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.

Merely seeing the pattern is interesting but so what? This is a fundamental tool for something virtually no companies do well – truly competitive strategy.

The basic principles are simple:

• Trying to do a bit better than everyone, at everything, to get a bit more market share [as most firms do] is hopeless – very costly, everyone can see what you are doing and does the same, and it just doesn’t work.
• Competitors vary in their scale and strength, and therefore in the benefit you would gain if they weren’t around.

… so it is clearly best to pick your 1-2 key victims and focus competitive efforts just on those - for which the ‘power curve’ is the ideal tool. Having picked which wounded wildebeest to take down, some simple principles help identify how to do it.  These are explained in chapter 5 of Strategic Management Dynamics, and you can download the extract that explains how to destroy competitors [the power curve is what you need for Figure 5.27].