Given all the hard work that true experts put into building powerful solutions to strategy challenges, it is truly depressing how easily folk are seduced by sexy-sounding slogans. Over the many years, we have been told that our strategic performance would be transformed by “creative destruction“, ” a blue-ocean strategy“,…

More on that push-back from a strategy expert, challenging my claim that the issues below are all unavoidable parts of managing an organisation’s strategy. Strategy – they say – is only about Formulation + consecutive one year Plans (the left-most item alone) … Here’s the second story making my case…

I got challenged for my claim that the issues in this figure are all unavoidably parts of managing strategy. Strategy, they say, is only about Formulation and creating consecutive one year Plans.(This goes to the very heart of the “What is Strategy?” question) A couple of stories may make my…

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) account for a large fraction of greenhouse-gas emissions (GHGs) from the business sector. But although most SMEs undoubtedly want to “do the right thing” and cut those emissions, few have the resources to devote to understanding the issue as it relates to their own case, let…

I recently explained the limitations of hypothesis-testing for strategic planning and problem-solving, and the advantages of abductive reasoning as more efficient and reliable method (keep asking “What directly causes that?”) But what kind of causes should we be looking for? It turns out that a 13th century monk – William…

My last post noted that hypothesis-testing is recommended as a scientific and efficient method for developing strategy – or maybe figuring out what’s going wrong. But that post also showed how it is not as efficient or reliable as is claimed. I also explained that, in business cases, we are…