves as a guidebook to steering clear of bad strategy. In the book, the author directs to a “kernel of good strategy” breaking it down into three components of diagnosis of a problem, a guided policy, and a set of coherent actions. Richard’s spell to escape bad strategy is an action-oriented strategy.
3. Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works
Authored by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin, and published in 2013 the book has been awarded the bestseller by Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Playing to Win reads as a strategic approach to “where to play” and “how to win”. It outlines a framework for strategic thinking and practices to really win in the marketplace.
4. The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School is a classic best seller on business strategy. The book reviews why most companies, even the big ones fail when integrating new waves of innovation into their operations. Reading The Innovator’s Dilemma will help us understand the difference between sustaining and disruptive innovations.
5. The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business & Life
A guiding book on business strategy based on prediction and strategic thinking by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff. The Art of Strategy evaluates the game theory of prediction and how it can be applied in different business settings. The authors bring science to strategic thinking, problem-solving, and predicting the next of the competitors using game theory.
6. Strategic Supremacy: How Industry Leaders Create Growth, Wealth, and Power Through Spheres of Influence
The Strategic Supremacy by Richard D'Aveni highlights, also the author of the hyper-competition underlines the “sphere of influence” as a strategy to outrun the competition. In Strategic Supremacy, the author handed out a guide on how to defend a business in a hyper-competitive market using a sphere of influence, taking the Disney, and Microsoft model as a variable.
7. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
Authored by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern and published by the Princeton University Press is a revolutionary work in game theory. A scientific book redefining game theory by a mathematician and economist, that helps to observe real-life phenomena and businesses. The authors examine the give-and-take behavior of a business and align it with many aspects of a game and its strategies.
8. The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World
From the work of a business journalist, and former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, The Lords of Strategy by Walter Kiechel III shed light on how “corporate strategy” rose to prominence in the 60s. The book is a tale of how four men introduced corporate strategy and laid the foundation of the multibillion-dollar consulting industry.
9. 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
A book focusing on a comprehensive strategy to create power for businesses, 7 Powers is a book on how to achieve it, by Stanford University teacher Hamilton Wright Helmer. A guide on how to achieve power and sustain business in an evolving and competitive market. The author systematically directs what businesses can do to create power and the risk of not achieving it.
10. This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)
Hands-on to a modern classic reading for those who are seeking to create a positive and lasting change. This Is Strategy by Seth Godin was recognized as the best Non-Fiction Book of 2024 from The Next Big Idea Book Club and National Bestseller. In the book he draws a series of insights on strategy, in the helm is how to approach problems, make decisions, and create change.
11. The 33 Strategies of War
One of the highest-rated books on strategy available, The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene mapped out war strategies and how they can be applied practically, an edition to lessons from “The Art Of War”. A contemporary classic and a guide to conquering the mind illustrating how psychological strengths can overcome patterns of failure.
12. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't
One of the most influential books by Jim Collins, Good to Great answers how big companies transition from good to great success. The book finds a practice of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship to overcome the curse of competence, called the Hedgehog Concept. The crux of the concept lies in successful companies' competitive advantages, the sources of their revenue, and their core values.
13. Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck—Why Some Thrive Despite Them All
A New York Times bestseller, Great by Choice by Jim Collins, Morten T. Hansen is themed on how business leaders of today face challenges in an unprecedented environment. A guide to pillaring business in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times. In the book, the authors compared “10X companies” who achieved greatness in a changing environment with others and shared their findings.
14. How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration
Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg. In How Big Things Get Done shared how research-based methods can make businesses succeed on a large scale. In the book, the authors answer how mistakes in judgment and decision-making can lead projects, both big and small, to failure. Guiding to maneuver the principles of good leadership, collaboration, and strategic planning for successful projects.
15. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers
Published in 2014 by Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm is a handbook for understanding the synergy between innovative technology and marketing. A theory of Technology Adoption Life Cycle of early adopters and the early majority where the former leverages being first while later awaits its improvement. Geoffrey teaches marketers the art of mastering targeted segments rather than jumping to the mainstream.