Capabilities clearly enable performance – if your organization can do key tasks, faster, cheaper or better than others, then you will develop stronger resources in a more powerful system than they can. But academic strategy articles on the topic are mostly too abstract to connect with the practical appraisal of skills and capabilities in organizations. So it’s good to see a down-to-earth approach to assessing skills from McKinsey – asking people to evaluate their own needs. But there’s more to a team’s or organization’s capabilities than just the sum of individuals’ skills, so could the same approach work for self-assessment of team capabilities?

If such capabilities consist of Continue reading »

Managers may not know or care, but this really matters. I’ve argued for professional strategic management before [search the archive], but if there’s a crisis in the discipline itself, there’s little chance of ever achieving that aim. Be clear – the academic topic of strategy is in real crisis. Students don’t like the courses, recruiters don’t value what they learn, executives don’t use its tools, and academics don’t want to be part of the field. A recent academic journal has some reasonably accessible discussion about the issue [not free I regret]. Here’s more about the problem, why it has come to pass, and possible solutions. Continue reading »

How to win by changing the game by head of Booz N America business Cesare Mainardi, and colleagues Paul Leinwand and Steffen Lauster makes a strong case for building capabilities to capture new opportunities, rather than looking inward at what you already have. Capabilities feature strongly in current strategy writing, but seem hard to make practical. The article implies, though, that they have a way of making capabilities concrete and measurable, to arrive at a ‘capability coherence’ indicator that seems to correlate with profitability – at least in the consumer products sector. This is a big step forward from the abstract and obscure concepts that feature in academic articles on the topic.  Continue reading »

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