Innovative Thinking in Strategy and Strategic Planning - Harvard Business Review

In 1966, Time magazine published a cover article posing the question, "Is God Dead?" Asked about the possibility, former President Eisenhower reportedly responded, "That's funny. I was just talking with Him this morning." Some of us are beginning to feel the same way about trendy assertions that strategy is dead. You may have read one such proclamation in the Jan. 25 Wall Street Journal. "Strategy, as we knew it, is dead," argued Walt Shill, who leads Accenture's North American consulting practice. An article titled "Strategic Plans Lose Favor" goes on to quote him saying, "Corporate clients decided that increased flexibility and accelerated decision making are much more important than simply predicting the future." If you believe strategy consists of predicting the future, or making plans, please feel free to take a chair next to Mr. Shill in the front row of mourners. On your seat you'll find a copy of Henry Mintzberg's 1994 book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, which should completely disabuse you of any residual hope you may have held out for the corporate planning process.

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Groupthink, Self Serving Subordinates and Uncertainty - Can They Be Overcome

In this article, Martin Evans considers the barriers to accurate information gathering in large organizations. “I expect to get valid information … I can’t make good decisions unless I get valid information” George W. Bush, April 13th 2004. George Bush’s cry is echoed by every organizational manager in the world. Looking back on the Presidency of George W. Bush we can see many information failures. Every manager would like to be sure that the information received was both timely and accurate. Every good manager knows it’s their responsibility to make sure that information received is timely and accurate. Despite his Yale education, George W. Bush did not learn this. Every good manager knows about the three major barriers to the realization of good information: group think, self-serving subordinates, and uncertainty absorption. Despite his Harvard Business School Education, George W. Bush failed to grasp this. Good managers are proactive to ensure that these barriers are overcome. Despite his years of management experience, George W. Bush did not learn this. In this article I will deal with the three barriers:

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Building Organisational Capabilities - McKinsey Global Survey 2010

Nearly 60 percent of respondents to a recent McKinsey survey say that building organizational capabilities such as lean operations or project or talent management is a top-three priority for their companies. Yet only a third of companies actually focus their training programs on building the capability that adds the most value to their companies’ business performance.

McKinsey's defined a capability as anything an organization does well that drives meaningful business
results. The survey explored which capabilities are most critical to a company’s business
performance and why they focus on the capabilities they do. It also asked executives how their
companies create and manage training and skill-development programs and how effective
those programs are in maintaining or improving on their priority capabilities.

Click here to read the full report from the survey.

The History of the Evolution of Strategy as a Professional Service - Harvard Business Review

I spoke recently with Walter Kiechel about his new book, The Lords of Strategy, which describes the rise of the large strategy consulting firms — BCG, McKinsey, and Bain — as well as the business school professors who contributed conceptual frameworks and pragmatic insights to the strategy revolution. Kiechel, a former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine, was the Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing from 1998 to 2002. HBR: Two of the big themes in the evolution of strategy thinking from the 1960s to the present particularly caught our eye. The first is the rise of frameworks that brought with them Greater Taylorism — sharp-penciled analytics that focus on costs and efficiency. The second is about helping employees to learn, innovate, and change. Why is the first set of ideas so much better understood?

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