Talking about strategy » MIT

MIT on Intelligent Enterprise

Kim Warren — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 14:40:10 +0000

Analytics: the New path to Value reports on what leading firms are doing with analytics. It offers five big recommendations. Whilst reasonable enough, they raise more questions than answers:

Focus on the biggest and highest value opportunities – should be easy enough in most cases, though blind-spots are common .. e.g. if you don’t know how to destroy competitors, the option is not likely to feature in the identified opportunities.
Within each opportunity, start with questions, not data – right, but what questions? Without a solid model of how the business works, key questions will get missed, e.g. many firms don’t know the scale or pattern of their customer losses, and of those that do, few know the reasons for those losses.
Embed insights to drive actions and deliver value – it’s tricky if you haven’t identified the best opportunities or asked the right questions concering them to find the insights, let alone embed them.
Keep existing capabilities while adding new ones – fair enough, though as we are not so good at specifying exactly what a ‘capability’ is, we will find it hard to define what new ones to develop, what effort will be needed, or what benefit will result.
Use an information agenda to plan for the future - not sure what an information agenda might be.

It would be helpful if such reports could specify potentially useful recommendations more clearly.

www.strategydynamics.com

From CSR to ROI at Nike

Kim Warren — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 14:59:03 +0000

Many firms seem stuck with the idea that Corp Social Responsibility = cost. A free case study from MIT on Nike makes the case that CSR has driven ROI, though also makes clear the challenges of working out what to tackle, at least in their case. It would seem worthwhile for other firms to read this and ask if their might be a case for them also to plug CSR into their strategies, rather than treating it as a charitable side-line.

www.strategydynamics.com

IT-driven innovation

Kim Warren — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 11:48:20 +0000

Some great material from MIT on this issue – IT has recently had less attention in strategy discussions than it once had, but that’s a big mistake, and these articles and videos explain well how to exploit IT powerfully. Just have your hype-filter set to full, though, to read through the journalistic headlines for the reliable detail beneath.

Sustainability and strategy

Kim Warren — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 09:51:55 +0000

Good to see a serious management journal – MIT’s Sloan Management Review – regularly featuring items on this issue. John Sterman’s ‘Sober optimist’s guide to sustainability‘ and an interview with Rebecca Henderson are both good. Rebecca uses the fact that making every shirt uses hundreds of gallons of water to point out that we are just not aware of wider consequences of what we do – and if we don’t know, we are hardly likely to act, either as consumers or firms. There are tons of basic facts like this, e.g. there are about 5 acres (2 hectares) of land area for each person on the planet, about five football pitches – rather less if we leave out barren territory, so everything we consume and all the waste we produce has to come from and return to just that small area.

For thinking about implications for strategy, I’ve just been pointed to Green to Gold by Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston, which looks at what leading companies are already doing. It’s pretty easy to extend the strategic architecture of a business to incorporate its impact on natural resources, and I will include a summary of how that works in the next edition of my textbook.