The ACS Blog

This essay starts with a shocking pricing tournament and proceeds to the challenges faced by President-elect Obama and the titans of industry. All of us are human and so all of us will be wrong. What’s important is when we make our mistakes.

A different approach to marketing crisis preparedness, from the Wall Street Journal. An upcoming two-day workshop about business war-gaming from ACS.

Whether we’re talking about the troubles of the Detroit Three or the Republican Two, it’s easy to blame the perfect storm of energy prices, financial crisis, and tough competition. But although the perfect storm may have accelerated their decline, it didn’t cause their vulnerability.

Is high executive compensation a problem, or is it high pay for bad performance? The difficulties of regulating compensation, some reasons why good executives go bad, and the need to focus on performance at least as much as on compensation.

How big would Google be if its recent growth weren’t “as bad as some had feared”? We know growth doesn’t go on forever, but our quest for bigger and better every year leads to trouble. How can executives know when they cross the line from building up to propping up to puffing up?

Recognizing excellence on the web at fivethirtyeight.com (“Electoral Projections Done Right”) and from Substance, Inc., developers of ACS’ new website.

“Darn right it was the predator [sic] lenders.” There’s a lesson there, a lesson we can use to help us move forward. However, the lesson has nothing to do with predators, lenders, lending, crises, or governors. It has to do with solving problems effectively, guarding against easy and satisfying assumptions.

The CI Foundation has published a new book, Starting a Competitive Intelligence Function. A chapter in the book, “You’ve Got the Data. Now What?”, was written by ACS Founder and CEO Mark Chussil. View the blog post for links to the book and the chapter.

The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, Oregon chapter, interviewed ACS Founder and CEO Mark Chussil. You can read the interview, a wide-ranging discussion about strategic thinking and business war-gaming.

There are many advantages to Honda’s flexible factories. In a mass-production industry, where does the idea of flexibility come from?