A New Mandate for Strategy
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"We are always on a road. Sometimes we are on a good road and don't need to change. Other times, the choice is straightforward. Or the choice requires thoughtful strategy development. In any case, explicitly or implicitly, we choose our road."
— Carl Spetzler


"Strategy as a delegatable standard business process stopped leaders from thinking."
— Jim Lang


"Instead of saying 'The buck stops here,' a better way to think about the best strategy development process is, 'The buck STARTS here'."
— Robin Arnold
Executive eBriefings

A New Mandate for Strategy
Lessons From the Past Decade

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The business failures of the past decade are many. There were, of course, those failures brought on by corruption, fraud, greed, and incompetence, but the real question is how so many good companies with strong management made poor strategic moves. Some of these leaders unknowingly made "bet the company" decisions - and lost. Today, they ask themselves, What were we thinking?

In this eBriefing, SDG examines the root cause of many of the failures of the past decade - the individual intuition and occasional mass hysteria that drove investments in massive systems, new businesses, e-commerce, growth for the sake of growth - and takes a critical look at how these decisions were made.

In hindsight, many missteps can be traced to a failure to take a broad enough perspective early in the strategic evaluation. Strong, operations-minded leaders, in their drive for rapid, consistent results and standard, efficient processes, cut off early discovery of alternatives and quelled debate. But strategic issues are complex, messy, uncomfortable, and heterogeneous. They do not respond well to uniform application of a standard process. Some companies made astute, countercyclical investments that have paid off handsomely. Were they smart - or just lucky?

The new mandate for strategy requires a diagnostic front-end that forces development of a broad perspective, meeting the problem where it is rather than dragging it into our comfort zone, and tailoring the process to the specific problem. In this eBriefing, we embark on a journey to reposition strategy where it can add the most value, within the right frame, capitalizing on the right people, and using the right process and tools.


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Date
May 12, 2004


Speakers

Carl Spetzler
Robin Arnold
Jim Lang
David Fishman


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(Requires Windows Media Player)

Download Executive Summary
(Requires Adobe Acrobat)


For a complete slide deck and transcript of this webcast:

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