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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The breaking news today is that DaimlerChrysler is going to sell about 80 % of Chrysler to private equity fund Cerberus. The price of 5.5 bn Euros is far less than what former Daimler Benz AG invested for its ‘merger among equals’ with Chrysler years ago. My first reaction to this news was some sort [...]

Do companies always have a strategy? This is a difficult question, since a variety of definitions for the term strategy exist. Hence I would like to present some major and important definitions for this term: CHANDLER (1962) and ANDREWS (1971) define strategy in terms of intentions. ANDREWS (1987) defines strategy as an artful alignment of [...]

Again, I spent half of my weekend with my studies of Real Estate Investment Banking. In the lecture about Exit Strategies (for real estate investors) the excellent tutor managed to keep us awake during this wonderful summery Saturday afternoon when he asked the question “Who of you works in a company that does have a [...]

OK, Porsche’s announcement to increase its share in VW is not really new any more. However, I have spent the last few days thinking about the strategic rationale behind that (among other things, of course). And still, I did not make up my mind. I am not sure if this is a smart or dumb [...]

Naseem Javed, global authority on naming and branding, has submitted a very interesting piece of thought about Global Copycats to our Management Portal. Naseem directs our attention to a phenomenon that is so widespread and commonplace these days, that we hardly notice it and surely don’t think about it very much – the stealing and [...]

For all those who are interested in theoretical issue of strategic management I would like to recommend a specific research paper. We know that strategies and the empirical research on strategic management can be analysed under two different point of views. One focus of research is strategy content. Another research focuses on the process of [...]