I see middle managers are getting hit yet again, this time in McKinsey Quarterly as ‘innovation blockers‘.
It seems to be forgotten that middle managers have the additional rather boring but important role of actually running the business that generates the cash flow that funds innovation. This is the group that actually knows how things work, [...]

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 [...]

… 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The Academy of Management conference each summer brings together large numbers of faculty from business schools, mostly from the United States but also from other countries. Amongst the sessions on strategy at this year’s event in Philadelphia, discussions expressed disquiet about the state of the subject and its status in departments and teaching in business [...]