Wally Bock is a fixture in the online leadership community. So when Wally offered to send me a review copy of Ruthless Focus: How to Use Key Core Strategies to Grow Your Business, I was excited (and to be honest, flattered). Wally co-authored the book with Thomas Hall, who had been researching companies that experienced lasting growth. The book is the culmination of nearly ten years of research. Hall and Bock argue that lasting companies ruthlessly focus on their core strategy. They offer a simple definition of strategy. Strategy answers the questions “How are we going to beat the competition?” and “How are we going to make money?” The answers to these questions reveal one of five strategies: opportunity, differentiation, technological, implementation, and acquisition. The first two chapters lay out this thesis, the remaining chapters provide case studies on company’s that used each of the five strategies.

When reading Ruthless Focus, the parallels to two authors develop immediately: Collins and Porter. Jim Collins in Good to Great offers his “Hedgehog Concept” a simplistic way to develop a strategy by answering three questions. Hall and Bock’s two questions mirror two of Collins’. It would have been interesting to hear Hall and Bock’s reasons for not include Collins’ passion question. Likewise, the five strategies echo Porter’s competitive strategy model, where organizations select one of five market positions.

The highlights of the book are the case studies. Many of the case studies are of oft-profiled organizations such as Toyota or Amazon.com, but some are companies that don’t immediately come to mind. Additionally, each chapter ends with a “Thinking Points” section, a unique way to cause the reader to reflect on the case studies. Overall the ideas in Ruthless Focus are not new. The ideas behind developing strategy have been writing about previously. However, the companies Hall and Bock profile are unique, which allows the reader to see old ideas from a new perspective.