What better place to start a book on implementing new corporate strategy than with AT&T during its landmark breakup in 1984. Amid this grand upheaval, Wharton management professor Hrebiniak had an enlightening conversation with colleague Randy Tobias, then a division head at AT&T and later CEO of Eli Lilly. Tobias confided that his biggest leadership challenge was not in coming up with a new strategic direction for his division but in actually getting his plan up and running. The conversation stayed with Hrebiniak, ultimately inspiring this book, which offers a detailed analysis of how organizational structure, institutional culture, coordination, and communication methods affect a company's ability to act on its strategic initiatives. Since change management lies at the heart of strategy implementation, Hrebiniak details its role in successfully transforming an organization. But he also gives airtime to the role of incentives in motivating behavior and of controls in providing feedback to keep the plan on track while highlighting how executive attitudes toward strategy implementation can get in the way of successful execution. The text is liberally peppered with diagrams, step-by-step processes, and real-world scenarios. Recommended for academic business collections.-Carol J. Elsen, Univ. of Wisconsin, Whitewater Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.