Includes index.

Exceptional performance -- Simpler, better -- A sea of opportunities -- Think value, not profit -- Value for customers: Claps and cheers-value for customers -- Hiding in plain sight-near-customers -- Looking for helpers-winning with complements -- Friend or foe? -- Tipping points -- Strategies for underdogs -- Value for talent and suppliers: Feeling heard-value for employees -- Gigs and passions -- Supply chains are people, too -- Productivity: When big is beautiful -- Learning -- No reason to sneer -- Implementation: Asking how -- Being bad in the service of good -- Guiding investment -- Value: Connecting the dots -- Value for society.

"Cut through complexity and get to better, more effective strategy. Extreme market volatility, pandemics, industry change, supply-chain disruption. The list of potential threats and strategic challenges seems to be growing exponentially. At the same time, the laborious processes used by many firms to develop a workable strategy often feel overly bureaucratic and behind the curve. There is no question that strategic decision-making has become more challenging and complex. In fact, many companies seem to have given up on strategy altogether. In Better, Simpler Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee provides executives with a simple tool to cut through technological complexity and market uncertainties. The Value Stick, based on proven economic mechanics, is an extraordinarily powerful tool that helps executives decide where to focus their attention and how to deepen their firm's competitive advantage. How does the Value Stick work? It provides a way of measuring two fundamental forces that lead to value creation and capture-the customer's willingness to pay and the employee's willingness to sell their services to the firm. For example, increasing product quality increases a customer's willingness to pay. And firms can redesign work processes or conditions or integrate other benefits (besides income) to lower employees' willingness to sell their services to firms and still retain them. With many examples across industries (based on Harvard Business School case studies), Oberholzer-Gee shows these value dynamics in action and explains how looking at and adjusting these measures using one tool, the Value Stick, enables firms to gauge and improve their strategies and operations. Based on the author's successful strategy course, Better, Simpler Strategy will become every business strategist's must-have guide for making better strategic decisions and gaining competitive advantage"--