Strategic Learning: How to Be Smarter Than Your Competition and Turn Key Insights into Competitive Advantage

By Willie Pietersen

How to use Strategic Learning to rapidly respond to change and gain a sustainable advantage over your competitors

What's even harder than creating a breakthrough strategy? Making it stick. As companies are fighting to survive in a tough economy, this new book by Willie Pietersen demonstrates the power of the Strategic Learning process, a four-step dynamic cycle guaranteed to create and sustain winning performance. Adopted by a wide range of corporations and not-for-profit organizations, the Strategic Learning process builds on eight years of practicing, adapting and honing the original concepts Pietersen first introduced in Reinventing Strategy to explain how organizations can generate superior insights about their customers and competitors, craft a Winning Proposition, focus on a vital few key priorities, create buy-in throughout the organization and achieve success – again and again.

• Teaches organizations to make smarter decisions that help them win customers and earn superior profits
• Explains how to instill a culture of openness, learning, and courage that can face and respond to the constantly changing business environment
• Is a tool that can benefit leaders at all levels, in organizations both large and small, global and domestic, for-profit and not-for-profit
• Author Willie Pietersen, a former president of Tropicana and Seagram USA, is a professor of management at Columbia Business School, and the author of Reinventing Strategy, from Wiley

Strategic Learning shows you how your business or nonprofit organization can develop better, more effective strategies for long-term competitive advantage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Feb 18, 2010
• ISBN: 9780470609804

Willie Pietersen

Willie Pietersen was born in East London, South Africa and attended Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, where he earned a BA in law and economics and an LLB in law and was chairman of the Students Representative Council. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University in England where he received an MA in jurisprudence. After practicing law, he embarked on an international business career. By 1974, at age 36, Pietersen had become one of the youngest Managing Directors in the history of Unilever. Over a period of twenty years he served as the CEO of multibillion-dollar businesses such as Lever Foods, Seagram USA, Tropicana and Sterling Winthrop's Consumer Health Group. Pietersen has served as a director on several boards including the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a think tank based in Silicon Valley.In 1998, Willie was named Professor of the Practice of Management at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He specializes in strategy and the leadership of change, and his methods and ideas, especially Strategic Learning, are widely applied within Columbia's executive education programs, and also in numerous corporations.He is the author of two previous books: Reinventing Strategy, published in 2002, introduced the underlying principles and application tools for Strategic Learning. Strategic Learning, March 2010, builds on these ideas and offers more extensive practical guidelines.

Reviews for Strategic Learning

[razinha-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I see this as a book on strategic leadership - the "learning" part of the title perhaps implies that the reader must learn how to be strategic. As it is a core text for a management program I am a part of, I will re-read it at least once more this year and likely get more out of it (I did make quite a few margin notes and flag points I thought were key, but there is always more to learn.) For now, the jury is out on whether to recommend or not.