Chapter 6: What’s to be Done?

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Chapter 6 explores how the problems of Strategy might be fixed – clearing out the bad methods, codifying what works, and setting professional standards. Executives who do strategy are vital to this, as are the strategy consulting firms who have largely ignored the issues, but who probably have the best repository of knowledge and capability in strategy that exists. Academics in strategy should welcome an emergent strategy profession – people are more likely to buy into a subject which features a recognised profession. ...

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Chapter 5: The MBA Myth: Welcome to Wizard School

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Chapter 5 acknowledges that business school strategy departments are at least worried about the relevance of what they do. Unfortunately, they are nearly powerless to do anything about it.

In the US at least, few strategy professors have any practical experience of strategy, and few even have a solid academic training in strategy – with backgrounds instead from economics, behavioural science, or other academically respectable disciplines. They try to back-fill the hole by bringing in adjunct teachers, but with no rigour to strategy ...

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Chapter 4: Why the Tools Don’t Work

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Chapter 4 argues that if we are to get better methods for strategy, it might help to know why the methods we have don’t work – a story that is actually quite simple. First, research asked the wrong question – what determines profitability (return on invested capital or similar), but we know investor value comes from growing cash flow. Research also looked in the wrong places for the answer – first, industry conditions and then weird features of businesses that are meaningless to management. Lastly, ...

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Chapter 3: Tools, What Tools?

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Chapter 3 takes an axe to the tools of strategy that pass as ‘method’ in our profession – most are neither reliable nor useful, so it is hardly management’s fault that they don’t bother to learn or apply them. We have check-lists of reminders, lists of options you are supposed to choose between (often based on false distinctions), magic bullets, two-by-two grids, and “frameworks” of words-and-arrows.

Most of these are not usable, either because we can’t agree on what the ...

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Chapter 2: True Professionalism

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This chapter explains that strategy does not exhibit any of the features that you would expect of a true “profession”. It  has no standard vocabulary (we don’t know what “competitive advantage” is, and can’t even define the “performance” strategy is supposed to deliver). There are no proven cause-effect relationships, so even if we knew what performance was, we don’t know where it comes from – companies triumph in appallingly tough markets and mess up in easy ones. There is no ...

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Chapter 1: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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Chapter 1 starts by acknowledging that some great strategy gets done – but it’s not all about the gee-whiz successes that make the headlines. For every Google, Ryanair, IKEA and Amazon there are plenty of solid, strongly directed businesses that keep driving forward, staying ahead of competitors, doing well by their customers, giving staff a sound and stable living, and delivering results to investors year after year.

Headlines also make sure we all know about the “Ugly” – the Enrons, Lehmans, Blockbusters ...

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So what’s the problem?

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Apart from some great exceptions, business strategy is badly done – disasters are common and most others fail to achieve what is possible. We all pay a heavy price for this incompetence, whether as employees, customers, investors or simply as citizens – business (not Government or consumers) caused the latest recession (like just about all others), but it is the public that ends up paying for it.

Strategy is badly done because it is unprofessional – no common terminology, no reliable methods and ...

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