1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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

Meanwhile, HBR offers more and more articles featuring glib slogans or ‘X ways to do Y’ and other styles of  thin journalism. Some are downright dangerous! There are still some great exceptions of course, but I wonder if their crown is slipping. 

Anyone got other favourite sources?

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.

For many management choices, such as the pricing decision discussed in his interview, there are complex long-run dynamics that common methods simply can’t handle – hence the need for strategy dynamics.

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.

Great use of business intelligence is important and good to see. I would just add though, as I think I’ve noted before, that powerful organizations go beyond predicting what people want – they look for what they could be persuaded to want, then go about developing it and doing the persuading.