A while back, a life insurance company developed a great new policy-product, aimed at “high-net-worth individuals” – especially people with higher incomes, who wanted to protect their families in the event of their untimely demise! Being more complex than life-insurance for mid-level earners, this new product was well suited to…

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…

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…

My last post “Get buy-in with the Pyramid Principle” explained a process to win support for important conclusions or recommendations … start with the key recommendation, or issue you want agreed summarise the key insights that lead to this recommendation then only explain any supporting analysis that audience questions call…

McKinsey reports on the increasingly strategic role that CFOs, but that needs dynamic business models.