Editor's note
INSEAD professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, authors of Blue Ocean Strategy, have made a splash in the business press with their recent book, landing on the Wall Street Journal’s “Top 10 business bestseller list” only one month after publication. Readers obviously find the idea of vast blue oceans of uncontested space appealing from a marketing,strategic and profitability perspective. Rather than sounding notes of gloom on over-saturation, the authors contend that meeting the needs of customers (that others have ignored) wins almost every time. For the Journal of Business Strategy (JBS) they have adapted a case study from their book on how a perfectly ordinary wine can become a best seller.
Michael Allio’s consulting firm specializes in family businesses, but his article for JBS applies to any business, large or small, public or private. He offers practical advice for implementing strategy, in part acquired as he observed that family businesses were often exceptionally diligent at implementing because the family honor could depend on it. Allio also emphasizes that communication of strategy can be a deciding factor in success. Unless every employee understands the company’s direction and his own part in the process, momentum can be lost.
Michael Goodman, founder and director of the Corporate Communication Institute at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and a professor there, gives a broad overview of the many suggestions in the business and communication sectors on how business can rebuild lost trust. His research applies to business in almost any country or industry, although he focuses explicitly on the scandal-ridden exemplars in American business. Of course, even Enron had a lengthy code of ethics in writing. They just didn’t observe the rules. Clearly, a first step to changing perception and reputation is a statement on values and behavior, but they matter little if not integrated into everyday business practice. We have the words, now action must follow. Business has a long way to go to prove its integrity.
Deloitte Consulting’s Brent Wortman takes the reader from knowing to doing when it comes to corporate behavior that creates value. A surprising one-third of financial executives in a firm survey confessed that they did not know how to convert knowing why their firms were valuable to establishing real value for stakeholders. Wortman has a number of practical suggestions for accomplishing this key task.
With all this knowledge floating around, it’s probably a good idea not only to manage it well, but to throw it away occasionally. Kevin De Souza and his co-author caution that two capabilities of knowledge management are often ignored, with dire consequences: segmentation and destruction. This can make for an unwieldy mess of knowledge that obscures even the worthwhile aspects. Norman Sheehan suggests that, even though it seems knowledge-intensive firms have existed for many years, we still don’t have the right tools for measuring and improving their performance. He adapts Michael Porter’s much-vaunted five forces for industrial firms to knowledge-intensive firms such as consulting firms and advertising agencies.
We call your attention to a particularly clever column by Patrick Marren, our“Alternative strategy” columnist who not infrequently causes us to smile or even laugh at some mention of business strategy, however unlikely that is. This month he has some rather amusing and pointed comments on the left brain-right brain dichotomy, if there is one. Different as their approaches to planning are, even oppositional, the two “sides” must somehow cooperate and coordinate in the business world if the company is to succeed. Reading Marren’s column this month may even cause you to rethink your own left-right dominance issues.
