Commercial Excellence Playbook by Philip Bowler

A straightforward tool for self-evaluation of your own business, Commercial Excellence Playbook: Navigating the Path to Business Success by Philip Bowler is a high-level guide for targeted improvement across the critical layers of an organization.

Exhaustively detailing the essential aspects of commercial success, which can be difficult to pin down in their complexity, the author taps into his years of experience consulting for corporations of varying sizes, distilling his professional observations into practical strategies. Without mincing words or wasting time on exposition, this playbook jumps directly into techniques for improving customer relationships and confidence at each level of an organization – strategy, sales, marketing, services, channel management, and more.

The consistent analytical structure of “As Is,” “Ideal,” and “Relevance” gives the book a streamlined and easy-to-understand foundation, but it also makes the reading experience somewhat repetitive and predictable, frequently covering variations on the same theme. While the author’s passion for corporate improvement and boosting business efficiency is obvious and energizing, there are also some basic grammatical errors and inconsistent formality that undercut the book’s overall authority.

On a similar note, the visual elements are fairly rudimentary, as can be evidenced in the cover, which doesn’t match the C-suite advice that the author is promoting. If these execution issues were corrected, the core wisdom of this book would have a more persuasive backdrop, but as it stands, Bowler’s extensive experience gives the book an informative fly-on-the-wall view of corporate problems and solutions.