Experience matters

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Nice to see confirmation that good strategic management is more likely if the complexities of the job are handled by people with experience. HBSP’s Daily Stat reports an academic study showing that insiders make better CEOs than external appointees. Perhaps this will hold back some Boards’ preference for paying exorbitant sums to head-hunters to fix grossly excessive deals for rent-a-CEOs, then paying those CEOs off with still more bags of cash when they mess up.

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Leadership and strategy

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Seeing our bankers grilled by politicians for gross failure highlights a confusion we see much of – an implied assumption that great leadership is the same as great strategic management.  Most telling for me was that of the 6 banking heads challenged by MPs in the UK, half had no significant industry experience! There is a big difference between knowing what’s best to do and inspiring others to do it – and being good at the second but useless at ...

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Strategy and sustainability

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Had a couple of interesting contacts on this last week. Seems senior executives in general certainly ‘want to do what’s right’, but face two difficulties. First, it’s not as obvious as it seems to know what the right thing is to do [think of the debates about exploiting cheap labour vs. destitution and poverty]. Secondly, it’s hard for CEOs to make the business case for doing things that seem to be just costly. We can help on both issues.

First, my ...

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The banking crisis – again

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I’ve gone on about this before, but it’s gone way, way worse since I last brought it up, so let’s not forget that this whole mess started with gross strategic incompetence on the part of a few dozen CEOs of ordinary banks over-selling high-cost mortgages to more-and-more people who, more-and-more, couldn’t afford it – and egged on by equally incompetent analysts lauding those same CEOs for their foolishness – and then compounded by further incompetence when those toxic loans were ...

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