Playing the Strategy Game: Strategy Is a Skill Not a Formula, Make It One of Yours

(Pearson Education) Text offering businesspeople ways to develop strategy as a skill within themselves and their organizations. Offers encouragement to empower the reader to identify and trust intuition in the strategy game, showing how the game is played by individuals who make themselves skilled players.

Patrick J. Thurbin is Principal Business Consultant and Strategy Lecturer at the Business School, Kingston University in the UK. He combines a wide range of consulting assignments in national and multinational organizations with research and lecturing at the University. His activities provide an exposure to leading business thinking and practices in many cultures, industries and organizations. He is a Director of the well-established Open Learning MBA program at the University, leading the team that teaches business strategy; he has lectured as a Visiting Professor in Management at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, USA; and in business strategy at the prestigious Academy of National Economy in Moscow, Russia.

Patrick's research on ways in which business growth can be supported by leveraging organizational knowledge is extensive. His book Leveraging Knowledge (FT Prentice Hall) provides an international benchmark in this area. A determination to promote a critical approach in the strategic thinking used by managers resulted in the publication of the ground breaking text The Influential Strategist (FT Pitman, 1998). This championed the use of key organizational paradoxes to diagnose and harness the tensions within organizations that create winning strategies. His consulting activities range over industries as diverse as aerospace, retail and distribution, software development and civil engineering, where innovative approaches to business growth is the main focus.

Before becoming an academic and author, Patrick spent some 20 years working in the UK, Europe and the USA, gaining practical management and business experience in design, production, research and information systems development.