Must Win Battles:

FM Staff

By Peter Killing and Thomas Malnight, with Tracey Keys Wharton School Publishing, 2006, $27.99 (hardcover), 252 pp.

Another month, another initiative?It often seems that way to busy directors.And often, the result is a work environment where everything is important and there are simply too many priorities to manage effectively.

This book offers a strategy for breaking that stalemate situation by focusing your organization's resources and energy on three to five key battles that you must win in order to achieve what you identify as your most important goals.These must-win battles (MWBs) are about making strategy and building the team.

At the heart of this book is a process for learning to do fewer things and doing them better. While you focus on your "Must Wins," you free up resources by shutting down your "Must-Stops."

The authors note that a hidden value of identifying MWBs is not only that they focus your operation on marketdriven objectives, but also that the process helps you build and coordinate a more effective team. If you can do this, "you will have a competitive advantage that will be very difficult for competitors to match."

Put another way: You start by winning battles; you end by transforming your organization.