The Art of Business Design 2.0 - James Rock

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Strategy by Design and the Importance of Enterprise Architecture - Booz and Co

For years, many companies have experienced a problematic tension between their IT departments and business units. On the one hand, IT works best when it is tied tightly to the company’s overall business goals. That’s why chief information officers have long worked to get a seat at the executive table — to help set the company’s strategic mandate and align IT with the organization’s aspirations. On the other hand, business unit executives remain doubtful about IT’s ability to support them in creating value. And despite the best intentions of managers on both sides of this gap, companies continue to struggle to integrate IT systems and to determine whether IT actually improves performance, and if so, by how much.

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Lessons from a Middle-Aged Revolutionary at W.L. Gore

Here is a piece from Gary Hamel's web site. It is genuinely interesting reading about an organisation W. L. Gore who has developed a unique DNA, recognised it and continues to innovate around it. This is a highly successful formula just like Apple. Yet, I have to ask you the question, could you use any their management concepts and techniques in your organisation. If not what might your organisational DNA look like. Here is Hamel's blog from the Wall Street Journal. As a management researcher, I’ve had the opportunity to peer inside a lot of organizations. In doing so, I’ve learned that most big companies are pretty much the same, at least when it comes to the way they’re managed. The rituals of goal-setting, planning, budgeting and performance appraisal differ only slightly from firm to firm. There’s even less variety in the architecture of power. Hierarchical authority structures, top-down leadership appointments and order-following employees have come to nearly every organization I’ve studied—nearly. One amazing exception is W.L. Gore & Associates.

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The Best Business Model in the World - Anthony Tjan - Harvard Business Review

One of the "golden rules" of investing we have at our firm, Cue Ball, is that we value the business model over the financial plan. In fact, we value the business model over any particular sector for investment and like to say that we are "business model driven" (versus sector-driven). There is not necessarily a consistent definition for business model, but the Wiki definition is good enough. It says a business model is "the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value." Consistent with this definition, we see the business model as the explanation of how a firm translates an idea into value, or more bluntly, into money. There is no doubt that at the heart of a business model is the monetization model. Over the years we have learned that having a business does not necessarily mean that you have a business model. Think of the dot-com heyday, when shipping 89-cent pet foot in an $18 Fed Ex package was a business.

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The Emergence of Scenario Learning instead of Planning

As protests in Iran last month drew the world's attention, the top executives at a large global industrial goods company held a teleconference to consider their options. The meeting was hastily called, but the participants were not starting from scratch. In fact, the events unfolding in the country were strikingly similar to a scenario that they had developed, along with a handful others, in a 2008 offsite meeting focused on potential changes in their competitive environment. The workshop, the output, and the eventual impact on decision making represents a perfect illustration of how so-called scenario planning techniques can be utilized to help managers navigate in complex and uncertain environments. In the meeting the industrial company held last year, executives had discussed each scenario they developed, the potential triggers for each of them, and how the company should respond to each of these situations if it were to arise. Pulling out the notes from these discussions, they already knew their options and had a view on how they would like to respond. In many ways, they were prepared -- and already one step ahead of some other companies. Paul J. H. Schoemaker, research director of the Wharton School's Mack Center for Technological Innovation, says such examples illustrate a continuing shift in how companies think about the future.

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