Seven Ways Forward from Booz & Co’s strategy+business on, with specifics for Manufacturing, Consumer Products, Aerospace and Defense, Telecom, Finance, and general guidance on rebuilding capabilities for long-term growth.

Surviving the Downturn: Lessons from Emerging Markets from Sloan Mgmt Review [title self-explanatory]

Three Opportunities to Seize in the Downturn a blog post from Harvard Business Publishing [HBP] makes the case for two points I’ve raised before [a] that there’s cheap talent on the market right now, and [b] there are cheap opportunities to acquire key assets or entire businesses … which leads to the 3rd point, that there will be new winners and losers out of all this.

How Recessions Shake Up Industries in the Daily Stat from HBP [their link takes you to a different article] reports studies from McKinsey and BCG on how industry leaders fall and new leaders emerge in downturns – a reminder for your strategy to be intentional and targeted about challenging specific existing and new rivals, not just trying in some vague way to do better than others [a shortpiece on this at the end of chapter 5 in my book].

Timing Strategic Moves in the McKinsey Quarterly explains how scenario approaches can help avoid moving too soon or too late in these uncertain times. It’s rather focused on macro-economic and stock-market indicators, rather than [I'd prefer a more assertive stance be taken - choosing what to do and when in order to make the future play out as you want, rather than the passive response implied if not actually stated in this.]

Strategic Planning: Three Tips for 2009 from McKinsey Quarterly explains the value of scenario-based planning, the need to intensify monitoring to detect how the recovery is changing things, and the need I have emphasised to look beyond the crisis. [Shame most firms were not doing enough monitoring before the recession!]

Also some good content in Taking Advantage of Tumultuous Times from Monitor.

Full article at Rethink Your Strategy: An Urgent Memo to the CEO.

Much of the advice is generic, and requires much more work than the brief headlines suggest. It also implies undoing much of the foolish activity that firms engaged in during the boom – by cutting fringe activities, shedding marginal businesses, conserving cash. [Where was the advice on these basic principles over the last 4 years?]

Then, as I’ve argued before, look for M&A and other opportunities to rationalise competition to your own advantage – see more on pushing out rivals from chapter 7 of my book.

This is a big step forward from the much-abused, misused and dangerous focus on ‘core competences‘ – the idea that some unique and super-powerful capability will deliver sustainable competitive advantage. [I even came across one quoted company who re-titled the entire strategic planning system in the firm as their 'core competence process']. Here’s an extract from my chapter 10 showing one example of why it doesn’t work …

 “Practising managers commonly look for core competences, but it should by now be clear that firm performance depends on accumulating and maintaining a complete system of mutually-supportive resources. If any of these is inadequate in scale or quality, the performance of the entire system will suffer – the firm must be capable in all resource-building and maintenance activities. Attempts to identify a single capability that will provide sustained advantage are doomed to failure, as the following quote from the Economist (July 4th, 1998) illustrates for Honda.
‘… by 1990, Honda was in thrall to its engineers – a priesthood … untroubled by the dismal business of marketing and accounting … It hardly seemed to matter that customers were not buying Honda’s flights of engineering fancy … Things were already going wrong [due to lack of] attention to what the customer wanted and producing it at reasonable cost. … it was taking twice as long to get a new Honda into production as Toyota.’Â
This brief comment is remarkable for indicating the supposedly non-core capabilities that were in poor shape – design capability to create cars that people wanted, product-development capability to get them into production quickly, production engineering capability to achieve low unit-cost, marketing capability to build the customer-base, and accounting and control capability to translate revenues into cash. The solution to Honda’s troubles involved reducing the focus on technology for its own sake, turning attention instead to market research and product-design, and moving policy control from the engineering function to the marketing and production departments. ” – interesting to note that Honda was in this mess in 1990, exactly the year that their core competence in engine technology featured in an HBR article! Of course Honda has come a long way since then, and the HBR article never actually said that you didn’t need to be basically capable in all other functions.

So … the capability-coherence notion from Cesare Mainardi and colleagues is a welcome call to make sure all necessary capabilities are strong.