Strategy
In my view strategy is:
- .. about the decisions that are made today with effects for (the day after) tomorrow (.. and should be based on a deep understanding of the matters involved at this moment in time)
- .. all about “HOW” and hardly at all about “WHAT” (A strategy is only worth more then the (virtual) paper it is written on if it can explain HOW the goals can be achieved.)
- .. understanding the terminology used and sharing (internalizing!) the same notions
- .. about keeping your eyes wide open, not ceding to the fashion of the day.
and strategy is NOT:
while keeping in mind:
About the strategist:
- The strategist must in my opinion understand the mechanisms at work in its markets and within the company.
- The strategist needs to focus on mechanisms that determine which options and limitations the company has, and will have in the future. A deep understanding of these mechanisms will be material to create successful strategies, but also to identify what routes should not be taken.
- To me a strategist should look – much – further then the popular notion of the day. Adequate but simple explanations do not exist; Simplistic views on the trends we are facing today and how they work out in various situations – or in a particular one like the Apple-Samsung who is winning discussions – are a red flag to me. Strategy based on to simplistic a notion is just the same as rolling a dice to decide how to develop the company, its products and value chains.
Business Intelligence
- ”what you measure, is what you judge, is what you steer. So be conscious about what you measure!”, an other version “How you measure, is how you judge, is how you steer. So be conscious about how you measure!”
Standardisation
- Standardization can be regarded as a special form of strategic cross company innovation. For today’s business strategists standards and standardization should be part of their basic toolkit.
Value Chain Analyses
Decision Making
- The promise of Big Data is that by analysing large amounts of data companies will be able to improve on the quality and pace of decision making, hence be more competitive than those that don’t or use inferior decision making models.
- Humans and computers are differing in many ways. But computers are getting better fast in various domains in what used to be the exclusive territories for humans but where their brains and self perceptions are posing all kinds of limitations (see Landing page on Human Nature and Human Abilities. The abilities of our brains for “decision making” are mind boggling (pun intended), but in many circumstances a computer program can do it even better.
- A good management decision should not be based on n=1 experiences, nor should declaring general trends be based on it.