Up & Ahead: Use Strategy to Succeed in Life and Work

by Sunny Bindra

UNLOCK THE POWER OF STRATEGY

Strategic thinking is an essential life skill that business leaders, entrepreneurs, and marketing strategists have mastered for business success. If you’re new to this way of thinking, you might feel bogged down with academic texts and esoteric theories. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Using decades of experience as a strategy advisor, Sunny Bindra delivers a simple and practical method for thinking about and applying strategy to your business and life in Up & Ahead. Written to deliver deep insights with an easy and natural light touch, without any unnecessary theory or jargon, Bindra’s book distills strategy into four manageable

1. DIAGNOSE: What’s really going on in our world and what we need to become

2. POSITION: Where we choose to play and how we think we might win

3. How we will explain this to our people and excite them with it

4. ACT: The concerted action sets we need to make this strategy happen

Even if you have learned strategy formally, Up & Ahead will help you unlearn all that was unnecessary, so that the necessary can take prominence.

174 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 19, 2021

Reviews

[Martin Omedo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The term strategy is often riddled with ambiguities and complexities that the commoner always finds challenging to discern. Moreover, in defining strategy, numerous tools range from SWOT analysis to PESTEL analysis that only adds to the complexities even though the tool's primacy is to decompose the essential elements of strategy.

In the book Up and Ahead: Use strategy to succeed in life and work, Sunny Bindra breaks down the ambiguity and complexity to their most chewable morsel. In this read, he brings down the essence and tenets of strategic thinking down to earth; to its most accessible elements.

There are primarily four approaches to discerning strategy.

1. Diagnosis: this process helps individuals identify the problems in their realm that need to be responded to.

2. Positioning: here, you explicitly identify the how bits of problem-solving by clearly defining the policies and interventions that will facilitate the process of addressing the problems identified in step one.

3. Story: each strategy needs a narrative to capture the spirit of the people. At this step, you develop a story to appeal to people's emotions.

4. Action: strategic thinking is never complete without action. Every strategic thinker must be very deliberate in identifying the steps that need to be taken and guide the delivery process.

In sum, every strategic process tends to gravitate around these four steps. Most importantly, strategic development is not an event to be taken to the lakeshore for the top management to define what needs to be done, but a process that needs to be ingrained in our daily process and thinking. This is a book that I would recommend to anyone starting in strategy development or anyone who wishes to clarify what strategy means.

[Ken Ndirangu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read, well written even for a novice in business to understand what strategy is and is not.

He reviews some of the myths and clarifies what strategy is not.
"To do strategy properly, you have to do it all the time, in all sorts of ways, everywhere—not just once a year in a special place."

"Strategy is those four things, in lockstep: a diagnosis; a positioning; a narrative; and a set of actions."
He breaks down the processes with several examples.

I loved the several references to real world organisations and the pointers around the importance of culture in executing a strategy.

[Nelisa Mwongera · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author breaks down what strategy is in a simple manner that can be understood by anyone. It thought provoking and it's a book that one can't put down