The ACS Blog

I’m not saying the Closed Minds, Distorted Markets, and Stormy World themes are wrong. I am saying I don’t think the evidence establishes they’re right. They might be right, but they’re not right yet. Until they are right I believe it’s worth considering other perspectives.

I’m not saying the Closed Minds, Distorted Markets, and Stormy World themes are wrong. I am saying I don’t think the evidence establishes they’re right. They might be right, but they aren’t right yet. Until they are right I believe it’s worth considering other perspectives.

I’m not saying the Closed Minds, Distorted Markets, and Stormy World themes are wrong. I am saying I don’t think the evidence establishes they’re right. They might be right, but they aren’t right yet. Until they are right I believe it’s worth considering other perspectives.

Advanced Competitive Strategies was officially incorporated in February 1992. Please join me with a smile: it’s time to celebrate and reflect upon twenty years of ACS. We will do that here with accumulated facts, acquired wisdom, sincere thanks, and hopes for what’s yet to come.

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.