Operations Strategy is key
Good to see strategy+business magazine on why operations strategy is vital to strategic performance. In Winter-09 edn An Essential Step for Corporate Strategy, Tim Laster points out that many operational decisions have huge implications for firms’ ability to build and sustain critical resources and capabilities, in spite of efforts by Michael Porter and others to dismiss their impotance. We do, though, need to go further, and develop a holistic, continuous view of strategy across all functions of course.
Better than HBR?
Harvard Business Review may be seen as the gold-standard for leading edge management thinking. But I am increasingly impressed by the quality of other journals. McKinsey Quarterly, of course, has long produced solid content based on work with major clients, or else on serious research from their Global Institute, and other big consulting firms do some of the same. Now, seems to me, Sloan Management Review is also putting out important, well-informed articles reflecting rigorous work, and strategy+business from Booz & Co does the same.
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?
… but some transformations are vital
There’s no question transformation is sometimes powerful or just unavoidable. You will find a more thorough, professional case showing how to think it through in Reinventing Print Media from strategy+business.
Re-imagine the future
S+B reports onThe Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. Read more
Building acquisition capability
Good discussion of M&A in strategy+business from Booz. Points out that making acquisitions is, like most other activities, something you get better at with practice, so skilled companies build real capability at doing it. Read more
More items on strategy in the crisis
Amongst the continuing stream of articles on this, some good ones [I've left out some bad or downright dangerous ones] include: Read more
Online environment changing competition
Digital Darwinism by Christopher Vollmer in strategy+business plays to my view of strategy as making order-of-magnitude impact, not the percentage incrementalism that constrains much management thinking. Read more
How firms are coping
Mixed news from a recent S+B survey of execs. 75% say they do not need extra financial support – as I suspected – though that may change of course. More worrying is that most seem not to be taking the correct actions, given their specific situations. Read more
Anyone using game theory?
Though I have heard of game theory being used in a few particular and special cases (e.g. the auctioning of 3G cellphone licenses) I have not seen anything of it being used in general strategic management or business planning. The strategy textbooks dismiss it as too uni-dimensional and limited to special cases to be useful, and I can find virtually no articles in e.g. Harvard Business Review or McKinsey Quarterly giving any encouraging cases where it has been helpful. (Though I did see on 12manage reference to a strategy+business article on Barry Nalebuff).
Does anyone know otherwise?