One of my favorite sportswriters is John Feinstein, whose fly-on-the-wall accounts tell the inside stories of college and pro teams as they battle long odds and internal conflicts to go head-to-head with tough competitors. That's the type of book many people would want to read about the Microsoft Windows team's attempts to reverse its fortunes over the past three years -- its very own season on the brink.

"One Strategy" is not that book.

Built around the internal blog posts of Microsoft Windows chief Steven Sinofsky, it might seem to hold the promise of a juicy insider account. But the objective is management lessons, not drama, and in that academic way, Sinofsky and Harvard Business School professor Marco Iansiti succeed in drawing insights from the Windows team's radical transformation on the path from Windows Vista to Windows 7.

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Q&A: STEVEN SINOFSKY

The Windows president talks about his upcoming book, "One Strategy," in a TechFlash interview.

The book, due out Nov. 30, will serve in some ways as an unofficial sequel to the widely read "Microsoft Secrets," published in 1995, as a blueprint for people seeking to understand the prevailing management strategy inside the world's largest software company.

And technology geeks will still find worthwhile insights into the personalities behind the Windows team -- such as the way Sinofsky reacted after seeing one of his confidential internal blog posts quoted in the media.

Rather than sending out the traditional, threatening corporate missive, Sinofsky reacted by writing another internal post, with the headline, "An Allegory of Van Gogh and Batteries." In it, he reflected at great length on his college art-history class, in which the professor made students vow "not to tape record the lessons or try to take notes, but to experience the art." The promise was ultimately betrayed by another student whose illicit taping was revealed when a recorder fell off a desk, and the batteries rolled to the professor's feet.

In his post, Sinofsky referred to the leak only once, in the conclusion. He wrote, "I thought about that class a lot today as I read a (news) story that contained direct quotes from a post on this internal blog."

End of post. Message delivered.

That's one of dozens of internal posts republished in the book -- on subjects including planning, communication, strategy, execution, organizational structure and decision-making. In one post, Sinofsky explains the need to be selective about Windows features by telling the story of his childhood experience taking in too many rides at Disney World. One post offers tips to Windows employees on the best ways to pitch their ideas for new features of the operating system. And another breaks down Sinofsky's weekly schedule to answer the eternal question of how the heck a Microsoft executive spends his days.

As a group, the posts illustrate the efforts of a new executive team to bring to the Windows division a new culture of deliberate and collaborative product-development strategy and execution. The title of the book, "One Strategy," refers to the concept of "aligning strategy and execution" through a participatory planning process that aims to get everyone working from the same playbook.

Sinofsky, who has since been named the Windows president, is a one-time technical assistant to Bill Gates who was tapped by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in 2006 to lead Windows engineering, following Windows Vista's repeated delays and glitches. A longtime Microsoft Office executive, Sinofsky was brought up under the leadership of former Office execs including Mike Maples, Pete Higgins, and Jeff Raikes, and he credits them for heavily influencing the approaches explained in the book.

In many ways, the changes over the past three years have brought longtime Microsoft Office management and development traditions to the Windows team.

"I like the book," said Higgins, who went on to become a founder of Seattle's Second Avenue Partners venture capital firm. "It's a from-the-trenches view of a manager trying to change a culture. It’s very different than other business and management books, which are recipe-oriented. Here you infer lessons from a guy doing it in real time, which is I think a different view than what you usually get."

Apart from the Windows PC operating system, the Windows division includes Windows Live and Internet Explorer, which play supporting roles in the book. But the management changes will ultimately be judged by the long-term success or failure of Windows 7, which was released Oct. 22 to favorable reviews.

"In a sense, the product speaks for itself," Iansiti said via phone this week. "The impact has been phenomenal. I've also seen internal data to Microsoft that talks about the group itself and its perception of all sorts of things ranging from morale to strategy, to how well strategy has been executed, to all the different things that one would want to see, and the metrics have gone through the roof."

In the book, Iansiti's narration of Sinofsky's posts hints at some of the initial angst caused by the changes -- with longtime members of the run-and-gun Windows team worrying about negative effects from the more-deliberate, Microsoft Office-style approach. But one shortcoming of the book, as a study of Microsoft's internal culture, is that it focuses on Sinofsky's messages to the troops without showing in the same detail the way those messages were received on the front lines.

In that way, the book itself is an embodiment of Sinofsky's now-famous pitch for "translucency" rather than complete transparency in the company's disclosures to the outside world.

At the same time, Iansiti is able to put the Windows team's experience in context by relating it to other corporate giants that he has studied over the years, from Toyota to Dell. That lifts the book beyond the realm of tech-industry gossip to provide potential value to managers from a variety of industries.

Sinofsky, who met Iansiti on a chance visit to Harvard Business School many years ago, ended up teaching at the school on a sabbatical, and the two have become friends. The idea for the book grew organically from internal reactions to Sinofsky's posts and Iansiti's interactions with Sinofsky and the Windows team.

"Here's a guy who for 20 years has been visiting companies, talking to them when their plans weren't working," Sinofsky said in an interview, describing Iansiti's approach. "He's studying them like an anthropologist, talks to everybody. He finds out that there's this huge disconnect between the people on the assembly line and the people in the fancy offices. Why is that, and what to do? What we'd always tried to do on our teams is reduce that disconnect and reduce the friction between the plan and the execution."

"One Strategy: Organization, Planning and Decision Making," is due out Nov. 30. Publisher: John Wiley & Sons; List price: $39.95.