The old value-chain may help show how costs and activities are traded off between parts of the system, but says nothing about how that system will perform over time.

• Building Strategy and Performance through Time: The Critical Path outlines the key ideas and frameworks of strategy dynamics.
• Developing Employee Talent to Perform: People Power explains the big contribution that strategy dynamics thinking has for HR professionals.

• Thur 6th Aug 4.30-6.00, Chicago, before Academy of Mgmt
• Mon 7th Sept 2.00-5.00, Warwick, before OR51
• Mon 14th Sept 6.30-8.00, Brighton, before British Academy of Mgmt
• Sun 11th Oct 8.00-9.30 morning, Washington, before Strategic Management Society 

They are separate from the conferences, so attending those is not required. If you would like to attend, please register here.

Do take care, though - few are universally applicable, so you will need to assess how appropriate each is to your specific situation.

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He is being too kind - not even relevance is needed. The subject that should above all others show how organizations work - breaking across all those silos - is strategy, but the resource-based view [RBV] that has dominated strategy ‘research’ for 20 years is of no practical value. Beyond the trivial observation that it is good to have resources and capabilities competitors can’t easily copy, RBV goes off into arcane and abstract theorising that is of no actual use. So executives and MBAs are mostly still being taught with static tools that do little more than help choose a strategic ‘position’ - important, but a very small part of competent strategic management.

I have no problem being shown to be wrong on this. It’s no fun trying to justify working in a field that has failed so badly. So it would be great to see some detailed examples of RBV - as defined in the strategy academy - being really used. What was the situation, what RBV analysis was done on what data, leading to what choices and decisions, adapted in what way as conditions changed , to deliver strong and sustainable performance? It would be even better if anyone can show how RBV helped an organization anticipate the recent crisis and protect itself against harm. Please anyone, if it’s out there, tell us.

Reminder - This document reviews through some well-known cases the current philosophy and some basic tools of business strategy to make the case for a continuous, holistic approach to strategic management, i.e. strategy dynamics.

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Whilst random fluctuations add complexity to how exactly events unfold, many of the phenomena discussed in this article feature simple underlying mechanisms that are well understood and do not need abstract or complex math.

The sub-prime lending collapse was inevitable, and its timing increasingly clear as conditions worsened. The 2001/02 dotcom crash was indicated as new-firm startups were gradually overtaken by failures - both of which were observable - with IT/telecom suppliers, consultancies and others relentlessly adding capacity while ignoring this data. The same has happened this time round in many sectors - e.g. ship construction, commercial property, credit-card lending.

Many such events feature thresholds being crossed in the organization’s own market environment - making it a basic discipline of competent strategic management to track these mechanisms, rather than looking for abstract and non-actionable answers in complexity. 

Please go to this article and challenge its value for helping senior managers steer organizations’ strategy and performance! - there’s a comment facility. … unless of course you know of a  real business that made real decisions with real impact on its sustained performance byusing complexity science that could not have been done easier, quicker cheaper another way?

“When this investment [in strategic planning] is successful, the result is strategic management: the melding of strategic planning and everyday management into a single, seamless process. In this phase, it is not that planning techniques have become more sophisticated than they were in phase three but that they have become inseparable from the process of management itself. No longer is planning a yearly, or even quarterly, activity. Instead, it is woven into the fabric of operational decision making.” It goes on to point out that virtually no companies have reached this point, except perhaps some in the electronics sector, where very fast changes across multiple products and highly segmented markets make it imperative.

… but surely this should be our aspiration for all organizations? though as I have noted before, we are not likely to get to this point with strategy tools that are simply incapable of ever delivering this result.

In any year, the vast majority of value is created by companies exploiting business models they have had for years or decades, rather than ones they just invented. On a longer view, though, all value ever created comes from business models that were new at some point in time. The article seems to be taking the first meaning - implying that most value is created by recently-new business models - and urges business schools to focus MBAs on innovation. This may be useful in some cases, but should not take precedence over strategy delivery. If this comment leads to MBAs learning less about how to deliver strategy as a result of focusing on innovation, it will be a great example of how an entirely false premise can lead to fundamentally wrong strategic choices [and this from a business school that is supposed to be teaching the rest of us how to do strategy well!]

So … when reading an article that seems persuasive, do put on your ’skeptical’ hat and just check that it’s built on accurate foundations.