Sense-and-Adjust – and Create

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It Makes Sense to Adjust in strategy+business describes a simple process that any decently-led organisation should be using:

  1. “sensing” to detect changes and assess their likely impact, then
  2. “adjusting” policies to keep the strategy and performance on track.

Some sensible examples illustrate the approach, such as anticipating staffing needs in a cyclical business – though one wonders what on earth the companies discussed were doing before if they didn’t do this! It contrasts sense-and-adjust with reactive styles (do nothing until forced to) ...

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Continuous strategic management

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Just came across a great piece, but curiously embedded in a McKinsey Quarterly article that seems to be about something else entirely – an update of how to decide what businesses should be in a corporate portfolio. The little gem is on the evolution of strategic management – which describes how strategy has evolved from a basically financial approach, through forecasting and then externally driven strategizing, to its ultimate, described as follows:

When this investment [in strategic planning] is successful, the ...

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Get strategic planning right

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Useful reminder to avoid flaws in strategic planning in HBP’s Management Essentials. Especially good to see the first item:

  1. Don’t skip rigorous analysis.
  2. Don’t think strategy can be built in a day.
  3. Take care to link strategic planning to strategy execution.
  4. Make sure to hold robust strategy review meetings.

This may all seem verypedestrian in these exciting times of strategic innovation and reinventing your business model – but no less critical than it always was.

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More items on strategy in the crisis

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Amongst the continuing stream of articles on this, some good ones [I’ve left out some bad or downright dangerous ones] include:

Seven Ways Forward from Booz & Co’s strategy+business on, with specifics for Manufacturing, Consumer Products, Aerospace and Defense, Telecom, Finance, and general guidance on rebuilding capabilities for long-term growth.

Surviving the Downturn: Lessons from Emerging Markets from Sloan Mgmt Review [title self-explanatory]

Three Opportunities to Seize in the Downturn a blog post from Harvard Business ...

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