The ACS Blog

There are as many ways to accumulate happy numbers as there are to be lucky, which is to say there are a lot of ways. But applying the diligence and discipline not only to ask good questions but also to answer them well, and to act on the answers, makes those happy numbers well-deserved.

I get around a bit and I’ve noticed a few things. This isn’t the grand unifying theory of strategy that we all crave. It’s just a few observations as we lurch, slide, dive, bound, stagger, drag, and hop(e) from 2011 to 2012.

800,000 subscribers left Netflix after the company raised its prices. That tells us Netflix adopted a bad strategy. Or does it? Fourteen reasons why Netflix was wrong, or not.

Steve Jobs died today. We salute his innovation and his passion for excellence. I also want to ask, when’s the last time we mourned the passing of a business leader?

I’m not talking about the Democrats and Republicans. Not the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. Not even the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I mean something BIG. I mean Safeway and Supervalu, the huge supermarket chains. How do we know whose strategy worked?

Albert Einstein said, “Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” So when it comes to business decision-making, what’s too simple, what’s not simple enough, and what’s just right? We’ll investigate with Groupon, social ROI, and a strategy simulation.

When strategists choose bad strategies, strategies fail. That sounds obvious, except no strategist purposely chooses a bad strategy. Strategists are smart, experienced, industry-savvy, data-rich, and highly motivated to succeed. Yet smart strategists can and do choose bad strategies, and bad strategies fail.

Business war games, in my experience, provide outstanding insights that greatly impact bottom lines. But why? What is it about business war games that produces insights that evidently elude other approaches?

If we ran a survey asking “are you biased?” we would find no one is. Bias is a characteristic of others, not of ourselves. It’s about you, not me. Which is ironic, and the point.

Due diligence may not protect you from frenzies of advocacy. At its worst, it’s like signing an ill-advised legal document because the spell-check said it was okay. Think it doesn’t happen? Remember that no one invests in a strategy or business expecting it to fail, yet somehow smart people invest in strategies and businesses that fail.