Strategy That Works: The Books Worth Your Time

Strategy That Works by Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi makes a case that most companies fail not because they lack strategy, but because they execute the wrong one. The book argues that the gap between strategy and execution is largely self-inflicted, and that closing it requires a different kind of discipline than most leadership teams are willing to apply.

It is one of a small number of business books that holds up under scrutiny. Not because it is fashionable, but because the problems it describes are real, persistent, and visible in almost every organisation I have worked with or alongside over the past two decades.

Why This Book Gets Taken Seriously

Strategy That Works was published by Harvard Business Review Press and written by two partners at PwC Strategy&. That context matters, not because it lends automatic credibility, but because the arguments in the book are grounded in client work across major organisations rather than academic theory applied in isolation. The authors had seen what happens when strategy and execution diverge, and they wrote about it clearly.

The central argument is that most companies try to compete everywhere, which means they build no real advantage anywhere. The companies that win consistently, what the authors call “coherent companies,” make deliberate choices about where to play, build a small number of distinctive capabilities to support those choices, and then apply those capabilities systematically across everything they do.

That sounds obvious. It is not, in practice. I have sat in enough strategy sessions to know that the default move for most leadership teams is to add, not subtract. New markets, new channels, new product lines, new initiatives. The discipline to say “we are not doing that because it does not reinforce what we are actually good at” is genuinely rare.

If you are thinking through how strategy connects to go-to-market execution, the broader Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial side of these decisions in more depth.

What the Book Gets Right About Capabilities

The capabilities section of Strategy That Works is where the book earns its keep. Leinwand and Mainardi argue that most companies have dozens of capabilities, but only a handful that are genuinely distinctive, the ones that competitors cannot easily replicate and that customers actually value.

The mistake most organisations make is treating all capabilities as equal. They invest in everything moderately and in nothing sufficiently. The result is a business that is competent across the board and excellent at nothing, which is a comfortable position until a competitor who has made harder choices arrives.

I watched this play out at an agency I joined mid-turnaround. The business had tried to be everything to everyone: creative, media, digital, PR, events. Each practice was understaffed and under-resourced. None of them were genuinely strong. When we made the decision to concentrate, to get very good at a smaller number of things and build the infrastructure to support them properly, the commercial results followed. Not immediately, but they followed. The book describes that dynamic with precision.

The authors also make a point that tends to get glossed over in summary versions of the book: capabilities are not just functions or departments. They are cross-functional systems. The capability that makes a retailer excellent at customer experience is not just the front-line staff. It is the hiring process, the training, the store design, the supply chain, the returns policy, and the way those things connect. Pulling one thread changes the whole system.

The Coherence Premium and Why Most Companies Don’t Have It

One of the more useful concepts in the book is what the authors call the “coherence premium.” Coherent companies, those where strategy, capabilities, and product portfolio all reinforce each other, consistently outperform incoherent ones. The authors present data from their research to support this, and the pattern is consistent enough to be credible.

The reason most companies do not achieve coherence is not ignorance. Most senior leaders understand the concept when it is explained to them. The problem is that incoherence accumulates gradually, through individually reasonable decisions. A new product line gets added because a major client asked for it. A new market gets entered because a competitor is there. A new capability gets built because it seemed like a gap. None of these decisions are obviously wrong in isolation. Together, they produce a business that is pulling in multiple directions.

I have seen this in agencies specifically. The temptation to say yes to whatever a client needs is enormous, particularly when revenue is under pressure. But every time you build a capability for one client that does not fit your core model, you are making your business slightly less coherent. Over time, that adds up. The agencies I have seen struggle most are almost always the ones that have tried to be too many things.

The broader challenge of why growth feels harder than it used to is something Vidyard has written about from a go-to-market perspective, and the strategic incoherence problem the book describes is a significant part of the answer.

Where the Book Falls Short

No business book is without its limitations, and reading Strategy That Works critically is more useful than treating it as gospel.

The first limitation is that the book is primarily written for large, established organisations. The frameworks around capabilities systems and coherence are most applicable when you have a business complex enough to be incoherent. For a startup or a small agency, the strategic challenge is often different: you are trying to find product-market fit and build any capabilities at all, not rationalise a portfolio of existing ones.

The second limitation is that the book is better at diagnosing the problem than solving it. The prescription, build a capabilities system, commit to it, cut what doesn’t fit, is correct but underspecified. The political and organisational difficulty of actually doing this in a real business is acknowledged but not fully addressed. Telling a leadership team to stop doing things that generate short-term revenue is easy to say and genuinely hard to execute.

The third limitation is that the examples, while useful, are drawn heavily from very large companies. IKEA, Apple, Hasbro, Amazon. These are coherent companies, but they are also companies with enormous resources and established market positions. The lessons are transferable, but they require translation for businesses operating at a different scale.

None of these limitations make the book less worth reading. They just mean you should read it with your own context in mind, not as a template to be applied directly.

How This Connects to Marketing Strategy Specifically

Marketing teams tend to read strategy books through a narrow lens, looking for frameworks they can apply to campaigns, channels, or positioning. Strategy That Works is not that kind of book, and that is part of its value.

The argument it makes about capabilities applies directly to marketing functions. Most marketing teams try to do too much. They run too many channels, chase too many metrics, produce too much content, and end up being moderately present everywhere and genuinely strong nowhere. The coherence principle applies: what are the two or three things your marketing function does that are genuinely distinctive, that create real competitive advantage, and that you would be willing to invest in properly?

Earlier in my career, I overvalued lower-funnel performance activity. It looked efficient because the numbers were clean and the attribution was easy. What I understood later was that much of what performance channels were credited for was going to happen anyway. The customers converting through paid search often already knew the brand. The real growth, reaching people who had never considered the category, was happening elsewhere and being measured less precisely. The book’s argument about coherence helped me think about that more clearly: performance marketing is a capability, but it is not a strategy, and treating it as one produces exactly the kind of incoherence the book describes.

The Forrester Intelligent Growth Model makes a related point about how growth strategy needs to be anchored in something more durable than channel execution, which is worth reading alongside this book.

Other Strategy Books Worth Reading Alongside It

If Strategy That Works is on your reading list, a few other books sit well alongside it.

Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt is probably the most rigorous book on strategy written for a general business audience. Rumelt’s distinction between a real strategy (a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent actions) and what he calls “bad strategy” (goals dressed up as strategy, vague aspirations, lists of initiatives) is something every marketing leader should understand. It is a harder read than Strategy That Works but more intellectually demanding in a useful way.

Playing to Win by Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley is the other book that belongs in this conversation. The “where to play, how to win” framework is genuinely useful and has survived longer than most business frameworks because it is grounded in real strategic choices rather than process. Martin’s argument that strategy is about making choices that constrain your options, not expanding them, is a useful counterweight to the default corporate instinct to keep all doors open.

For the execution side of the equation, The Four Disciplines of Execution by McChesney, Covey, and Huling addresses the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it, which is where most strategies die. It is more operational than strategic, but it addresses a real problem that Strategy That Works identifies without fully solving.

I would also add Competing on Analytics by Davenport and Harris, not because analytics is the same as strategy, but because it makes a useful point about what it actually means to build a distinctive capability. The companies that compete on analytics are not just using more data. They have built systems, processes, and cultures that make data-driven decision-making a genuine source of advantage. That is the capabilities argument made concrete.

How to Read Strategy Books Without Wasting Your Time

Most business books are written to a formula: a central idea that could be an article, padded to book length with case studies and repetition. Strategy That Works is better than average in this regard, but it is not immune to the pattern.

The most useful way to read any strategy book is to hold it against your own experience as you go. When the authors describe incoherent companies, think about organisations you have worked in or with. When they describe the capabilities of coherent companies, think about whether your own organisation’s capabilities are genuinely distinctive or just table stakes. When they prescribe a course of action, ask yourself what would actually prevent that from happening in a real business.

I remember reading a well-regarded strategy book a few years into running an agency and finding myself agreeing with every sentence and recognising that almost none of it was actionable in the context I was actually in. The frameworks were sound. The political, financial, and organisational constraints I was operating within made them largely irrelevant. That is not a reason to stop reading strategy books. It is a reason to read them critically and translate them into your actual context rather than applying them as written.

There is also value in reading books that challenge the frameworks you already use. If you are a committed performance marketer, read books that argue for brand investment. If you are a brand marketer, read books that make the case for measurement discipline. The most commercially useful perspective I have developed over 20 years came from holding opposing views in tension rather than committing to one school of thought.

Tools like those covered by Semrush on growth strategy tools are useful for execution, but they are not a substitute for the strategic thinking that books like this one are designed to develop. The tools serve the strategy. Not the other way around.

The Practical Test for Any Strategy Book

The test I apply to any strategy book is simple: does it change how I think about a real problem, or does it just give me new vocabulary for things I already believed?

Strategy That Works passes that test, partially. The capabilities system framing is genuinely useful and changed how I thought about organisational design in the agencies I ran. The coherence argument reinforced something I had experienced but not articulated clearly. The prescription for cutting incoherent activities is something I have tried to apply, with mixed success, because the book is right about the diagnosis and honest about the difficulty.

What it did not change for me was anything about how to build the commercial case for strategic change within an organisation that is resistant to it. That is a different problem, and it is the one that most strategy books quietly sidestep. The assumption is that if leadership understands the argument, they will act on it. That assumption is wrong more often than it is right.

But that is a limitation of the genre as much as the book. Strategy books describe what good looks like. The harder work of getting there is done in rooms that no book can fully prepare you for.

If you are working through how to connect strategic thinking to commercial execution, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the operational side of these questions with the same level of commercial grounding.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions