Bain & Co offer good reviews of strategic imperatives in chemicals, retail banking, consumer packaged goods, engineered products and services, oil and gas, and technology – with supporting reports on each. Well worth a a look if you are in any of these, but also some useful insights applicable to other sectors. Chemicals, for example, offers the deadly combination of over-capacity and competitors with both innate advantages and naive strategies – just as was the case when I started my strategy career 30 years ago! Other common themes include the need to rationalise poor-quality assets – not just within a business but between competitors through M&A and asset-swaps, the threat of rapidly developing competitors moving from cost-leadership to superior technology, and the value of focusing on quality customers, not just quantity.