Managing from Clarity: Identifying, Aligning and Leveraging Strategic Resources

Rating:
Summary: Alphabet Soup
Review: If you are into systems thinking, you probably already know most of the material in this book. It has two good case studies of strategy planning using system tools. The concepts are great, but this is a poorly written book. You would think it was written in German and then poorly translated into English. It consistently uses unfamiliar acronyms, making it read like alphabet soup.

Rating:
Summary: Insightful, practical and readable - I want more clarity!!
Review: Managing from Clarity is well thought out and clear application of how to apply systems thinking to real organizational issues. I want to know more about how to introduce this way of thinking into my company...I am sure this is the way for our team to improve its communication as well as its performance. Thank you for putting this out there!

Rating:
Summary: We've tried this and it helped
Review: People working with large complex systems can often become lost in the large number of variables in their working environment. It is easy to be swayed by the ones that happen to be most appealing personally or most visible, rather than by the ones that present the highest leverage point based upon a good analysis connecting goals, resources, structures, actions and people. For someone like me working to develop global systems that aspire for fundamental societal change, this is a continual danger. The methodologies presented in Managing from Clarity are powerful tools to avoid this danger and ensure that actions are tied to points of high strategic leverage.
- Steve Waddell - PhD, MBA
Director - The Collaboration Works

Rating:
Summary: A great start at integrating systems thinking and strategy
Review: This book brings together, in an integrative, simple framework, a set of systems thinking and decision making tools that help managers understand people issues and resource issues from a more systemic, organization-wide perspective. Many strategists argue that this type of wider perspective should lead to better strategic decisions within the organization.

This practical book adds to the eloquent works by leading authors on system dynamics, systems thinking, decision making, and strategy by providing a systematic, macro-to-micro methodology for integrating the best of these works.

Rating:
Summary: We've tried this and it helped
Review: While we have worked in our company for years with systems thinking and strategy tools, it wasn't ever clear to us how these different ideas fit together. Each had its own purpose.

The GRASP framework showed us one compelling way of connecting all these ideas (resource dynamics to value chains to core competences to stakeholders/five forces to values to mission and back again). And it's simple too. Thanks for showing that it is possible to make sense out of the mumbo jumbo soup of strategy in real organizations.