Strategy Dynamics Briefing 82: Capabilities and business processes

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The mapping and deliberate design of effective business processes has become almost ubiquitous amongst larger organizations since business process re-engineering (BPR) came to prominence in the 1990s. At the time, many businesses were using information technology to automate activities that were pointless, rather than redesigning processes to incur the minimum essential activity. The result of redesigning or re-engineering the process would often be a considerable improvement in speed, reliability and cost efficiency.

In summary, BPR first identifies the activities involved ...

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Briefing, Strategy

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Strategy Dynamics Briefing 70: Basing decisions on direct effects

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Briefings 68 and 69 showed the dangers of decision-rules based on simple ratios or on overall performance outcomes. For the consumer brand’s marketing-spend decision from recent Briefings, for example, either “Spend x% of revenue on marketing”, or “If profits fall, spend less/more on marketing”.

So what do we need instead? Well, the basic problem is that neither of these approaches focuses on the direct consequences of the decision – winning customers! So a decision on marketing spend should surely respond ...

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Briefing, Strategy

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Strategy Dynamics Briefing 18: Resources drive each others growth, or limit it

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What makes strategy dynamics so POWERFUL?

We can now wrap up the rock-solid theorythat makes strategy dynamics so powerful:

  • Performance at any time of any organization depends on the levels of resources in place at that time
  • Resources fill up and drain away over time – mechanisms that therefore cause performance to change over time
  • The rates at which each resource fills and drains depends on existing levels of resources, which may include actual and potential levels of that resource itself.

[Briefing 16 already mentioned ...

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Briefing, Strategy

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Strategy Dynamics Briefing 16: What drives gains and losses of resources?

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I hope we have now made a pretty solid case for the first two parts of the core strategy dynamics framework:

  • Performance at any time of any organization depends on the levels of resources in place at that time
  • Resources accumulate and deplete over time – mechanisms that therefore cause performance to change over time

We got to these principles by repeating relentlessly the question ‘What causes what?’ So the next logical question is… ‘What causes the rate at which resources are won ...

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Briefing, Strategy

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