Book Review: Strategy and The Fat Smoker, David Maister

Book Review: Strategy and The Fat Smoker, Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy, David Maister

A great book with insights on strategy I have not seen elsewhere – highly recommended.

If you’re a fat smoker, especially of you have family of heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other related health issues, your strategy is simple: lose weight and stop smoking.

As Maister artfully explains, knowing what we should do (strategy) is easy; doing it can sometimes be impossible. It may take a near cataclysmic event to make us do what we need to do. Or it may depend on how much we want it. For some organizations, as David explains in chapter 4, strategy is simply NOT possible!

It’s interesting how direct competitors often have nearly identical strategies. Whoever does the most of what they know they should be doing does the best.

David Maister is well known for his work with professional service firms, but his insights are applicable across business types. I haven't read his previous (and best selling) books, but I will be!

Yes, David Maiser was a fat smoker. Me? I’m just fat.

Dog Starts Car: Too Much Technology?

In my Future of Technology speech, one of the things I talk about is "Technology for Technology's Sake" -- technology where it doesn't belong, making things more complex and failure prone than necessary.

An example I used at my keynote at the ICE conference earlier this week was the keys for my wife's van -- they have a microprocessor in them. Supposedly this is an anti-theft device.

More likely, some propeller head (like myself) figured out they could do it, someone in marketing thought customers would like it, and they did it!.

So what if your dog eats your key, or maybe the chip when you're changing the battery? Well, you may need your dog to start your car? Ridiculous, but true?
Full story here.