Real Rubber Meets the Road Advice

Move: How Decisive Leaders Execute Strategy Despite Obstacles, Setbacks and Stalls – Patty Azzarello (Wiley)

What are some of the chronic challenges that your business faces when it comes to executing on strategy? You know, those nagging problems that just ever seem to change or go away, but continue to roadblock change, expansion and acceleration of growing your business.

There are plenty of high powered, highly recognizable business consultants that you can hire, familiar names like KPMG, McKinsey, Bain Consulting and dozens more you can hire to help guide you through the process. Pay them a substantial fee and in return you will get a very well educated MBA; think Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton, who will assess your business issues and then try to pigeonhole them into their patented way of thinking, based on their consultants perspective. This won’t be based on the thought process of someone who has actually run a business, but on a protocol or set of protocols based on their companies approach to things.

It’s like those “smarter than you” folks who make careers in academia who try to tell business owners what they are doing wrong. That’s why I think Patty Azzarello’s new book, Move: How Decisive Leaders Execute Strategy Despite Obstacles, Setbacks and Stalls, is so different. This is REAL, rubber meets the road, actionable business intelligence.

Azzarello compiles a business “greatest hits” in the pages of Move, and displays a real bias towards action. She offers up tried and true advice for breaking through those age old barriers to create actual forward motion, hence the title. Change can be uncomfortable for those folks who like things the way they are or as they have always been. Azzarello addresses those sticky issues of engagement and details how no successful project moves forward without full on buy in from the team. She gives you the tools to get people on board.

I love books that give you the tools that you can put into play today and Move certainly accomplishes that without coming off as a one size fits all approach to business.