Strategy + Business Magazine Best Business Books 2016

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The Power of Resilience: How the Best Companies Manage the Unexpected (MIT Press, 2015), was selected by Strategy + Business Magazine as the Best Business Book on Strategy in 2016.

"Most corporate managers and business school professors simply accept globalization as an unalloyed good. After all, if your goal is to sell more of something, more potential customers must be better than fewer. But although globalization does hold out the promise of boosting revenues, cutting costs, or both, it also exposes companies to all manner of new risks. Yossi Sheffi’s The Power of Resilience: How the Best Companies Manage the Unexpected (MIT Press, 2015), our choice for the best business book on strategy this year, does an excellent job of covering the most important of those risks as well as best practices in everything from preparation to monitoring to drawing up crisis playbooks. And it does so while focusing on a relatively obscure corporate competence: supply chains. An entire book on supply chains would seem to be a slog and particularly narrow. But The Power of Resilience is actually a bit of a page turner, with implications that go beyond tactics to strategy. Sheffi delivers exactly what his subtitle promises. He makes a compelling argument in support of proactive moves designed to enhance redundancy and flexibility, while swatting away superficial conclusions such as the idea that supply chain resiliency is an expensive option that pays off only in a disaster." —Adapted from “Planning for Unpredictability,” by Duff McDonal