For all who are interested in issues of strategic planning I would like to recommend a new article from TheMcKinseyQuarterly. It is now available online without being a premium member of their web services. Core statements are Only 45 percent of survey respondents said that they were satisfied with their existing process for strategic planning [...]

well, before I start I have to explain that the term “second” here is equivalent to “another”. To be more specific, it is the bank’s second major strategic move to enter the lower retail banking market. One of German leading financial institutions, the Deutsche Bank, has started its associated company “Norisbank” to enter the German market [...]

If you just wondered what on earth ‚Evonik’ might be, I have already brought my message across. Evonik is the brand-new name of a very old German industrial group, formerly known as Ruhrkohle AG. Ruhrkole AG, or briefly RAG, has just separated its activities into two different businesses: the mining business will remain branded as [...]

I discovered it only today: Yesterday, the same day as Tobias Bayer’s article “For they know not what they do” in Financial Times Deutschland, there was a comment with a similar message in Financial Times: John Kay – “The same old folly starts a new spiral of risk” (available on his website). John also says [...]

Actually, this is not exactly the question I want to answer with this post. It is borrowed from an article in today’s Financial Times Deutschland, which is titled “For they know not what they do”. Author Tobias Bayer looks at the latest bank-failures (or better almost-failures) in Germany and presents some surprisingly simple explanations: At [...]

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 his last post, Oliver has discussed various aspects of the language of strategy with a focus on strategic conversations and strategic discussions. This reminds me of a more practical problem I experienced quite often. The language of strategy is full of specific terminology. Most people know these terms (you can hardly not know them [...]

Today Hypo Real Estate Holding AG (HRE), a specialised German real estate financing institute, and DEPFA BANK plc, Ireland, announced that HRE would take over DEPFA. DEPFA, which has German roots too, is specialised in public sector and infrastructure financing. Both are listed companies with a high free float. Both banks are active in the [...]

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 [...]

I made a quick and dirty competitor benchmarking today in the office. This was a spontaneous idea when I worked on the profile of one of my company’s competitors. When doing this I realised how many buzzwords this company used to describe how great it is and why customers should do business with this company [...]