Finance-led Strategy: strangled business AND higher risk!

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It seems Finance has taken over Strategy’s role in recent years (our fault, not theirs), and we know this can strangle a business. The CFO tells the CEO to keep operating margins up, so pushes down on R&D, marketing, training, and just about anything needed to develop. So we keep slogging along with little growth, just about keeping investors calm with decent ‘returns’.

At least this might keep business risk under control – right? Maybe not. If the business is squeezed ...

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Booz & Co on strategy today

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Some sound principles in a brief Memo to the CEO. Particularly good is the focus on opportunity today’s conditions offer for sound firms.

Full article at Rethink Your Strategy: An Urgent Memo to the CEO.

Much of the advice is generic, and requires much more work than the brief headlines suggest. It also implies undoing much of the foolish activity that firms engaged in during the boom – by cutting fringe activities, shedding marginal businesses, ...

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