Interesting to see from Booz Allen’s journal strategy+business that there’s no guarantee of getting innovation success from spending more on R&D - the most successful companies seem to make sure innovation efforts align with corporate strategy and listen to their customers. [see Myth 1 post]

This one goes back for ever. Management is supposed to spend their time on strategy searching for a better ‘position’ than rivals - some combination of who they serve, with what products and services, and how, that ensures they can protect their sales and profit margins from competitors.
But we have known for many years that [...]

I hope everyone had a good Christmas. In between turkey and Christmas pud we have been getting on with the class materials for the on-line course in strategy dynamics. This will first see daylight with participants on the graduate studies program as Worcester Polytechnic Institute [WPI].

Just had a notification of a forthcoming web-briefing on this from Harvard Business School to be led by Professor Thomas DeLong, co-author of When Professionals Have to Lead. [Amazon US link] [Amazon UK link]. Should be excellent for senior folk trying to manage one of these organizations.
Anyone who would like a light but instructive [...]

Just scanned Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing [TDABC] from Robert Kaplan - of balanced score-card fame - and Steven Anderson, thinking it might link to the strategy dynamics idea of managing performance-over-time. It doesn’t do that, but it does provide a useful update on the established ABC idea.
[Amazon US link] [Amazon UK link]

If you would rather watch than read, Wiley kindly arranged to take some short videos about the book, one for executives and professionals, and another for strategy teachers.

Here’s another that just jumps out of the strategy books and articles. Strong performance, it is said, shows up in higher profitability [return on sales or invested capital]. So good strategy which leads to that lovely ambiguous phrase, ’sustained competitive advantage’, shows up in persistently higher profitability than competitors.
Well, sometimes - but investors value [...]

We had a great time with the book launch yesterday evening. Here are some short videos with me, Steve Hardman from Wiley and James McDonnell at PWC who kindly sponsored the event.

Many people love the book cover .. thanks to Mark Styles at Wiley for that! But my friend Lars Finskud at Vanguard Strategy spotted a new take on the theme. Take a look at this clip, especially the later part.

Much of what we know about strategy comes from research into why some firms are more profitable than others - but investors value growth in cash flows [see chapter 1 of Strategic Management Dynamics]. An article in McKinsey Quarterly ‘How to choose between growth and ROIC‘ [return on invested capital] confirms the importance of this [...]