Wheel of Fortune: Getting to the Heart of Business Strategy

Wheel of Fortune is emphatically not the usual strategy book. It challenges leaders' deepest preconceptions about strategy, arguing that it is over-relied-upon, largely imitative, and a "minefield" of hidden failure risk. Like the medieval Rota Fortunae that spins the mighty from fortune to ruin, business strategy as commonly practiced leaves success far more to chance than leaders know or admit. The book's remedy: less paper planning, more execution, and a decisive shift from copying others toward imagination, creativity, and rapid adaptation.

This book helps readers by:

• Questioning What Strategy Really Is. Examines the values and preconceptions behind business strategy, revealing how it narrows choices and reflects constraint rather than the freedom leaders assume it provides.
• Exposing Strategy's Social Roots. Offers a social-science analysis showing how strategy functions as a status-driven exercise in "exploit" – nonproductive, imitative work disconnected from the value creation employees actually do.
• Dissecting a Real Failure. Applies a new structured failure-analysis method to the Boeing 737 MAX, pinpointing the institutional and structural weaknesses in executive thinking and decision-making that turned Boeing’s business strategy into catastrophe –and offering tests to evaluate strategies before they fail.
• Choosing Creation Over Imitation. Confronts the reflexive habit of copying what other leaders do, showing why "copy or create" is the pivotal strategic choice and why imitation surely erodes advantage.
• Unlocking Imagination and Creativity. Makes the case for genuine imagination and creativity as the true sources of business success, moving leaders beyond fad-following toward original combinations of productive methods.

Provocative and cross-disciplinary – drawing on social theory, a high-profile failure case, and practical worksheets – this book gives leaders both the rationale and the "permission" to think differently about business strategy, execution, and their own roles. For executives and strategists who sense that elaborate plans don’t work well, Wheel of Fortune reframes strategy as something to be spent less on and executed better, with human creativity at its heart.