One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making

Steven Sinofsky is a brilliant (and sometimes quirky) executive at Microsoft who manages to step back from his colossal workload to write a series of blog posts on strategy. Although those posts can be a little uneven, they give us a window into a mind that thinks deeply and clearly about how to build complex products in large organizations. Unfortunately, the clarity of Sinofsky's writing doesn't always live up to the clarity of his strategic thinking. That's perfectly OK in a blog, but not in a book, where the standard is well-crafted prose. The reader shouldn't have to wade through the hundreds of sentences in this book that are difficult to parse (much less comprehend fully), or the hundreds more where the writing is simply not crisp ("a holistic set of features that represent a coherent whole"). For whatever reason, the only edits to Sinofsky's original blog posts in this book are silly ones -- like capitalizing letters that begin quotations or inserting dollar signs (as if "this could be a big [$]100M decision" in a paragraph about costs was obscure until that dollar sign was inserted). And each one of the thousands of trivial edits is set off with square brackets -- a typographical practice that gets annoying fast. Bundling Sinofsky's less-than-polished writing with the leaden "analysis" of a business school professor results in a tedious book. I couldn't get past the first couple of chapters without the urge -- which I ultimately indulged -- to stop reading and start skipping around, until I finally put the book down. Sinofsky is one of today's leading business thinkers; it's a shame that this book's creators chose not to edit his writing before publishing it in book form.