I look forward to any new strategy book, so was thrilled to get “Good Strategy: Bad Strategy” by Prof Rumelt who McKinsey call ”strategy”s strategist”. Big disappointment! “Bad strategy” apparently shows up as ”fluff”, failure to face challenges, mistaking goals for strategy, or choosing bad objectives – all common enough,…

No surprise I suppose that many companies took the shock of the down-turn to focus on cost-cutting. In What worked in cost cutting—and what’s next? McKinsey’s report of a global survey offers mixed news – yes, plenty of costs were cut, but executives worry about sustaining those cuts and about…

Good advice from McKinsey on handling the behavioral issues of strategic decision-making. Important though this is, McK themselves have shown the strategy field offers little rigorous method for working out what to do – an issue that the field in general also worries about constantly. Hardly surprising, then, that in…

I strongly recommend a McKinsey article on using knowledge brokering to improve business processes, with some simple but powerful points. E.g. effective business processes are key to performance throughout a firm, and do not result from a random process of making-it-up-as-we-go-along-and-see-what-works, but a deliberate process of search and design. The article focuses on product-related and…

McKinsey’s Charles Roxburgh offers nicely practical advice on the use and abuse of scenarios. In the process he points out that the latest crisis many firms find themselves in, like previous ones, was foreseeable and even preventable if management had done this work professionally. And remember scenarios are not just useful…

Just been alerted to Green Recovery, another debunking of assertions that it is too costly to tackle environmental damage [notably carbon emissions]. This follows a session I saw from  John Sterman of MIT and the Sustainability Institute, which reported McKinsey data showing 10 giga-tons per year [!!] of CO2 abatement potential that is financially…