The Human Science of Strategy: what works and what doesn’t

Research shows that 80 percent of all strategic initiatives by professional service firms fail to meet their objectives. This book is about how to make them a success. Strategy is, in the end, about people, and will succeed or fail depending on how well partners, employees, clients, and others apply it.

Scientifically, there are several basic elements in getting human beings to adopt any new strategic idea, which can be encapsulated in four questions:

• Will it give me more certainty in areas of my life that I most care about?
• Will it give me more autonomy, more freedom, more choice in the areas of my life that I most care about?
• Will it increase the amount of trust that people have in me?
• Will it increase my value, my status, in the eyes of those that I care about?

Almost all of the strategic failures that the authors – Dr Bob Murray and Dr Alicia Fortinberry – have witnessed or researched have come about because the key stakeholders have answered one or more of these questions in the negative.

The Human Science of Strategy: what works and what doesn’t examines the issues behind each of these questions and shows how they form the drivers of almost all human decision-making and behaviour.