The ACS Blog

Don’t we all wish that the stress tests of banks had been done, say, a year and a half ago? The case for running our own stress tests on our businesses.

What would you do if you were the GM CEO? Or Alan Mulally of Ford, Akio Toyoda of Toyota, Tom Purves of BMW, Robert Cosmei of Hyundai, or another industry leader? Would your strategies work? Come participate in an automobile-industry business war game, facilitated by ACS.

A year from now, more or less, people will be writing stories about those prescient strategists who found opportunity and led their companies to glory. Those stories will also mention the companies desperately scrambling to catch up. Those stories will be about decisions and actions begun now.

Harvard Business Publishing’s Denis Sautnier, Educational Technology Director in the Higher Education Group, recently interviewed ACS Founder and CEO Mark Chussil. You can see their wide-ranging conversation at Business Simulations and War Games: An Interview with Advanced Competitive Strategies’ Mark Chussil.

Prognosticators would rather be right than wrong. The question remains, why do they (and we) get it wrong? Here are some reasons, and here is a way to distinguish good remedies from bad.

According to Newsweek’s Sharon Begley, “The more feted by the media, the worse a pundit’s accuracy.” So, if we shouldn’t trust pundits who have (merely) achieved fame, how should we decide whom to trust? Fame may not be a prerequisite, but it doesn’t follow that obscurity is.

Executive compensation is top-headline news these days. It commands the attention of the President and Congress. It’s an attractive problem, full of righteous indignation, handy villains, and clear action plans. Unfortunately, it’s not the important problem.

Have you ever seen 36,270 what-if’s on your strategy ideas? Have you ever seen your 36,270 what-if’s compared in a universe of 5,658,120 simulations? That’s what ACS did for over 150 strategists competing in a pricing tournament.

It is, of course, good news for Yahoo that new CEO Carol Bartz is a capable person working hard to turn the company around. It is worth asking, though, whether a turnaround is even possible. Is there only room for one major search engine?

People talk of business models with certain words and meanings in the USA. People may use the same words with different meanings in France, Malaysia, Brazil, and South Africa. We may translate the words but we may not understand each other, with real consequences.