Strategic planning is about preparing a business for the future. As we all know, a strategy should put a business in a position to maximally exploit potential chances and to minimize the damage of potential threats.
We all witness the worst financial crisis most of us would have thought of in these days. We also witness […]

The race of the two presidential candidates of the Democrats in the US, Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton, is becoming more and more dramatic. It receives extensive media coverage and surely has many interesting aspects. It even fits into our blog on strategy, since both candidates’ campaigns follow their particular strategies. Unfortunately, the further this […]

The international financial crisis claimed another victim among German banks this week. It was the specialised mortgage and public sector lender Duesseldorfer Hypothekenbank (Duess Hyp). “The small German bank’s owners have temporarily transferred ownership to the BdB’s depositor guarantee fund, after which it will be sold to a third party.”  The bank is fairly small […]

I know, the headline of this post doesn’t sound very topical. Don’t worry, this will not become a review of a not-so-new management book. However, exactly that is what I found on the website of Financial Times Deutschland last Friday. There is an article with the headline roughly translated as “Why should competition bother me”. […]

So far I have resisted the wish to comment about the ongoing sub-prime and financial crisis on this blog. I surely have an opinion about all this. However, so much has been written in this matter – analyses, comments, reports, more analyses, readers comment etc. I agree with many of them and disagree with others. […]

There are bad news from the financial sector wherever you look these days. Here are just two headlines from the last couple of days:

Worldwide financial job losses triple in 2007 – Almost 200,000 staff are laid off (FT, 18 January 2008)
Crisis talks for West LB – about one third of the current staff (of 5,900 […]

My morning reading of the German newspaper FAZ really gave me a happy start into the day. I read an article about the weak stock quotes of the large investment firms like Blackstone or Fortress. There I found this sentence “In the view of increasing defaults of corporate loans, a new heyday is expected for […]

Now that we have discussed the strategies of a downsized workforce to cope with the resulting higher workload, it is time to address business leaders and their consultants.
Your company is threatened by falling profits or even losses. Your shareholders, your creditors, all analysts and the whole market expect you to do something. Of course, you […]

Part One: What to do when your department was over-downsized
This question might be back on your agenda soon. Latest turmoil at the financial markets made the profits of banks and other investors drop sharply. Nobody knows how many more unrealized losses are to come. We have already seen first redundancies. With growing fears that a […]

I had an Auris experience yesterday which made me revisit my old post about the Auris advertising campaign in Germany in February. My little experience is definitely not representative for what is going on on Germany’s roads, since I haven’t been using my car very much over the last couple of months. However, yesterday’s strike […]