HBR's Strategy Feast
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First, Sloan Management Review comes out with some good articles. Now the Harvard Business Review has come out with the TOC of their new issue, and it's a doozy. It's a special issue on Leadership and Strategy. |
Michael Porter has updated his über-classic article on strategy, The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy. If you know the "threat of new entrants-substitute products-buyer's bargaining power-suppliers' bargaining power" framework, this is where it comes from. If you want to get your team thinking more strategically, it's hard to think of a better place to start. HBR is also making this article available for free online.
Another free download, Beware of Old Technologies' Last Gap, which is written primarily for the benefit of high tech entrepreneurs, invendors and their investors, will probably elicit a d-uh from IT pros. Yes, vendors (and legions of IT professionals) can do a good job of extending the usefulness of older technologies. Surprise?
Robert Kaplan and David Norton of "balanced scorecard" fame have an article called Mastering the Management System (paid only, but the summary is free). Norton has written articles for CIO Insight on strategy maps and on aligning IT and strategy, both of which are definitely worth re-reading. Their new article is about closing the strategy-operations gap:
Discussions about bad operations inevitably drive out discussions about good strategy implementation. When companies fall into this trap, they soon find themselves limping along, making or closely missing their numbers each quarter but never examining how to modify their strategy to generate better growth opportunities or how to break the pattern of short-term financial shortfalls.... In our experience, however, breakdowns in a company's management system, not managers' lack of ability or effort, are what cause a company's underperformance. By management system, we're referring to the integrated set of processes and tools that a company uses to develop its strategy, translate it into operational actions, and monitor and improve the effectiveness of both. The failure to balance the tensions between strategy and operations is pervasive: Various studies done in the past 25 years indicate that 60% to 80% of companies fall short of the success predicted from their new strategies. By creating a closed-loop management system, companies can avoid such shortfalls.
Clayton M. Christensen is one of the authors on another article called Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things. The article warns of the misuse of three common financial metrics that undervalue investments that result in innovation: discounted cash flow, fixed and sunk costs, and a short term fixation on earnings per share. That ought to resonate with IT executives who've had projects shot out from them by bean counters. Fresh ammo, anyone?
