Book excerpt: Essential Management Models is a compilation of business tools that actually work. It’s a guide to the very best in practical management thinking. No reinventing the wheel, no management fads and no corporate word-bingo. Essential Management Models demystifies strategy tools and does so with attitude: the view that any decision is better than no decision. The book encourages you to "go on...decide" and provides you with reference on how to do so. Rather than a series of independent summaries, the book makes connections between frameworks to expose the overlaps and relationships between them. This is the key to what makes the exercise worthwhile, the tools useful and the book unique. Using diagrams extensively to explain key concepts, but without ever "dumbing down", the book is written for managers who get things done – or students who want to. If you’ve ever studied management or strategy before, Essential Management Models will enable you to go back to the models and use them to do a better job, or think more clearly. It will remind you of the interlinkages between the frameworks to really make them work as a coherent whole. If you've forgotten them, it will give you confidence to use them. If you’ve written them off as mere theory, we urge you to think again.