Make your strategy resilient

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How to Prepare for a Black Swan in strategy+business offers good advice to assess exposure to disruptive events, but misses key elements a strategy can and should cover.

In summary, the advice is [1] map the firm’s operations, supply-chain and sales channels [2] list potential disruptions [3] ask ‘what if’ these happen [4] set up contingency plans. Work on risk in utilities shows several additional strategy responses are both possible and desirable.

  1. Reduce the risk that an event will actually cause ...
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The psychopath leader

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A great episode of BBC’s Horizon hints that business leaders may feature 4x more psychopaths than the average population – up to one in 25 – just might explain why some leaders have driven banks and other firms to keep doing things everyone knows are dumb, messing things up for the rest of us in the process. I guess we each have our own examples – I worked with one in academia too!

The programme reviewed basic findings about psychopathy [I ...

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Strategy Dynamics Briefing 41: Important implications of the customer choice pipeline

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This briefing offers some observations that, whilst illustrated by Briefing 40, are far more general. Here they are…

  1. The difference between good strategy and poor can be massive, as the contrast between the two cases in briefing 40 clearly shows. We have previously pointed out that superior profitability is not the main concern of investors, who tend to value growth in earnings. Furthermore, performance differences on such measures are not typically very wide. On the other hand, firms may differ by ...
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Strategy and the economy

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With worries about world economies falling back again, we could reflect on how we got in this mess, and some questions for Strategy.

Recessions usually start, I hear, in the corporate sector – falls in consumer or public spending then follow those business reversals, rather than the opposite. It can also be shown that an industry can fall into big cycles with no variability at all in underlying demand growth. If this happens in one sector, then both the boom and ...

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Strategy models help Boeing

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I see strong 2nd quarter profits at Boeing,  just after hearing their strategy VP explain their heavy use of strategy models. Their industry model led them not to cut production after a 2009 collapse in orders, in spite of screams from analysts that they should do so to cut costs. Reminds me Airbus used a similar model way back in 96 (also in link above) to spot that a massive jump in orders was fluff, and to ...

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