Many companies may find some of the articles in the latest e-issue of the McKinsey Quarterly to be helpful, such as ‘Market fundamentals: 2000 versus 2007‘ and ‘Learning to love recessions‘.
Even more useful perhaps is the article on ‘Preparing for the next downturn‘ - it can be too late to think about escaping the quicksand [...]

Pity to see that long-rising star, Starbucks, in trouble over the last year or so. Specially intriguing to see the similarities with the MacDonalds’ trouble around 2005 - over-expansion.

… and now we see Merrill Lynch in the same trouble, so perhaps they could answer the same question we put to Citigroup.
Meanwhile, here in the UK, we are told that every household in the country is going to have to stump up Stlg 2,000  to prop up another spectacular failure of strategy, this time [...]

Interesting to see that Citigroup may take a further multi-billion dollar hit as a further consequence of the sub-prime lending fiasco. Now nothing makes me angrier than strategic incompetence, not because of the harm it does to investors - they know they are putting their money in the hands of people who may flush it [...]

The latest from McKinsey Quarterly is yet another fire-hosing about ‘driving radical change’, ‘transformation without crisis’, etc. etc. Radical change is very rarely needed, most often destructive, and only appropriate in the most dire circumstances - which applies to very few organizations. And don’t come back with ‘Well you’ve got to transform yourself before some [...]

Everything seems to be happening at once round here. Having got the book out … and decided to rebuild the MBA course entirely around it … and record it all for others to use in class and professional training … and start a Forum for course participants and everyone else to use … and offer [...]

This FT article regrettably makes public what can no longer be kept as private grief within the business schools - and Strategy is amongst the worst offenders !
There’s no gentle way to say this - virtually no-one uses the ‘tools’ we teach, because they don’t do anything useful. Take a look at the latest survey [...]

The data in chapter 1 reports the numbers of diabetes cases diagnosed, whereas chapter 6 looks at the likely development in total numbers of cases, including estimated numbers undiagnosed. These could be as much as 40% higher in number.

We have just launched a NEW forum for this area and encourage you to join the community conversation. I have added links on the StrategyDynamics website and the book website - forum.strategydynamics.info.
There are two streams of students taking a Strategy Dynamics course with Kim Warren starting week of Jan 14th, one based in London at London [...]

I see the latest Harvard Business Review (Jan 08) includes a nice piece from Cynthia Montgomery on ‘Putting leadership back into strategy‘. It makes important points  … that strategy is about creating value [a.k.a. growing future cash flows], rather than sustaining high profitability … that strategy is a continuous process of improvement [...]