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. Continue reading »
Jul 242009
Amongst the continuing stream of articles on this, some good ones [I've left out some bad or downright dangerous ones] include: Continue reading »
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. Continue reading »
Mar 212009
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. Continue reading »
Jan 042009
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?
How to win by changing the game by head of Booz N America business Cesare Mainardi, and colleagues Paul Leinwand and Steffen Lauster makes a strong case for building capabilities to capture new opportunities, rather than looking inward at what you already have. Capabilities feature strongly in current strategy writing, but seem hard to make practical. The article implies, though, that they have a way of making capabilities concrete and measurable, to arrive at a ‘capability coherence’ indicator that seems to correlate with profitability – at least in the consumer products sector. This is a big step forward from the abstract and obscure concepts that feature in academic articles on the topic. Continue reading »
I realise I’ve focused on what McKinsey has had to say on the downturn, and especially on the failure to warn of the subprime nonsense, so thought I should check out the other big consulting firms. Not so easy, as they mostly don’t publish their own views quite so firmly or accessibly as happens with the McK Quarterly.
Why am I banging on about this? If those advisors had been urging caution when it was obvious trouble could be building, and their clients had listened and acted, then much of the over-commitment that made the boom-to-bust so serious would never have occurred. What, for example, would have happened had these firms all blown the whistle on the subprime bubble early in 2006? The world might have been a very different and happier place than it now is. So what did the consultants have to say on this and the impending downturn generally?
I’ve been posting on strategy in the downturn for a while now, but what makes me really angry is the strategic incompetence that led to this mess [search 'incompetence' for previous posts on this]. But now I’m puzzled – Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly, Strategy+Business, Economist, etc, etc, are full of advice from strategy experts on how to survive the problem, so I wondered how much they warned folk before that this was likely to happen? .. and how much advice they offered on how to make sure your organization would avoid trouble in the first place? Continue reading »
Oct 312008
In The Coming Boom in Hybrid Cars ‘in strategy+business makes out that sales of hybrid vehicles are following exactly what would be expected from ‘S-curve theory’ [?] - slow initial growth being driven by early adopters until the innovation becomes mainstream. Standard approaches have little to say about the scale or nature of change in such cases. Continue reading »
