Strategic DNA: Bringing Business Strategy to Life.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Brief article - Book review

Strategic DNA: Bringing Business Strategy to Life. By Lawrence Hobbs. Agate Publishing, 304 pages. $30.

Stuffed with charts and tables, Strategic DNA draws from a program developed by Lawrence Hobbs, who heads strategy and management consultancy Chinook Solutions. Its aim isn't to raze and standardize, but to complement an organization's existing concepts and practices.

The book is structured sequentially, starting from formulating a vision and progressing through steps such as mapping strategies, selecting portfolios, organizing the structure, undertaking detailed project planning, mobilizing the team, measuring results and then analyzing them.

In each chapter, Hobbs asks and answers three key questions: why do it, what to do and how to do it.

The author offers some great nuggets of advice. "The ability to be distracted by non-strategic ideas is the best way to judge whether an organization is sufficiently...