Nice concept, and BCG probably have intensive analytical tools to assess your rating on the 4 dimensions, but I fear that in practice it will join the list of qualitative and subjective ‘methods’ that seem to make sense, but don’t give much real value. It is hardly a great insight, for example, for a would-be multinational entrant to a RDE to discover it needs to focus on local adaptation of its products.

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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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.

Attention to what competitors are doing – especially new ones -  is a critical skill in strategic management, but often ignored. And usually you can do something about it. Not only can you undermine the strategies of current competitors to the point that they collapse, it is also perfectly possible to pull the ground from under new rivals – and to do so legally, of course! [One short example of how is given in chapter 5 of Strategic Management Dynamics and I plan to say more in future chapters]. You may not stop all the attacks, but holding back just a fraction can make your life a whole lot easier than sitting back and watching.

Good to see the Boston Consulting Group encourage us to focus on the core business (as we should have been doing in the first place), protect product development, look at competitors’ weaknesses etc. – and all with analysis too, rather than gut feel !

Unfortunate, though, that some of the proposals conflict, and some are positively dangerous. “.. begin with aggressive moves to cut costs and increase efficiency … some means of lowering break-even points are obvious: stripping out layers of the organization … consolidating central functions … “.

If you’re in danger of going under, maybe, but I keep coming across companies where everyone is ludicrously flat out and simply failing to get important things done. The strong impression is that many managements are grossly under-staffed, not top-heavy. And what goes out the door when you throw out those “time-wasters”? – the organization’s memory and knowledge of how to do simple, critical things. And those constant reorganizations do the same – in function after function, no-one knows how to do things because none of them have been there more than five minutes.

What you need in present conditions is settled people who really know what they are doing. [Reminds me of the three dimensions of organizational capability - the ability to do critical tasks well, fast, and cheap - see chapter 9 of Strategic Management Dynamics - analyst-driven obsession with doing things cheap does serious damage to doing things well, and fast.]

Then the article repeats that other current fad “Rethink your business model” – almost always wrong and in present conditions a bad distraction from making what you have work really effectively.

There’s some good stuff too though, so take a look – but with brain engaged!

Why am I banging on about this?  If those advisors had been urging caution when it was obvious trouble could be building, and their clients had listened and acted, then much of the over-commitment that made the boom-to-bust so serious would never have occurred. What, for example, would have happened had these firms all blown the whistle on the subprime bubble early in 2006? The world might have been a very different and happier place than it now is. So what did the consultants have to say on this and the impending downturn generally?

It’s not easy finding what Boston Consulting Group strategy folk had to say on the subject. Publications seem to be a mix of reports, press releases and external citations, organised by industry and topic, and the search function delivers a long, repetitious list of items. I couldn’t find any pre-warnings about the likelihood of collapse, though, either in subprime specifically or in the wider economy – but it may be there somewhere.

Bain & Co offer ‘Bain briefs‘ and newsletters that, like McK Q articles are very well written and helpful. They are a little easier to find your way around, but I found no mention of subprime in either set of resources, and again no warnings before collapse was well under way in many other sectors, nor strategy recommendations on what to do about it.

Monitor has items nicely organised by topic and by industry. Many of these, like BCG’s were published in other channels. Couldn’t find much on the finance industry – certainly no warnings. Under strategy there are some items from the Financial Times on ‘mastering risk’, but these focus on firm-specific risk, rather than warning of dangers building in the wider environment.  What is especially curious about this is that Monitor has a link-up with Global Business Network – the premiere scenario planning gurus [As I write, their website does not seem to be responding]. Indeed, the Monitor site has some publications by, or in collaboration with GBN experts, such as Future-Proofing Your Organisation, by partner Nick Turner. Strange then, that neither this article nor any other I could find explicitly warned CEOs during 2006/7 to anticipate and plan for a serious reversal – but again I may well have missed something. 

Booz Allen Hamilton, of course, publishes strategy+business magazine which regularly offers great articles, the most useful of which I try to post on. The BHA website also offers Reports & Studies, with extensive archives. Didn’t see much from the last couple of years that warned about hard times ahead, but I did pounce on 2007: Trends and Prospects: Letters to Clients, which offered articles aimed at various sectors.  By that time, we were well into the slow-down that would turn into collapse, so good to see that on both mortgages and retail banking generally, Booz were not urging firms to go for growth, though the main response recommended was merely to cut costs, not to cut out bad quality business or take a knife to ill-conceived ‘strategic’ initiatives. And I saw no mention in their views on the Auto industry, for example, of any possible reversal [currently down 30% in UK], and with the US big-3 asking for bail-outs.

That’s about all I’ve got time for right now. We could go on and see what the next few firms in the consultancy rankings had to say – Mercer, Deloitte, Wyman, PWC etc, but I hope you get the point. The main responsibility of strategic management is to ensure sustainability of organizations’ mid- to long-term future, so it is vital that top teams look over the horizon and prepare for what might be approaching. Most larger companies rely to some degree on the consulting firms for strategic advice, so could have expected these advisors to be warning of possible trouble ahead as long ago as 2006, and saying how firms should prepare – but I could find no sign of them having done that.