The ACS Blog

If an unexpected threat (or opportunity) can come out of left field, it is good to look in that direction before committing to a new strategy or the status quo. What investors and Congress have to say about that.

Our first surprise suggests that we don’t ask questions that might help us predict competitors. Our second surprise suggests that our competitors may not be so easy to predict, unless the slate isn’t clean, jobs aren’t safe, issues aren’t clear, and tradition is binding.

Businesses tend to overtighten. They do it because they’re led there by simple, persuasive logic, which we can boil down to this: it is cheaper to print “do not overtighten” on the instructions than it is to supply products that can withstand formidable strength.

Upcoming programs from ACS: Webinars about business war games and strategic thinking, and a workshop at the 2010 SCIP Conference entitled Numbers Gone Wild: Or, Precision In, Garbage Out.

In lieu of evidence and a causal theory, I say that if you like to tweet, go ahead and tweet. You don’t need to justify it — and you cannot justify it —any more than you need to justify a preference for cabernet sauvignon over pinot noir.

What can we learn about business diagnosis from TV’s nastiest doctor? Quite a bit. We take a look at Safeway and Supervalu pricing on our rounds.

We’ve run it again: a business war game on the automobile industry. It was to demonstrate war-gaming, not to solve the industry’s problems. That said, it revealed a lot about what goes right and what goes wrong when people develop competitive strategies.

(Translation: Business War Game in Washington, DC.) We all know we’re in an economic crisis. We all know that we still have to make strategy decisions. And we all know it is a time of opportunity as well as a time of danger. It’s a perfect time for business war gaming.

I presume you would like to predict your competitors’ moves better than you do now. Say, for instance, their prices. Let’s work on that, perhaps with a shock as we go along. We structure today’s harangue around a pricing quiz.

ACS announces two upcoming workshops about business war-gaming and a forthcoming article about a business war game for the automobile industry. We also invite strategists to participate in a free and fascinating pricing-strategy tournament.