The Playbook Is a Playbook, Not a Strategy.

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The playbook has to be versatile enough to allow the players to play, Harm says. If John Chambers didn't have every member of his team involved and aligned, Cisco wouldn't have been able to process those acquisitions with such impressive speed. It's easy to draw it up, but can you execute it? You cannot ask a player to do something that he's incapable of doing because then you put him in a position to fail.

All great teams need to improvise under pressure, but underpinning this should be a set of tried-and-tested playbooks that let you orchestrate and replicate winning strategies. Cisco's John Chambers created a library of living playbooks — covering culture, acquisitions, crises, and more — to astounding effect as he took Cisco from a small tech supplier to the most valuable company on the planet.

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