The Mission Action Plan

Most strategic plans fail before they start — because the organization never agreed on what game it's playing.

For nearly five decades, Dr. Ichak Adizes has worked with organizations across 48 countries — from family businesses to Fortune 500 companies — and found the same pattern again and again: brilliant strategies built on a mission no one actually agreed on. The Mission Action Plan is the practical system he developed to fix that, before a single strategy meeting begins.

Strategy asks how to win. This book asks the three questions that have to come first: What business are we really in? Who do we serve, and what do they need from us? What are we good at, and what should we build next? Through real cases — Kodak, Nokia, IBM, Sears, AT&T — and the Market Product Scope framework at its core, Adizes and Rufat Jahangir walk you through defining your organization's direction with the same discipline used with thousands of companies worldwide.

It's not another statement for the wall. It's a living process for getting an entire leadership team to agree — genuinely, not just on paper — on why you exist, who you serve, and where you're going next.