Some time ago I was involved in helping local authorities understand changes to the supply and demand for elderly-care homes. This was to help them understand the likely prices they would have to pay providers in order to ensure enough capacity. (In the UK, those authorities are fully responsible for…

A nice word of caution from strategy+business magazine about looking for magic strategy answers by peering into the ways of superstars. In The Google Enigma, they point out that ‘Unless your company makes money by selling advertising attached to digital goods, you may not be able to learn much from…

Many companies may find some of the articles in the latest e-issue of the McKinsey Quarterly to be helpful, such as ‘Market fundamentals: 2000 versus 2007‘ and ‘Learning to love recessions‘. Even more useful perhaps is the article on ‘Preparing for the next downturn‘ – it can be too late…

The latest from McKinsey Quarterly is yet another fire-hosing about ‘driving radical change’, ‘transformation without crisis’, etc. etc. Radical change is very rarely needed, most often destructive, and only appropriate in the most dire circumstances – which applies to very few organizations. And don’t come back with ‘Well you’ve got…

This FT article regrettably makes public what can no longer be kept as private grief within the business schools – and Strategy is amongst the wp_ offenders ! There’s no gentle way to say this – virtually no-one uses the ‘tools’ we teach, because they don’t do anything useful. Take…

Interesting to see from Booz Allen’s journal strategy+business that there’s no guarantee of getting innovation success from spending more on R&D – the most successful companies seem to make sure innovation efforts align with corporate strategy and listen to their customers. [see Myth 1 post]