business war games

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.

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 and SCIP Oregon conducted a business war game of the automobile industry. Here’s why, here are lessons from the war game, and here’s what you should do in your own business.

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.

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.

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.

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.