Mar 17Dare To Give Up Control!Leaders are judged on delivering success. The traditional playbook has been to make the organisation run like a well-oiled, efficient machine — producing ever-greater outputs with ever-minimal inputs. To make the machine efficient a monster, feeding on an insatiable diet of measurement and control, is unleashed.[1] …Strategy5 min readStrategy5 min read
Mar 13Strategy Playbook for Overcoming Sanctions — the Huawei BanMission In May 2019[1] the United States government designated Huawei — the telecommunications giant — a risk to national security and restricted the Chinese company from doing business in the U.S. What became known as the ‘Huawei Ban’ ban was later extended to restrict anyone, anywhere from selling Huawei anything that…Huawei12 min readHuawei12 min read
Feb 18“People, ideas, technology — In that order!”When, in 2016, AlphaGo — an AI system from DeepMind (a Google-owned company) — beat the world champion of Go (or weiqi, a strategy board game as popular in the East as chess is in the West) it sent shock-waves throughout Asia. This ‘sputnik’ moment triggered a tidal wave of…Technology3 min readTechnology3 min read
Feb 1Strategic Options for Elon Musk’s Twitter 2.0Mission In October 2022, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk made headlines when he acquired Twitter for $44 billion. Since then, speculation has been rampant about his intentions for the social media platform. In a recent tweet, Musk provided some insight, stating his aim to provide “Trust as a Service” (TaaS):1 We’re going…Twitter10 min readTwitter10 min read
Oct 3, 2022Hierarchy of Strategic ThinkingBusiness people bandy about words like strategy, innovation and culture all the time, but if you ask people to define what these words mean you’ll get very different answers. So when people repeat well-known phrases such as “culture eats strategy for breakfast” what they’re saying is that something (they can’t…Strategy4 min readStrategy4 min read
Sep 5, 2022Chapter 10. Strategy for an Uncertain WorldUncertainty is central to both the Eastern and Western approaches to strategy. The Chinese philosophical tradition – from which Sun Tzu emerged – recognised that, as minor fluctuations in conditions can amplify into dramatic changes, no two situations are ever identical and therefore no universal recipes can exist. While Clausewitz…18 min read18 min read
Jun 29, 2022Introduction: Why “Best Practices” Hold You BackOne day a clever hedgehog came to a wide river and was determined to cross it. Being a clever hedgehog he knew how to build bridges, so he set about building one over this river. Half-way done he stopped to admire his work. Looking back at the riverbank he saw…12 min read12 min read
Mar 20, 2022Chapter 7. Honda-Yamaha War of Natural SelectionWhat lessons can we learn from the Eastern approach to strategy when dealing with, for example, the kind of competitive threat Honda posed to Britain’s champions in the US motorcycle industry? Perhaps fortunately we have a case showing exactly what Honda did, a decade later, when their leading position was…Strategy6 min readStrategy6 min read
Feb 7, 2022Removing your organisation’s biggest source of wasteIn any large organisation people are often building things that already exist somewhere else in the same organisation. They’re not doing this because they’re stupid. They’re re-building what you already have because they simply have no systematic way of knowing what other silos in the organisation are doing. And, if…Wardley Maps3 min readWardley Maps3 min read
Jan 31, 2022How do you make your projects more successful?It may seem counterintuitive but, to increase your project team’s chances of creating something of value may require reducing budgets, team size and deadline. Because those projects with big budgets, big teams and deliverables in the far distant future are more likely to ask for extensions on all three rather…Wardley Maps3 min readWardley Maps3 min read
