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A Mundane Comedy is Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in mid 2024. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

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Halcyon's aim is to help you reflect on how you can better deal with related change in your own life.

What's Changing? - Strategy

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Please see below selected recent strategy-related change.

 

See also:

 

October 2020

  • Executives on the C-suite are being forced to adjust strategies more often, and the global pandemic has amplified this need. Businesses want to self-disrupt before competitors disrupt them, and the executive group in charge of implementing strategy is expanding with new roles, such as Chief Growth Officer, Chief Transformation Officer and Chief Sustainability Officer. At the same time, strategy now needs to focus on all stakeholders - not just shareholders. Competitors also need to be considered as potential partners in order to thrive in an uncertain future. All of these forces are changing the way companies formulate and execute strategy, noted EY.

 

August 2020

 

December 2018

  • Operational changes during a crisis often have lasting impact on strategy implementation. Quartz connected with leaders that have experienced crisis to identify ways executives can use a crisis as an opportunity to improve strategy design and implementation capabilities - read more.

 

2016

Key developments:

 

May 2016

 

 

  • Only 13% of companies successfully execute their strategies, claimed a recent book. Lack of commitment to a shared mission and lack of “connectedness” – open communication among executives and employees – are significant factors when companies fall short. Disconnected employees don’t engage with each other, with their executives or with their companies’ strategies, plans and goals. Connectedness dominates in firms that win Best Place to Work competitions. Their executives promote regular, positive conversations as a foundation of their organisational culture. Such exchanges can help your firm become a “Thirteener” company – one of the 13% of organisations that actually implements its strategies.

 

 

 

  • More than ever, companies need to devote time to strategy, argued the Boston Consulting Group. Nearly one-tenth of public companies disappear each year—a fourfold increase in mortality since 1965. And the life span of the average company has halved since 1970. Faced with those odds, it doesn’t make sense to put all your chips on agility. Agility is great, but it’s more powerful when paired with preparedness. And achieving strategic preparedness takes a structured, organised thought process to identify and consider potential threats, disruptions, and opportunities - which is, for want of a better term, strategic planning.

 

 

 

April 2016

 

 

  • The world of strategy is thick with ideas and frameworks, noted The Boston Consulting Group, while claiming that its new book, 'Your Strategy Needs a Strategy' will help readers cut through the noise and find clarity regarding which approach, or combination of approaches, is their best bet. The book includes a "strategy palette" which proposes five distinct approaches to strategy, helping leaders to match their approach to their business environment and execute effectively and to combine different approaches.

 

 

 

 

 

March 2016

 

 

 

 

 

February 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • Almost every business today faces major strategic challenges. The path to creating value is seldom clear. In an ongoing global survey of senior executives conducted by Strategy&, more than half of the 4,400 respondents said they didn’t think they had a winning strategy. In another survey of more than 500 senior executives around the world, nine out of 10 conceded that they were missing major opportunities in the market. In the same survey, about 80 percent of those senior executives said that their overall strategy was not well understood, even within their own company. These problems are not caused simply by external forces. They are the outcome of the way most companies are managed. In all too many businesses there is a significant and unnecessary gap between strategy and execution: a lack of connection between where the enterprise aims to go and what it can accomplish.

 

 

  • See also: The 5 elements of #StrategyThatWorks fly in the face of what most business schools teach students. via @MarketWatch http://strat.to/YnPS9; Rejecting industry best practices can mean gaining in differentiation. That’s #StrategyThatWorks: http://strat.to/YnPS9 ; The hypothesis of #StrategyThatWorks: reliably successful companies let capabilities drive strategy. http://strat.to/YnPS9

 

 

  • 'Strategy that Works' is a new book from Harvard Business Review Press by Paul Leinwand, Principal at PwC's Strategy& and Cesare Mainardi, retired CEO of Strategy&, which demystifies the perennial question of “why are certain companies so successful?” Strategy That Works guides corporate leaders through real-life examples of how successful companies around the world have bridged the gap between strategy and execution to rise to the top of their industries. An excellent summary of the book and its key concepts can be found in the recent strategy+business article. or more information and resources, visit the Strategy that Works Spark group. See also Strategy& perspectives.

 

 

 

January 2016

 

 

 

 

 

November 2015

 

 

  • Accounting firms face many changes, from industry consolidation and disruptive technologies, to a changing field of competition, new revenue models, fee negotiations, and continued innovation. To meet these challenges, accounting firms need to build a strong strategic leadership bench. Accounting Today made recommendations on how to this, reflecting two decades of experience developing strategic leaders at leading companies around the world, as well as research conducted at Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management.

 

 

 

September 2015

 

 

 

 

 

June 2015

 

 

  • Beaton Capital recently published a piece on the evolution of strategy consulting from its late nineteenth century beginnings to the digital disruption of today...describing inter alia Clayton Christensen’s job-to-be-done framework proposes a way to re-engineer the competitive landscape. Firms that organise around job-to-be-done framework and build centres of excellence around this will make it more difficult for competitors to imitate.

 

 

 

 

 

May 2015

 

 

  • Source published its best new research and ideas from consulting firms for strategy and marketing leaders. (Please consult Dominic Kelleher for details.)

 

 

  • Strategy&'s Annual Study of CEOs, Governance, and Success quantified the cost of change at the top. It found that forced CEO turnovers caused an estimated $1.8 billion in lost shareholder value per company. It's a stark reminder that your biggest threats often come from within. Most people assume that natural disasters or other outside forces are the chief culprits that destroy companies. But most of the time, that's simply not the case. In fact, 80% of corporate value destruction comes from bad strategy decisions. That means getting strategy right is the single most valuable decision that any executive can make.

 

 

 

January 2015

 

 

  • AT Kearney asked executives about strategy formulation failures. Most complained that it is an insufficiently inspired, unrealistic, impractical, and detached process due to: lack of understanding of future trends (88%), little understanding of internal capabilities (87%), too much top-down approach (84%), not enough logical thinking (84%). Shaping Tomorrow therefore examined what is changing in the strategy space and found that: conventional approaches to business planning and strategy will leave many businesses stranded at a competitive disadvantage; anticipating the future and shaping it ahead of rivals is the next competitive advantage; business areas with low levels of investment and expertise could be left ill-prepared for anticipated demand in the period of recovery; scenario planning will be not unusual but a social technology that will be part of the "collective intelligence" of the future, and scenarios will be used more alongside other strategy work as uncertainty increases.

 

 

 

 

November 2015

 

 

  • Accounting firms face many changes, from industry consolidation and disruptive technologies, to a changing field of competition, new revenue models, fee negotiations, and continued innovation. To meet these challenges, accounting firms need to build a strong strategic leadership bench. Accounting Today made recommendations on how to this, reflecting two decades of experience developing strategic leaders at leading companies around the world, as well as research conducted at Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management.

 

 

 

September 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

June 2015

 

 

  • Beaton Capital recently published a piece on the evolution of strategy consulting from its late nineteenth century beginnings to the digital disruption of today...describing inter alia Clayton Christensen’s job-to-be-done framework proposes a way to re-engineer the competitive landscape. Firms that organise around job-to-be-done framework and build centres of excellence around this will make it more difficult for competitors to imitate.

 

 

 

 

 

May 2015

 

 

  • Source published its best new research and ideas from consulting firms for strategy and marketing leaders. (Please consult Dominic Kelleher for details.)

 

 

  • Strategy&'s Annual Study of CEOs, Governance, and Success quantified the cost of change at the top. It found that forced CEO turnovers caused an estimated $1.8 billion in lost shareholder value per company. It's a stark reminder that your biggest threats often come from within. Most people assume that natural disasters or other outside forces are the chief culprits that destroy companies. But most of the time, that's simply not the case. In fact, 80% of corporate value destruction comes from bad strategy decisions. That means getting strategy right is the single most valuable decision that any executive can make.

 

 

 

January 2015

 

 

  • AT Kearney asked executives about strategy formulation failures. Most complained that it is an insufficiently inspired, unrealistic, impractical, and detached process due to: lack of understanding of future trends (88%), little understanding of internal capabilities (87%), too much top-down approach (84%), not enough logical thinking (84%). Shaping Tomorrow therefore examined what is changing in the strategy space and found that: conventional approaches to business planning and strategy will leave many businesses stranded at a competitive disadvantage; anticipating the future and shaping it ahead of rivals is the next competitive advantage; business areas with low levels of investment and expertise could be left ill-prepared for anticipated demand in the period of recovery; scenario planning will be not unusual but a social technology that will be part of the "collective intelligence" of the future, and scenarios will be used more alongside other strategy work as uncertainty increases.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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