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…

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…

A few times in the past, experienced consultants have told me how they use a “hypothesis-driven” approach to figure out strategy recommendations for clients. In summary, this means starting from some well-informed explanation for the outcome of interest. We then seek and analyse data about the elements of that explanation,…

You maybe never made this mistake, but I sure did … As a junior planning analyst and consultant, when it came to presenting my findings and recommendations, I thought the way to do it was:… explain the analysis I had done… show the insights that emerged from that analysis… justify…