How can you frustrate your long term customers? There are a lot of ideas in the market to do this, but I did not expect such a surprise from this particular company.
My desktop is Windows 2000 workstation. Everything (all drivers, programs, hardware) works fine together. We use Norton Internet Security to have a certain level […]

Often I receive questions concerning interdependencies between strategy and risk management. There is no general answer but at the end of the day we have to accept that our strategic decisions (as well those measures without a decision) have an impact on the firm’s risk situation.
For banks in Europe it has become a little bit […]

In Germany there is a very interesting business magazine. It is called “Brand eins”. Translated into English it means “Brand One”. The second headline is “the other business magazin” and I can confirm that the editors, authors and articles are quite different. 
There is a interesting section called “the world in numbers” in which I discovered […]

There are a lot of definitions for strategic planning. Also there are a lot of critics and discussion about it; I agree that in general it is not possible organise the generation of insight and synthesis. Other critic factors focus on the ability to forecast future development. But we have to be fair: Most of our […]

Today I read an announcement for a new book from German management consultant and thought leader Hermann Simon. As it says, he urges managers to shift their primary focus away from market share orientation towards profit orientation. Simon argues that aggressive strategies that aim for higher market shares can cause price wars, which destroy profits […]

As posted a couple of days ago, it is very likely that we all going to be observers of the next major conflict between the „copyright empire” and the videoportals. The GEMA (the company that takes care for copyright issues in Germany) requires fees from Google (YouTube). Discussions between Google and GEMA have already started. […]

Today I found a very interesting study, which seems to have no relation to strategy. Its title is “The global State of Information Security 2006”, a worldwide study by CIO, CSO and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. But inside the survey results some very interesting issue concerning strategy can be found. The survey authors asked participants to prioritise their […]

Well, you may be inclined to say both. Henry Mintzberg goes even further with his concept of ‘Four P’s for Strategy’: Path, Perspective (equivalent to objective), Pattern and Ploy.
But let’s stay with the path and the objective. Of course, a strategy can describe your objective, i.e. what you want to achieve, and your path to […]

I would like to discuss an issue for which I posted my first opinions a couple of days ago. These days we can read a lot about web 2.0. It is said that users are not only consumers of web contents; instead of that they generate the content themselves. Videoportals (e.g. YouTube, Clipfish) and blogs […]

Recently I talked to a freelance consultant who had been working for a company in a turnaround situation for the last couple of months. This company had been through a long and severe crisis and had now – under new ownership – taken its time to develop and implement a new strategy. Of course this […]