What an utter disappointment. Clem Sunter may (or may not) know something about strategy and scenario planning, but this book does nothing to excite me. The analogy of a fox is pushed and stretched and twisted to incorporate it into every few pages with no benefit. The structure and flow of the book make it difficult to read, there is a combination of too many detailed tactical points (particularly for a book on strategy) and superficial examples that demonstrate nothing.

We are expected to take almost everything as given and accepted, with almost no time spent showing, explaining or proving why these ideas work. Add to that some standard business analysis models reworded and renamed, but giving no better (or worse) insight than the original models makes me wonder what the point of reading the book is.

Mr Sunter would have done well to have a editor with a little more backbone who could counter this weak effort and ask him to try again.

I agree wholeheartedly with the basic premise; maybe that is the problem. As I read, I moved from nodding vigorously in agreement during the introduction to nodding off to sleep by the second chapter.

The general themes of critical thinking, caution and recognising complexity rather than being taken in by simplistic, post hoc, naive, flawed logic reasons for high performance are important. Authors from Tom Peters to Jim Collins have made a fortune, and entertained thousands, with their books on how to improve organisational performance. However, from the admission that much of the data for “In Search of Excellence” was fabricated to small samples and failed long-term predictive ability out of “Good to Great” the answers are imperfect.

The world of behavioural economics has discovered much about exactly how badly we typically think, especially when we don’t realise we should be in “logical analytical mode”. So much so that the book is now old news.

I don’t know whether the author is so impressed with his own ideas that he imagines the need to spell them out in excruciating detail with multiples too much evidence to allow mere mortal readers to understand, or whether the typical reader is so unfamiliar with the requirements of critical thinking that a ten page pamphlet needed to be expanded to several hundred pages. Maybe the publishers paid per word?

If you need convincing that much of what we are taught about success and the few or single simple drivers of it are, the book might be worthwhile as a tome of evidence. If you require a simple memory aid, there is none better than the 1917 quote of Mencken, “There is always an easy solution to every human problem–neat,
plausible, and wrong.”