Strategic Learning: How to Be Smarter Than Your Competition and Turn Key Insights into Competitive Advantage

STRATEGIC LEARNING is the approach to corporate strategy developed by Willie Pietersen, the former President of Tropicana and Seagram, now a professor at Columbia University. In the eight years since the publication of Pietersen's first book, Reinventing Strategy, which first described his Strategic Learning process, the strategic learning concept has been widely applied in multi-national and not-for-profit organizations.

Strategic Learning builds on the success of Reinventing Strategy, explains why traditional methods for creating business strategy no longer apply, and describes the key steps in the Strategic Learning approach to creating and implementing strategy:

• The best strategy is made by generating superior insights, through a Situation Analysis into the needs of customers, actions of competitors and industry trends.
• The goal of strategy creation is to produce a Winning Proposition, which answers the question, "Why should customers choose to do business with us?"
• A crucial task for leaders is to translate the Winning Proposition into a clear and compelling message which will win the hearts and minds of its employees. Organizations become smarter than their competitors by performing this process again and again in response to an ever-changing competitive environment.
• The ultimate challenge for leaders is to instill a culture of openness, learning and courage to address reality, so that the Strategic Learning cycle can continue.

STRATEGIC LEARNING describes how this process has been successfully applied and has become an integral part of the leadership philosophy in a number of major enterprises, including Exxon, Ericsson, and the Girl Scouts of America.