The Strategic Planning Process

Strategic Planning is to a business what a map is to a road rally driver. It is a tool that defines the routes that when taken will lead to the most likely probability of getting from where the business is to where the owners or stakeholders want it to go. The steps in this process are described in this series.

Strategic Planning Redux

Strategic planning at many large companies is a sterile annual exercise that managers endure. They’re often asked to produce either a shining vision or financial certainty, or both. But with growth back on the agenda, a few leading companies are creating value through strategic managing, which connects strategy to the front lines and to market opportunities as they unfold.

The Morality Play

More than ever before, Americans are talking about values. For marketers, it’s tempting to do the same. But will a values-driven campaign drive business — or drive it away?

Ross Mayfield

It used to be easy to measure transaction costs especially when looking at economies of scale and speed. That’s what helped justify centralization in vertically integrated firms. In the more dynamic and decentralized world, the value shifts to economies of scope. The real problem that we have is we have no transaction-cost analysis like “build versus buy” for determining whether I should share an asset … [ Read more ]

Giving Global Strategies Local Flavor

We’re undeniably living in the era of globalization, but too often the strategic motivations for going global aren’t matched by operational approaches to meet enterprise needs. Nowhere is this truer than in IT organizations that remain under all of the standard pressures to innovate, deliver value, and contain costs while facing demands to meet various local needs, comply with local regulations and tax codes, and … [ Read more ]

Enacting Strategy Through Projects: An Archetypal Approach

In this paper, the authors advocate that a configuration perspective is needed to capture different kinds of project/programme governance approaches. The basic assumption being that different situations involve different environments and different characteristics and that project management governance cannot be taken out of context. Understanding these situations and contexts, and adapting decision-making and learning systems accordingly, is crucial. The underlying assumptions that have guided the … [ Read more ]

Rethinking Risk: Adventures on the strategic risk frontier

Beyond earthquakes and currency fluctuations, there’s a broad array of strategic risks poised to disrupt or even destroy any business. But embracing risk is also part of the growth equation. Is your business prepared? And what are the risks you should be taking but aren’t?

Development of the 3rd Generation Balanced Scorecard, Part I

This paper describes the changes to the definition of the Balanced Scorecard that have occurred since it became popular as a performance measurement framework during the early 1990s. The paper builds on earlier work by the authors that characterised such definitions into three distinct generations of Balanced Scorecard. The paper relates these developments to literature concerning strategic management within organisations, observing that … [ Read more ]

Bill Huyett

Extreme competition means more volatile earnings – something that worries equity markets obsessed by predictable earnings per share. Most businesses monitor and control operational risks but pay too little attention to the more complex range of strategic ones. Four in particular merit attention: the value proposition risk (will a cheaper product knock the company out of the water?), the cost curve risk (will a low-cost … [ Read more ]

Learn to Conduct Competitive Analysis

This PowerPoint training tool shows you how to analyze your company’s competitive advantages and disadvantages. This tool explains the strategic group map technique of competitive analysis and includes a case study that illustrates how one company used this technique to plan an expansion of its facilities and services. This tool can help you improve your own understanding of competitive analysis or you can share it … [ Read more ]

Innovation Blowback: Disruptive Management Practices from Asia

Western companies think too narrowly about the emerging world. If they aren’t careful, they may end up as defenders, not attackers.

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits

The world’s most exciting, fastest-growing new market? It’s where you least expect it: at the bottom of the pyramid. Collectively, the world’s billions of poor people have immense entrepreneurial capabilities and buying power. You can learn how to serve them and help millions of the world’s poorest people escape poverty.

It is being done-profitably. Whether you’re a business leader or an anti-poverty activist, business guru Prahalad … [ Read more ]

The End of the Endgame?

Over the past 40 years, strategic thought has evolved through three distinct phases-bodies of thought that have built progressively on each other. The Internet takes us it into a fourth: a phase that is defined by the explicit rejection of central premises of each of its predecessors. But to understand where strategic planning is going, it is first necessary to review where it has been.
[ Read more ]

Smarter ways to do business with the competition

Companies that enter into strategic alliances thus encounter many dilemmas. This article summarises the key issues into six categories of 10 dilemmas and discusses how Star Alliance, the world’s largest airline alliance, has dealt with these 10 dilemmas.

What do strategists actually do?

Geopolitical uncertainty, rapid globalisation and faster business cycles mean that companies must be more flexible and responsive to changing conditions.
* But what does this mean for strategy?
* How should strategy be defined and, importantly, who should define it?
* What is the role of the CEO?
* How can leaders bridge the gulf between strategic thinking and implementation?
* How do operations influence … [ Read more ]

Finding New Sources of Strategic Advantage

Now is a good time to take a fresh look at your sources of capability building, according to the new book The Only Sustainable Edge. Book excerpt plus Q&A with coauthors John Hagel III and John Seely Brown.

Joseph Lampel

Business schools are invaluable for laying the foundations for the practice of management. This is especially true for marketing, finance, or human resources, but far less so for strategy. The problem with the current system is that it forces strategy into the direct and narrow approach to teaching. If the shortest distance between two points in geometry is a straight line, then the shortest distance … [ Read more ]