Ricardo Diaz
Professor Sean Jasso
BUS 109
Book Review: The Strategist

The Strategist:
Be the Leader Your Business Needs

INTRODUCTION & OVERVIEW
In the book The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs by Cynthia A. Montgomery discusses the topic of being an elusive and a rigorously effective strategist. The purpose of the author is to give us a new understanding of what a strategy really is and the components needed to be a strategist. The author through all her pages help us to understand some of the most fundamental questions that the manager must ask themselves when it comes to strategy such as what is strategy, why it is important, and what you have to do in order to effectively execute them. The final and most fundamental
Leaders in this step must have a clear idea of what the company looks like in the present and future; they also need to know the strategic posture they will take accordingly.
The last and most fundamental step from Montgomery’s perspective is the participation of the manager as a leader. In this step, the manager owns the strategy. Some of the strategic solutions the author offers to own the strategy is to explicitly write the purpose of yourself and the company, develop a system of value creation, use the strategy wheel, have a reality check of the state of the company, and in the end compress all this element into the strategic planning broacher of your organization.
The author finalize her endeavor of showing us the roadmap and help us being the strategist we want to be by examining the most important questions that you must ask yourself, as a manager, and more importantly as a leader. Montgomery writes that in this final stage it is important “to put aside the industry analyses and the strategy statements, and instead looking deeply into the how of being a strategist” (p.65) she even argues that you, as a manager, are not in the corporate to be a strategic manager. On the contrary, you must strive to achieve a leadership mentality. In order to obtain this leadership posture, Montgomery writes “one must confront the four basic