There are, conservatively, 300 gazillion books published every year. No one has the time to list them, let alone read them or review them. That’s a problem because there’s a lot of value in many books you may not hear about because of the clutter. 

“Short Takes” is my humble effort to cut through the clutter and highlight business books that might be perfect for your next read. Here’s why I think A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness might be a good choice for you.

Roger Martin’s writing jogs me into new ways of thinking. That started with his key question for testing the logic of a strategy: “What would have to be true for this to be a robust strategy?” It happened again with his books The Opposable Mind and Creating Great Choices. There are weekly doses of insight in his Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights on Medium.

A New Way to Think pulls Martin’s many insights together. Here’s a snippet from the promotional copy for the book.

“Martin covers the entire breadth of the management landscape—illuminating the true nature of competition, explaining how company success revolves around customers, revealing how strategy and execution are really the same thing, and much more.”

Here are reviews and excerpts from the book.

A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness

“Roger Martin is a business book author of bestsellers including The Opposable Mind, The Design of Business and Playing to Win. He advises CEOs and was formerly Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Below, Roger shares 5 key insights from his new book, A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness”

From Industry Week: Tried, True and Overdue for an Upgrade

“In this installment of the IndustryWeek Book Club, Roger Martin, author of “A New Way to Think”, talks about better alternatives to dominant yet flawed business leadership models.”

From Chief Executive: How A.G. Lafley Made Culture Change Stick

“Adapted with permission from A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness, by Roger L. Martin, Harvard Business Review Press, May 2022.”

From Charter: Book Briefing: ‘A New Way to Think’ by Roger L. Martin

“Martin’s advice for handling talent is one of 14 areas in his new book in which he outlines approaches that fall outside of conventional ways of thinking. Some are less radical than others, and one is almost inaccessibly wonky for non-financial-experts. But many of the 14 are lucid expressions of how to approach common organizational and management problems from a top business thinker.”