FruITion
 The story opens with Ian and members of his IT management team reviewing the company’s IT Strategy in a hotel meeting room, something that anyone involved in this process will find familiar. Ian then takes the strategy paper they produce to Juliette, who reacts in a way Ian is not expecting. She pushes Ian to articulate the company’s strategy for IT in one sentence, which he is initially unable to do. When he does, she pulls it apart and then asks Ian to start again, mentored by Graham. She sets him a timescale of a week to come back with an entirely new strategy, squarely focused on how the company creates value by exploiting IT. This is the beginning of a journey of discovery and change for Ian, at the end of which he will either become one of Juliette’s inner-circle corporate strategists or, it seems, lose his job. He rapidly discovers, for example, that the company’s difficulties with creating value from IT are actually nothing to do with IT, but originate in the organization’s culture towards investing in change. This is one of the book’s central insights, and one which takes Ian time to understand and then apply. As well as formulating the new ‘corporate strategy for exploiting IT’, Ian is expected to say what his own future role in the organization will be. Ian’s discomfort with the personal implications of the strategy he has been asked to formulate begin to undermine the chances of success. As the story progresses, Ian formulates his strategy in a number of iterations, and has mainly one-to-one conversations with the other key characters. Underlining the theme of relationships, the implications of Ian’s history with each of these people, and feelings about them, are both explicit and implicit in his narrative. The climax of the story is Ian’s formal meeting with Juliette, Graham and James to propose the new strategy and his role in its success. In the aftermath of their decision, we learn what happens to the various parts of Ian’s old IT department and to the members of Ian’s senior team. The result, like the book’s original question, is unorthodox — yet by then somehow obvious.