More ‘transformation’ hype

Posted by:

Just had to pour some cooling water over another bit of hype on this issue. Harvard Business Publishing just promoted ‘Constant Transformation Is the New Normal‘ by Scott Anthony. See below for my reponse:

Please be careful about this kind of journalistic hype! There are plenty of less-thoughtful folk out there who will just pick up the headlines and set off doing dumb things urged on by discussions like this.
‘Transformation’ is about the most exaggerated and over-sold concept ...

Continue Reading →

Understanding customer churn

Posted by:

Great seminar last week by my colleague Bruce Hardie at London Business School on the complications involved in the simple idea of customer churn. Bruce probably knows more than most experts how to extract useful information on the issues from corporate systems. A few key messages I heard …

Bruce feels the word ‘churn’ should only be used for customer relationships based on contracts, e.g. in banking, mobile phones, media subscriptions. It’s not always simple, even then – many people ...

Continue Reading →

What is strategy? … and the strategy life-cycle

Posted by:

Just working on the first chapter of the textbook 2nd edition, and thought it needed a bit more on this question – found the only way to explain to newbies was to go through an organization’s life and track what ‘strategic management’ actually does over that time-horizon. Main messages are:

  • The choice of strategic ‘position’ [what to provide, to whom and how, relative to rivals] is a very rare activity.
  • Substantial strategic initiatives [acquisition, new market entry etc] occur occasionally.
  • By far the ...
Continue Reading →