The Strategic Enema

Unload the future before you go there 

It’s rare to see a five-year plan that does not say everything will be amazing when we get there. Most are pretty confident.

Planning brings with it a few issues. Here are a couple. 

One is in the future: there can shift. What seemed like an ideal, achievable goal when you started can be less so when you get there. You achieved your sales target but failed to improve your offering. A more evolved version of your product came to market. You maintained share but squeezed profit margin to do so. The final results were well below target.

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The risk of avoiding risk

Playing it a little bit unsafe

Ever look back and wish you’d spoken up? I remember times when it may or may not have helped. It would, however, have been good for me. You tend to take on some shame when you hide. It’s the opposite of empowering.

You see this in business disruption. Things are ticking over pretty well but you know it’s changing out there. An alternative product might make sense. Trouble is, you don’t want to mess up a good situation. You hang on to your current offering for fear of cannibalising your success. 

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So what if there's a recession

Coping with cyclical inevitability. 

Forecasts of recession are common this time of the year. Trawl through the financial press and you’ll see all sorts of gloomy predictions. Most will be wrong. Forecasters don’t have a great track record. Research shows barely 15% of them will get it right. 

Should we worry?

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How to grow any business

You’ve probably already got what it takes

There are several remarkable things about General Electric (GE). For a start, it’s been around for a while. Thomas Edison put it together in the late 1880s.

It was one of the first entrants in the Dow Jones Index. Out of the original members, it’s the only one still on the list. The rest have disappeared.

GE has arguably transformed itself a few times. It started making electric turbines. It developed leasing facilities for customers. That led it to finance. It’s said to have been the first business to actually own a computer. In the 1960s it had a significant computer division. It sold that business to Honeywell.

The financial crisis almost brought GE undone. Now it is exiting finance and reinvesting in manufacturing, buying industrial businesses that align with its historic strengths.

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The Wisdom of the Loud

Groupthink is alive and well, and often wrong

I was warned at an early age. You can’t believe everything you read. And that was well before the internet was running fast and loose with the truth.

I was later alarmed to find Mark Twain didn’t exactly say reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. And to find Captain Kirk never said ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ in a Star Trek episode. And how disappointing was it when astronauts couldn’t see the Great Wall of China from space?

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