Peter Drucker

There is no perfect strategic decision. One always has to pay a price. One always has to balance conflicting objectives, conflicting opinions, and conflicting priorities. The best strategic decision is only an approximation – and a risk.

Peter Drucker

No business can do everything. Even if it has the money, it will never have enough good people. It has to set priorities. The worst thing to do is a little bit of everything. It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.

Ambidexterity: The Art of Thriving in Complex Environments

Ambidexterity—the ability to excel simultaneously in efficiency and innovation—is a rare but increasingly critical capability in today’s complex business environment. There are four distinct approaches to achieving it, and the suitability of each one depends on the diversity and dynamism of the specific company’s environment.

Peter Drucker

Strategic management is not a box of tricks or a bundle of techniques. It is analytical thinking and commitment of resources to action. But quantification alone is not planning. Some of the most important issues in strategic management cannot be quantified at all.

William Cohen

A firm that continues to employ a previously successful strategy eventually and inevitably falls victim to a competitor.

Clay Shirky

I use the analogy of a rocket ship: You can’t get a rocket to the moon just by aiming it. You also have to give yourself the ability to course correct. And when we look around at the landscape of really big successes, very often what we see is that the course correction turned out to be more important than the initial direction.

Strategic Partnering: Remove Chance and Deliver Consistent Success

Strategic Partnering – remove chance and deliver consistent success – is designed to take the guesswork out and provide you with a ground-breaking and fully encompassing system of rules and processes, to make your partnering strategy a vitally important and transformational reality. Supported by invaluable insights from a wealth of senior leaders across a range of leading global organizations, the book introduces a comprehensive and … [ Read more ]

Gary Cokins

When measures are displayed in isolation of each other rather than with a chain of cause-and-effect linkages, then one cannot analyze how much influencing measures affect influenced measures. This is more than just leading indicators and lagging indicators. Those are timing relationships. A balanced scorecard reports the causal linkages, and its key performance indicators (KPIs) should be derived from a strategy map. Any strategic measurement … [ Read more ]

Rethinking the Role of the Strategist

Strategic planning has been under assault for years. But good strategy is more important than ever. What does that mean for the strategist?

Five Keys to Strategy in the Age of the Hack

How do you shape your strategy for the age of the inevitable hack?

Tom Landry

Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.

What Strategists Need: A Meeting of the Minds

A unique gathering of strategists from academia, leading companies, and McKinsey debates the state of the discipline, with an emphasis on opportunities for innovation in a changing world.

Strategies for Superior Value Creation: Improving the Odds

Creating value in today’s economic environment isn’t easy. Every company has to chart its own course. The companies that succeed are those that understand the opportunities and priorities embedded in their starting position, as defined by the economics of the business and its current valuation in the equity markets.

What Is a Business Model?

In The New, New Thing, Michael Lewis refers to the phrase business model as “a term of art.” And like art itself, it’s one of those things many people feel they can recognize when they see it (especially a particularly clever or terrible one) but can’t quite define. That’s less surprising than it seems because how people define the term really depends on how … [ Read more ]

Building Bridges

The days of innovating in isolation are over. Instead, companies now favor interfirm collaborations such as technology alliances. The question is, how do you maximise innovation while minimising any potential downside?

Growth Strategies for a Digital World

What does it take to be a digital business, and why should companies try to become one? Citing industry profiles and corporate case studies, Accenture observes that truly digital businesses often excel at generating, as well as meeting, demand; developing profitable new products and customer experiences; and maximizing margins.

Max Klein

People are afraid to compete because they prefer to pretend they could have won if they played, than to know that they played and lost.

Remaking Customer Markets: Unlocking Growth with Digital

Digital technologies are remaking markets; 80 percent of companies are planning to use new business models to dramatically improve business performance and meet changing customer expectations, according to Accenture research. As business leaders harness the power of digital disruption, six new markets can reshape traditional industries and unlock growth.

Best Business Books 2014

strategy+business presents their 14th annual best business books special section with picks from seven eminent reviewers.

Editor’s Note: As usual, these pieces offer more than just listings of recommended books. In particular, I recommend you read the entries on strategy and economics.

Strategic Thinking for Turbulent Times

Very soon after the crash of 2008, most of the conventional conceptual and operational frameworks for strategy formulation and strategy choice ran out of steam. Five years later, as this author notes, the search is still on for more compatible models for strategy analysis, formulation, choice and implementation. In this article he offers a model and four options for applying it that he believes is … [ Read more ]