I asked for two ratings – Useful [no, a little, very] – and Dangerous [no, a little, very] – and allowed people to respond with both if they felt a suggestion was both potentially useful, but also came with dangers. Following are the most common views – with no initial prompting from me! Note that other views were justified in specific cases.

De-layer management

Useless and dangerous in most cases. Most felt it should only to be done in extreme crisis – like danger of bankruptcy.

Consolidate support functions

Possibly useful and not too dangerous, provided it did not distract management from other important tasks.

Redefine your business model

Useless in most cases and dangerous diversion from managing the business.

Save the core at the expense of the periphery

Very useful, and not too dangerous. With prompting, most felt their firms had over-expanded away from their core in the first place.

Buy up cheap assets – or whole businesses

Very useful and not dangerous if current business was not struggling too much.

Pick up good people who become available

Very useful and not dangerous. Most have found it tough to get the people they needed before the crisis, so see this as a great opportunity.

Keep going with all strategic initiatives

Could be useful but also dangerous … most thought they had way too many ‘strategic’ initiatives that should never have been started. Conflicted with the better advice above to focus on the core.

So … if there was a good purpose in having them help last year, chances are it’s still a good purpose now. Chucking them out looks like another example of ‘gesture management’ that some companies seem to think they need to do, but don’t.

” …

Have had many useful answers on this. There seems little dissent that:

• we have a problem with current strategy methods not being valued by the people who are supposed to use them,

• … which implies we have little useful theory [notably that seeking explanations for profitability is the wrong question], and
• existing strategy tools focus on the rare issue of choosing strategic position, rather than what management actually does to steer strategy and performance continually through time.

If this is all about right, perhaps any firm’s ‘sustained competitive advantage’  shows up not in persistent higher profitability, but in stronger sustained growth in cash-flows. Perhaps this implies that the question strategy should be asking [in business cases at least] is ‘what does management actually do to deliver sustained growth of cash flows ahead of others?’ On this measure, performance of strong firms might be tens or hundreds of times greater than that of weaker ones, so an answer would seem to be of more interest to our customers .. executives, consultants, students .. than a few percentage points of ROIC or ‘rent’.
It would be useful to hear more from the senior figures in the strategy field as to whether this is all way off-target – I would not want to stand accused of encouraging colleagues down a long, deep and dark blind alley. Maybe there is no problem with the reputation of Strategy in its market-place, with basic strategy theory, or with the utility of the tools and methods that are recommended and taught?

…”

Kim