A nice word of caution from strategy+business magazine about looking for magic strategy answers by peering into the ways of superstars. In The Google Enigma, they point out that ‘Unless your company makes money by selling advertising attached to digital goods, you may not be able to learn much from Google’s example’. You can say [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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]

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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 [...]

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]

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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 [...]

Many of the articles, comments and conferences about strategy-related issues seem to perpetuate some damaging myths - so I thought it might be useful to develop a list of these as I come across them.
This one comes up all over the place - the idea that successful strategy requires constant ‘re-invention’ of the business [...]

With my second major book (Strategic Management Dynamics from Wiley) fast approaching publication, and trying to balancing a number of different conversations about the book and the approach, it seems a good time to open out the discussion via a blog.
I will be offering some thoughts on the subject shortly, so watch this space.
Kim

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