Ruthless Focus: My Review

I am going to recommend “Ruthless Focus: How To Use Key Core Strategies To Grow Your Business,” by Thomas Hall and Wally Bock. I got my copy free from Wally Bock, who’s  Three Star Leadership blog is in my opinion one of the best blogs on leadership out there.  I have tremendous respect for Wally, so I’d love to tell you this is a great book, but it is not. It’s a good book for sure, but there are some things that I found very annoying, which in my mind kept it from being exemplary. I’ll cover those at the end of my review.

The second chapter, “What is a strategy,” and the last chapter, “Conclusion: Lessons learned,” make the book worth your time. According to Hall and Bock, strategy is how you answer two important questions: 1) How are we going to beat the competition, and 2) How are we going to make money? (p. 32). I like that a lot. They then identify five basic strategies – opportunity, differentiation, technological, implementation, and acquisition strategies (p. 37) – and spend most of the rest of the book giving examples of these strategies in action.

One of the best things about the book are the Thinking Points and Actions Steps at the end of every chapter. I thought those were very well done and quite helpful. I also liked the appendices, which contained questions to help you choose and develop a strategy, and questions to help you succeed with a strategy.  These two features make this book, in my opinion, most valuable to small business owners and entrepreneurs.

If you like lots of stories about real companies in action, you will like this book a lot. I found the stories overwhelming. One can always find a case study of a company to back up just about any point you want to make about almost anything. Case studies are appealing, but they are not very persuasive to me.

The most annoying thing about this book was the way it was written. Most of the paragraphs were no more than two or three sentences. I found that very distracting. So much so that I could not really concentrate on the book enough to thoroughly enjoy it, so I found myself skimming large sections of the book very quickly.  That’s a shame, because even though this book has some very good information, I frankly did not enjoy reading it.

If you are a small business owner or entrepreneur, understanding the importance of a sound strategy is critical to your success. This book will frame the basic strategy issue for you very well and give you lots of good questions to think about.

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Tags: book review, strategy
Posted in Entrepreneurship, Leadership