When I read about this advertising campaign I remembered a specific strategic approach called “judo strategy”. This strategy was presented in the book “Judo Strategy: Turning Your Competitors’ Strength to Your Advantage”; the authors describe an approach how this kind of martial arts can also be used to help organizations battle seemingly bigger and stronger [...]

In mid September we published a short post with the title “the worse is yet to come“. Now, one month later, we can observe worst case scenarios becoming reality. Black swan effects test the survivability of financial institutions. Large banks on both sides of the ocean are in very serious trouble and need massive government [...]

How important is education? Well, we know that education (as process) and knowledge gained (as a result) has become an important factor to differentiate organizations and to establish (or at least to support) competitive advantages. Today knowledge can have the same meaning as a commodity. Information, knowledge and learning have a huge impact on capabilities [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

We are back from our “annual”one week holiday trip to Mallorca (compare this old post from 2007). For a very specific reason we decided to travel a month earlier this year; we going to post this reason somewhen in summer. April is a good time for visiting this beautiful island, too. Compared to May the [...]

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”. [...]

Sometimes friends raise the question whether we would spend the entire weekend in front of our computers. Well, that is an interesting question. But a good friend did ask a more specific question: How many leisure times is left for you after writing blog posts and running your management portals? I think that this question [...]

I am back from my recent business trip to Istanbul. There is a saying in German which translated has the meaning of traveling would be equal to education. In this particular case I had to learn that companies still have a confusing understanding how to manage their customers. We have to keep in mind that [...]

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 [...]