Now this is a management classic both in terms of its relevance and insightfulness.  On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B came out in 1975 and I have used it often in my time as a manager and consultant.   Kerr, S. (1975). On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B. [Article]. Academy of Management Journal, 18(4), 769-783. In a nutshell (and I encourage you to find and read the article as it is also very well written and therefore an easy read) we behave the way we do in response to a number of factors which are summarised in the following diagram. In nearly all situations in the work environment (and in life in general) there are consequences to our actions.  Some consequences are positive like a pay rise and some are negative like being fired.  It isn't rocket science that we, as individuals, act in a rational manner and try and maximise the positive consequences whilst minimising the negative consequences. This article highlight...

I'll try and make this easy to understand as what is usually going on in our heads is a bit of a mystery to everyone including ourselves. Managers get inundated with information all day every day and confronted with problems that require them to somehow pull all the appropriate information together to be able to make solid decisions.  We meet this challenge by employing cognitive frameworks as a means of framing problems in a way that makes sense to us facilitating information processing and decision making. For example, we have a cognitive framework about driving and road rules which has been built up through initial learning and then from practical experience.  This allows us drive efficiently and with confidence as our cognitive framework means we do not have to reinterpret and analyse each situation we encounter.  However, when we first drive in a foreign country we are very aware that we need to take extra caution to understand how the road rules work....

I figure anyone looking for strategy made simple really needed to hear the words - it doesn't exist !!! But before you click away ask yourself if you would ever dream of searching for 'legal advice made simple or 'accounting the quick way' you know you would just be asking for trouble and yet with strategy, which after all is helping set the direction and future fortune of the organisation, we want it in an hour with fries and six pack abs...... If you are reading on then the news gets better because it isn't a dark art either.  You don't need to pay truckloads of money to high powered consultants who will likely just regurgitate from the text book they were given in their MBA programme.  That option to me is the illusion of strategy as if the future is more assured based on the amount of money the advice cost. There is no real short cut and like any business discipline you need a blend of knowledge and experience to really do it well.  Look at the h...

A quick look in the business section of any book store or a search on-line will reveal an absolute multitude of books on strategic management.  Professor Richard Whittington ( a prominent academic in the area of corporate strategy currently at the Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford) said it beautifully at the start of his 2001 book 'What is strategy and does it matter' when he observed that there is a basic implausibility about these books.  If they genuinely offer the secrets of strategic planning, something we pay top executives a great deal of money to perform, why so many books and why so cheap? I can't help likening them to books on sex education where you can gain some of the basics but just by reading the books you will never become expert or even that good, you have to get a little experience...........  Yet the management guru industry and the popular presses churn them out by the score in the same vein as they churn out books on h...

During my recent PhD reading and thinking I've come to the conclusion that strategy, although lumped in with all the other management areas, is different, fundamentally different.  And because of this it needs to be thought of and treated differently as well and I don't think that is done. Why is strategy different? Two things; It is about positioning the organise in a future environment The competition are doing the same thing so you are competing. A simple analogy is a car race - The team decides what strategy to start with and what to do in the race, every other activity is about keeping the car on the road and making it go faster.  To bring this into a business context, strategy is about what to do and every other activity is about efficiency and effectiveness. For this reason strategy it is a skill set that differs and you really can't just think about it every now and again and hope to be good at it or even competent.  The te...

I wasn't going to be doing much posting on this blog as I got busy in my PhD but it happens to be quite a good way to review bits and pieces in the strategic management field and also share them with anyone who is interested. For those interested in business strategy and strategic planning should have come across Henry Mintzberg in your travels.  Not only is he incredibly insightful and has been for decades, he has a very good ability to juggle academic rigour and practitioner applicability and his writing style is understandable, interesting and very engaging. Way back in 1979 he wrote a paper about direct research which is has applicable today as it was then when it comes to thinking about how to effectively research strategic management.  There is a big spilt in this area between; those who believe management research should try and emulate the methods of scientific research; Trying to investigate actors’ subjective processes, because they are...

Sometimes it seems as though the people involved in strategy must have a rare intellect able to hold multiple conflicting threads of information whilst including future possibilities and probabilities finally coming up with something interesting. But do they really. In a similar manner have you ever wondered how chess masters can play 25 games at a time and still win nearly all of them?  On February 8-9, 2011, Iranian grandmaster Ehsan Ghaem-Maghami achieved the Guinness world record for most simultaneous chess games. He played for 25 hours against 604 players, winning 580 (97.35%) of the games, drawing 16, and losing 8.  A brain the size of Texas....... But this experiment tells us something. First, present a grandmaster and a novice with a position from an actual, but unfamiliar, chess game (with about 25 pieces on the board). After five or ten seconds, remove the pieces and ask the subjects to reproduce it. The grandmaster will usually reconstruct the whole...