This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans
By Seth Godin
Authors Equity, 256 pp., $30

For those who hear the word strategy and immediately associate it with corporate business plans, objectives, and activities, Godin's newest book, This Is Strategy, reinvents the concept in a refreshing way and makes the idea accessible for readers.

The author begins by redefining strategy not as a map of fixed destinations, but as a compass that guides individuals from the present day toward a better tomorrow. As we each hold our compasses and use them to make better plans, Godin calls on us to think about four main threads that can shift our personal direction if we are not mindful of them.

Those threads—time, games, empathy, and systems—make up the book's framework. Each topic touches on a single idea for making better plans and ideas that involve at least one of the threads. Godin weaves the threads recursively to build on each other, emulating how the topics interplay in real life.

My favorite threads were games and systems because "these threads are everywhere we look and yet easy to ignore," Godin writes. He introduces the concept of games with multiple players and possible outcomes within a system. I take that as a reminder for talent development specialists that systems can be complex, creating unexpected and unpredictable outputs.

At the same time, systems respond to "elegant strategies," which are simple, efficient, and effective, reducing waste and saving time and energy. Individuals must identify the right kind of elegant strategy to bring to bear on the systems in which we work to produce a different outcome.

An important idea to me from the book was: "to find a better strategy, we need to be prepared to walk away from the ones we have defaulted into." We expect games and strategies to stay the same despite a change in the rules—and even when the game itself is no longer the same.

Written in 296 digestible chunks, This Is Strategy is a good book for team or group development because it reminds everyone that we all have what we need to make better plans.