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“Why Strategies Fail” webinar (posted April 2, 2013)
Strategies fail when strategists choose bad strategies. That sounds obvious until we consider that smart strategists never choose bad strategies on purpose. On the other hand, smart strategists also don’t choose bad strategies by accident.
Mark Chussil will present “Why Strategies Fail” in SCIP‘s webinar series on Thursday, April 18, 2013. The one-hour webinar runs 6:30-7:30 pm east-coast USA time, 5:30-6:30 pm Minneapolis time, 3:30-4:30 west-coast USA time. People can attend from any location and do not have to be SCIP members. Those in the Minneapolis area can attend online or in-person with the SCIP Minnesota Chapter. Click here for more information and to register.
Posted March 13, 2013. ACS Founder Mark Chussil will receive SCIP‘s prestigious Fellows award for outstanding contributions to the strategic and competitive intelligence professions. The award will be presented in May at the SCIP International Conference in Orlando, Florida.
Posted March 8, 2013. “The Secret of Training for Competitiveness,” a thought-provoking eight-minute presentation by Sync Strategy partners ACS and the Academy of Competitive Intelligence, is available on YouTube.
Posted February 4, 2013.
An interview with Mark Chussil (and others) appears in the January 2013 issue of Aalto University Executive Education Profile (Finland). The interview begins on page 13 in the article “Living Risks” by Joanna Sinclair, and focuses on risk management, business war gaming, simulation, and early warning. “People don’t make bad decisions on purpose — and they don’t make bad decisions by accident.”
The ACS essay “Why Do War Games Work?” has been published, in an enhanced version, in Competitive Intelligence Magazine. CIM is published by SCIP.
Mark Chussil’s 30-minute video “Why Strategies Fail” has been viewed over 6,000 times.
Posted December 5, 2012. Mark Chussil’s 30-minute video “Why Strategies Fail” has been viewed over 4,200 times. It’s from his speech of the same name for two conferences of Chief Strategy Officers (New York, December 2011, and San Francisco, May 2012). You can see the video on YouTube or on “How to Think Better,” which describes ACS’ workshops on great strategic thinking.
Posted December 4, 2012. Mark Chussil will speak on “Strategy! It’s Not Bragging If You Can Do It” for the 2013 SCIP Conference in Orlando. Update, February 4, 2013: For more information, see this press release from SCIP.
Posted August 21, 2012. When he’s not solving gnarly strategy problems ACS CEO Mark Chussil tackles intriguing life challenges as the author of Nice Start: Questions Only You Can Answer to Create the Life Only You Can Live. The Harvard Business School Career Management Webinar Series begins its Fall 2012 program on September 6 with “Nice Start: Now What?”, presented by Mark (HBS MBA ’79). Open to all HBS alumni.
Posted August 17, 2012. “Suffering Strategy! What We Don’t Know Hurts Us, and What We Do Know Hurts Us Too.” Mark Chussil will present a workshop for SCIP Silicon Valley on September 12, 6 pm – 8 pm, venue hosted by Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, CA. Click here for more information and to register. Why didn’t Blockbuster become Netflix? Why did GM go bankrupt after being the biggest company in the world? Safeway and Supervalu took opposite pricing strategies during the recession; who was right?
Posted July 12, 2012. SCIP published “Paying for Bad News” in the April-June 2012 issue of Competitive Intelligence Magazine. You can read and download it. The article also appears as a four-part series of posts on this website.
Posted July 9, 2012. Mark Chussil will present a workshop on “Pricing and Pricing War Games” on July 26, 2012, for the PDMA (Product Development and Management Association). Membership in the PDMA is not required. The workshop will be in Beaverton, Oregon (just outside Portland), from 6:00 – 8:30 pm. Click here to register for the workshop. (Registration is being handled by email, as PDMA’s online registration is temporarily disabled.) Click here for more information about the workshop.
Posted April 27, 2012. ACS has launched a joint venture with Dr. Ben Gilad, founder of the Academy of Competitive Intelligence and author of Business War Games. The joint venture, called Sync Strategy, focuses on intense, highly experiential programs on strategic thinking for rising-star managers. Suitable for corporate universities, executive-development programs, and more. Please contact ACS or contact Sync for more information.
Posted March 20, 2012.
ACS’ Mark Chussil has contributed three “Powernoodles” as a Powernoodle Expert. The three focus on Predicting Competitors’ Actions, Competitive-Strategy Action, and Scenario Planning, which help you get basic insight into key questions. From Powernoodle’s website: With Powernoodle’s technology you “participate in anonymous, online group brainstorming where everyone has a voice. The best ideas from brainstorming rise to the top through an interactive process of voting, rating and prioritizing.” (Notes: ACS recommends Powernoodle, and has no financial interest in the company.)
And now for something completely different. Mark Chussil is author of Nice Start: Questions Only You Can Answer to Create the Life Only You Can Lead (Inkwater Press, 2010). You can watch a 55-minute video of a mini-workshop based on Nice Start, with Rémy Chaussé, bestselling author of Living Life As An Exclamation Point!. (The video, recorded on March 16, 2012, is also available on vimeo.)
Posted March 5, 2012. The “Lucky or Smart” webinar (see February 22, below) is now available online on EMA-I’s website. Free, non-commercial, no registration required for viewing.
Posted February 22, 2012.
Mark Chussil will present “Why Strategies Fail” at the Chief Strategy Officers Summit in San Francisco, May 17-18, 2012, sponsored by The IE Group.
Mark Chussil will deliver a free one-hour webinar on “Lucky or Smart: How to Judge Your Business’ Performance,” March 2, 2012, sponsored by EMA-I. 5 pm Zurich time, 4 pm London, 11 am New York, 10 am Chicago, 8 am San Francisco. Click here to register and for more information. Update: click to hear and view the webinar, as it was delivered, on EMA-I’s website. Free, non-commercial, no registration required to view the webinar.
Posted February 15, 2012. ACS is twenty years old this month! Twenty years of business war games, strategy simulators, and workshops on strategic thinking. See also 20 Years of ACS: Plus, Four Great Trivialities about Strategy.
Posted January 11, 2012. Mark Chussil will present “Lucky or Smart: How to Judge Your Business’ Performance” in the EMA-I 2012 Webinar Series. It is free. It will take place Friday March 2, 2012, at 11 am – noon east-coast USA, 8 – 9 am west-coast USA. Update: see above for a link to view the webinar as it was delivered.
Posted January 10, 2012.
You can see a video of Mark Chussil’s “Why Strategies Fail” speech (see below) for The IE Group. Thirty minutes.
Mark Chussil was again named one of the Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior by Trust Across America.
Posted January 2, 2012. ACS has completed major improvements in its analytic capabilities in its strategy decision test technology.
Posted November 22, 2011. Mark Chussil will present “Did Our Strategy Work? A Great Question We Answer Badly” as a workshop at the 2012 SCIP International Conference and Exhibition, May 14-17, in Philadelphia. SCIP is Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals.
Posted November 7, 2011. Mark Chussil will speak on “Why Strategies Fail: Human People, Biased Tools,” on December 9 in New York City. He’ll speak at the Strategic Planning Innovation / Chief Strategy Officer Summit, by invitation only, sponsored by The IE Group.
Posted November 7, 2011. Mark Chussil will conduct a three-day program on strategic thinking and business war-gaming for the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India, November 17-19.
Posted November 7, 2011. Mark Chussil spoke on “Putting Your Strategy to the Test” at The Performance Conference in Orlando on October 20. The interactive presentation focused on the difference between judging strategies after the fact and testing them in advance. It covered “The Five ‘Gets’ to Better Strategic Thinking” and included running about 70,000,000 simulations of ACS’ Top Pricer Tournament™ with the conference participants.
Posted September 10, 2011. Mark Chussil will present a free webinar, “Did Our Strategy Work? Why We Give Wrong Answers to the Right Question,” on September 21 at 12:30 pm EST, 11:30 am Central, 9:30 am Pacific. It’s sponsored by the Strategic Planning Xchange (SPX) LinkedIn group and Method Frameworks. From the webinar description: “Carol Bartz was hired as CEO almost three years ago to turn around Yahoo. The Board of Directors fired her, by telephone, a few days ago because Yahoo has not turned around. In other words, her strategy failed. Or did it?”
Posted September 1, 2011. Mark Chussil was featured in The Many Sides of Price Optimization Software, written by Kasey Coryn of Kforce Inc. for their finance and accounting newsletter.
Posted August 23, 2011. Mark Chussil will speak at the Strategic Planning Innovation conference (December 8-9, 2011, New York City), sponsored by The IE Group. His topic is “Why Strategies Fail: Human People, Biased Tools.”
Posted July 8, 2011. Mark Chussil will deliver a two-day open-enrollment workshop on Business War Games: High-Impact Strategy Development, for The Performance Institute of the American Strategic Management Institute. The workshop will be held September 26-27, 2011, in Washington, DC. Discounts for groups of 3 or more are available; contact Andrea DiRaddo.
Posted July 3, 2011. View and download a brochure about ACS How to Think Better workshops.
Posted May 23, 2011. View a bibliography of articles and essays by ACS on the subject of why strategies fail, plus recommended thought-provoking books by non-ACS authors. The bibliography is downloadable and contains links to full text online (for articles and essays). The ACS Why Strategies Fail Bibliography.
Posted April 26, 2011. New media! See one-minute videos about “Why Do Our Companies Fail?” and “Lucky or Smart” on YouTube. They’re also on ACS’ site, on the business war games and strategy decision test pages.
View a bibliography of 25 articles and essays by ACS about business war games. It contains a brief description of each article and essay, plus links to the full text online. The ACS Business War-Gaming Bibliography.
Posted March 28, 2011 The March 24 30-minute webinar on Strategy, for the Boston Graduate School of Business, is now available, free. You can access it here.
Posted March 21, 2011 Mark Chussil will deliver a free webinar on Strategy for the Boston Graduate School of Business. The webinar is on Thursday, March 24, at 1:00-1:30 pm EST. Advance registration required; click here to register.
February 7, 2011 Audio and slides from the How to Become a Superstar Strategist webinar are available. The webinar was recorded on February 1, 2011, and is just over one hour in duration.
January 24, 2011 Mark Chussil will deliver a workshop on “Why Strategies Fail (P.S. We expected them to succeed)” at the 2011 SCIP Conference, May 10, 2011, in Orlando, Florida. SCIP is Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals.
January 7, 2011 Mark Chussil was named one of the Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior by Trust Across America.
January 3, 2011
Happy New Year!
Mark Chussil will present a free webinar on February 1, 2011, at 11:00 am USA east-coast time, 8:00 am west-coast time, on behalf of the Enterprise Management Association. The webinar is on “Build Your Skill: How To Become A Superstar Strategist.” Conventional thinking produces conventional decisions that lead to conventional results. Great thinking inspires great decisions that create great results. Learn about picking proper paradigms, learning to learn, resisting the lure of precision, and accepting the inevitability of uncertainty, all illustrated with stories from real life.
You can find a registration link on this page. No membership is required.
Mark Chussil will present a free webinar on January 19, 2011, at 12:30 pm USA east-coast time, 9:30 am USA west-coast time, on behalf of the LinkedIn group “Strategic Planning Xchange.” The webinar is on “Business War Games: Stress-Testing Your Strategy Before You Commit Your Career.” Learn why business war game work and what they are good for; the essential elements of successful business war games; and what you can learn and apply from business war games.
To participate in this webinar you must be a member of the Strategic Planning Xchange group on LinkedIn. To join, go to the Strategic Planning Xchange group. You can review the group’s profile to assess its fit with your interests before you press the yellow “Join Group” button. As a member, you can find the webinar announcement partway down the main page for the group.
November 29, 2010. Now available: a bibliography of 24 articles and essays by ACS about business war games. It contains a brief description of each article and essay, plus links to the full text online. Please write to ACS for your copy.
November 12, 2010. Mark Chussil will teach executive-MBA classes on pricing strategy, “Everyday Woe Prices,” at Willamette University on November 16 and 17. The classes will use, among other things, ACS’ Strategy Decision Test™ technology.
The reaction from those classes: “Mark has a rare skill of being able to communicate complex topics clearly and simply. His talk to my MBA class for professionals on pricing strategy was the highlight of the term. These bright and demanding students learned more in one evening from Mark than they could have learned from reading a whole text book on the topic. Mark’s intelligence, experience and wit combined to produce a fun and effective learning experience.” — Ed Warnock, award-winning MBA professor, the Atkinson Graduate School of Management, Willamette University
November 3, 2010. An audio recording of Trust Across America‘s live interview with Mark Chussil is now available. Click this link and move to 32:30 on the timer for the 25-minute conversation. Another interview is available, in print, at In Strategy We Trust.
October 8, 2010. On November 30, 2010, Mark Chussil will present a free webinar: “Business War Games: Stress-Testing Strategies Before You Commit.” The webinar is sponsored by EMA-I, the Enterprise Management Association – International. The one-hour webinar begins at 11 am New York time, 10 am Chicago, 9 am Denver, 8 am San Francisco.
October 5, 2010. Trust Across America published a two-part interview with Mark Chussil, Thoughts on Trustworthy Public Companies. You can also see the full interview on ACS’ site, called In Strategy We Trust.
Pricing and Pricing War Games
PRICING AND PRICING WAR GAMES
PDMA Learning and Networking Event
July 26, 2012 — 6:00- 8:30 PM
This workshop has already taken place. It received the highest ratings ever recorded in the 2 1/2 years the PDMA chapter has collected its ratings. Click here to contact ACS to learn more about the workshop and to arrange it for your company or organization.
Professionals in any industry work with tools as they set prices for their products or services: operating costs, ramp-up, S-curves, break-evens, ROI goals, and customer value. We understand the concepts and apply them carefully. How, then, do we end up fighting price wars, disappointing customers, and performing below goals?
For a start, consider what’s missing in that list of tools: anything that takes competitive dynamics into account. That’s where war games and simulations come in, and that’s what we’ll see in action on July 26th.
The Oregon Chapter of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) invites you to its July Learning and Networking Event. In this highly interactive and thought-provoking program, our experienced speaker will discuss and lead us through pricing decisions, pricing mistakes, and pricing war games. We will participate in simulations that shock, amuse, and enlighten as we ponder how to price effectively.
A special thanks to the Oregon Technology Business Center (OTBC) for hosting this event.
Speaker
Mark Chussil, Founder and CEO of Advanced Competitive Strategies.
Mark has conducted hundreds of war games and worked with thousands of strategists in Fortune 500 companies on six continents, and helped them make or save billions of dollars. He’s a highly rated speaker who’s written three books, chapters for five others, and numerous articles, and who’s earned a patent (another is pending) for simulation technology. A 35-year veteran in competitive strategy, Mark earned his MBA at Harvard and his BA at Yale.
Date, Time, and Cost
Thursday, July 26, 2012
6:00-8:30 PM
The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) is the premier global advocate for product development and management professionals. The Oregon chapter’s mission is to help local professionals and organizations to identify, develop, and launch more innovative and profitable products and services through cross-industry collaboration, thought leadership, and the sharing of best practices and practical knowledge. For more information about the Oregon Chapter of the PDMA, please contact: Miki Tokola, Chapter President, at president-oregon@pdma.org.
We encourage everyone in Oregon who is interested in the Product Development and Management Association to become a member of the National PDMA. For a great explanation on the benefits of membership in the PDMA, click here.