Book Review: StrategyMan vs. the Anti-Strategy Squad: Using Strategic Thinking to Defeat Bad Strategy and Save Your Plan written by Rich Horwath; art by Nathan Lueth
Disclaimer: I received a download of this book through a Goodreads giveaway to facilitate writing this review. No other compensation was requested or offered.
Technobody is in trouble. This manufacturer of wearable technology is soon to release “Project Elon”, a revolutionary new cybersuit. But a mysterious competitor has engaged the Anti-Strategy Squad, supervillains who cripple and destroy corporate strategies, to make sure that Technobody goes bankrupt and the suit falls into the wrong hands. Only Strategyman and his teammates can save the day by using sound business principles!
This edutainment comic book was written by the CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute to assist business people in learning principles of business strategy. Presumably this is meant for the subsection of managers who don’t have long blocks of time to read text and aren’t comfortable with audiobooks.
Strategyman, who gained his strategizing powers through a lemonade experiment gone horribly right, is joined by teammates Purposeidon, Innovatara and Rich Horwath (one of those irritating characters in superhero comics who seems to think he’s above having a code name or wearing a gaudy costume.) They battle such villains as Culturello and the Decision Demon while lecturing the management of Technobody on strategy.
The good: There’s some genuinely useful information and suggestions in here, especially for the beginning business strategists.
Some of the villain designs are excellent: I especially like Fire Driller, who uses giant drills and spouts fire, and Dr. Yes, a James Bond-type villain who likes petting an animal while scheming, but has adopted a porcupine instead of a cat. The art in general is serviceable, and it’s fairly easy to tell the characters apart.
Less good: There’s way too much business jargon and buzzword usage. A lot of this material comes across as “management fad of the month.” On the Kindle especially, there’s what I call “Powerpoint overcrowding” where too many words are stuffed into a small space. Combined with a black and white screen which makes some colored sections muddy, it causes a lot of squinting.
A number of the characters get short shrift due to so many needing to get space, and characterization is thin on the ground in any case. Too-large portions of the story are taken up by “as you know, Bob” sequences where the heroes tell each other things they’re already aware of during their down time as a way of cluing in the readers.
Recommended primarily to young business majors looking for a slightly more fun way of absorbing the material, and gamers who can mine the book for character ideas.
