Better, Simpler Strategy
Most strategy frameworks collapse under their own weight. Oberholzer-Gee offers an alternative built on a single picture, the value stick: raise customers’ willingness to pay, or lower employees’ and suppliers’ willingness to sell, and the value you create expands. Everything else, he argues, is either a means to one of those ends or a distraction from them.
His case is that simpler strategic decisions produce better outcomes, because complexity is where execution goes to die. I have watched that firsthand. Companies rarely fail for lack of ideas; they fail because they are running eleven initiatives when three would do, and nobody can say which of the eleven actually moves willingness to pay. A framework you can hold in your head and apply in a meeting beats a rigorous one that requires a consulting engagement to operate.
The book gave me sharper language for consolidation decisions I had already made on instinct. When we collapsed seven ecommerce platforms into one at Drummond, the justification I gave at the time was cost and maintainability. The value stick reframes it better: every platform we retired freed capacity that went into the things clients actually pay for, faster storefront launches and cleaner integrations. Simplification was not the strategy; it was how we bought back the ability to execute one.
The chapters on employee willingness to sell are underrated. Making a company a genuinely better place to work is not a soft initiative; it lowers the compensating wage you would otherwise need to pay and shows up in retention. Few strategy books treat that as seriously as pricing.
Worth reading if you are responsible for turning strategy into results and tired of planning processes that produce binders instead of decisions. It is the rare strategy book I have actually reopened before a planning cycle.