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Most of what we call strategy is carefully constructed theater. We produce elaborate plans that promise control over unknowable futures. We defend competitive advantages that are already eroding. We invest billions in strategic planning processes that almost no one believes will unfold as written. Yet the ritual continues, year after year, because admitting the truth is too uncomfortable: we cannot predict what will happen, and most strategic success depends on factors our frameworks cannot capture.

Unfair by Design argues that traditional strategy has become actively harmful in volatile environments. The frameworks that once worked now create rigidity. The planning processes that provided direction now waste resources. The search for sustainable competitive advantage leads organizations to defend positions that should be abandoned.

Drawing on two decades of experience watching strategies succeed and fail, Babu George dismantles the comfortable fictions that traditional strategy rests on. He shows why planning has become ritualistic, why sustainable advantage is increasingly mythical, and why the gap between strategic theory and organizational reality keeps widening. More importantly, he offers a radically different approach: treating strategy as continuous learning rather than periodic planning, building capacity for adaptation rather than optimizing for predicted futures, and embracing uncertainty rather than pretending it away.

This book is for executives who have watched rigorous strategies fail for inexplicable reasons, for strategists who have grown skeptical of their own tools, and for anyone who senses that the old approaches no longer work but lacks language to articulate what should replace them. It offers no easy answers because easy answers are part of the problem. Instead, it provides frameworks for thinking more honestly about strategy in a world that refuses to be stable.

The future belongs not to organizations with perfect strategies but to those comfortable operating imperfectly in uncertain environments. This book shows how to build that capacity.

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