…and how to manage them. When company managers discuss their personal experiences in terms of external consultants you can find a broad range of opinions and beliefs. Point of views may vary between very positive experiences when hiring external knowledge and very bad experiences; the later ones are sometimes expressed in jokes about “flippy” PowerPoint […]

Last week I was asked about my opinion about Porters Generic Strategies during the current financial crisis. My first spontaneous thought was: Why ask that question? Is it less important to have a distinctive strategy during a crisis than it is during a boom? I think the contrary is true.
However, my discussion partner expected a […]

“Some companies make things happen.
Some companies see things happen.
Some companies wonder that things happen.”
This is one of my favourite management quotes because this is all strategy is about. I heard it in a lecture during my MBA course back in 2000. This was the time when the Internet was said to change the way business […]

In this post we will have a brief look at a specific phenomenon of strategic management. Turn back time is in interesting concept in terms of movies or sci-fi literature, but in terms of chosen strategic directions an easy way out often does not exist. So let’s look at this issue – given the example […]

A couple of days ago I participated in a discussion concerning risk management systems. A specific emphasis was given on strategic risks and their management. Identification and delimitation were described as two major problems when starting to manage this risk type.
Well, that is basically not an unusual situation within an organization. Before managing a specific […]

Last week I received a newsletter from McKinsey concerning some selected articles. The major purpose was to present some thoughts around the 7 S Framework. Furthermore the newsletter suggested some other publications from The McKinsey Quarterly; some of them have the premium status (which means you have to pay in order to have access).
Since these […]

Recently McKinsey announced the survey results concerning the first 100 days of new CFOs. According to available data McKinsey considered 164 responses from a representative sample of CFOs. The article that contains the findings displays participants’ views about their first hundred days as CFO.

Major findings:

CFO may not be spending their time where it’s most needed […]

Early indicators are very popular in the business world. People normally like them because they see a lot of advantages, such as

Early indicators are perceived to provide some objectivity to otherwise fuzzy planning and forecasting processes.
They are most often based on external data, ideally from an institution with a very high reputation. That adds even […]

When you observe strategic planning processes in different organizations it is possible to find “closed shop” planning processes. In some cases only top manager “develop” the strategy, in other situations they are supported by specialised departments. Various sources in the academic literature have discussed and criticized the disadvantages of this approach.
But why is it so […]

In a former post I discussed whether companies have a strategy or not. So, we found out that there are some options that strategies might not exist in your organization and that for a very specific reason the absence of strategy could help the organization during a certain intermediate step. I have to stress “very […]