What MBAs want
Encouraging interview with Blair Sheppard, dean of Duke Business School, about increasingly mature expectations of future execuitves [their MBAs!] Seems they are looking for broader perspectives, linking business issues to societal and environmental issues, and not thinking the answer is to junk existing institutions but to make them work better. Blair says this needs better integration between schools of Business, Environment and Policy. We are not starting in a good place - though he claims business schools are already ‘interdisciplinary’ [i.e. they have all the required subjects], that’s not actually the case because they lack the tools to integrate them, even if they have the desire to do so.
The Execution Premium
More solid stuff from Kaplan and Norton, which moves on somewhat from their balanced scorecard + strategy maps ideas. The Execution Premium points out “Strategy that does not link to operations is not strategic. It’s just pointless planning.” and goes on to outline how to plan operations to deliver the strategy – a notable omission from most business school strategy classes.
Why Most CEOs Are Bad at Strategy
A blog post by Roger Martin* makes a good case that CEOs find it hard to simultaneously make a good choice of where to play and how to win. He concludes they need to go beyond these basics and ‘creatively integrate’ these two views. True enough if performance were all about formulating strategy, but it forgets that order-of-magnitude differences in performance more often arise from relentless expert management of strategy, than from unique choices of where+how to play.
He also claims that we do not have the tools to integrate these perspectives – which is not true, of course, because that’s what strategy dynamics does.
* Dean of the Rotman School of Management
Speed up clean-tech adoption
A Chatham House report calls for policy makers to cut radically the time for clean technologies to be implemented. Even when technically and financially attractive, adoption takes decades. This can be changed – a big strategic opportunity for firms in relevant sectors, as well as massively important to society - see my note. Read more
Green strategy potential
In Green Is a Strategy, strategy+business makes a strong case that sustainability is becoming, not a nuisance issue to which business will have to react, so much as an opportunity for advantage that needs to be proactively grasped. Read more
Which CEOs to admire?
It seems the real hero-CEOs are not the well-known names, and perhaps not with well-known companies either. In Do We Celebrate the Wrong CEOs? Morten Hansen and Herminia Ibarra identify CEOs who have delivered sustained, long-term growth in investor returns over long periods, and it’s likely you never heard of most. More worrying – maybe the companies they run are not well documented either, nor what has been so great about the strategic management that delivered these great results.
Are you the best owner of your assets?
With M&A activity recovering, a timely reminder from McKinsey to check out this question. Simple principles, but easily forgotten.
Business model innovation: BMI
A clear and practical paper from BCG explains nicely what a business model is, what ‘innovating’ it means, and when and how to do it. The only caveat is the superior total shareholder returns it claims comes from BMI innovators vs. traditional innovators – it likely excludes BMI innovators who failed. So by all means check it out, assess whether BMI is appropriate for you, but if not, get back to driving performance in your existing business model.
Beware divesting core business
A rare example of clear and useful academic research from Emilie Feldman at Harvard [but treat it with care - see below]. Emilie “investigates “legacy” divestitures, the sale or spinoff of a company’s historical core business. Firms appear to divest their legacy businesses within the context of larger efforts to reshape their identities. I find that operating performance deteriorates Read more
Scenarios for all
McKinsey’s Charles Roxburgh offers nicely practical advice on the use and abuse of scenarios. In the process he points out that the latest crisis many firms find themselves in, like previous ones, was foreseeable and even preventable if management had done this work professionally. And remember scenarios are not just useful for the big firms – any competent management team should be asking itself what range of things could happen, both to exploit incipient opportunities and anticipate new challenges.