Strategy
Reaching a good decision when facing a complex and uncertain situation is one of the fundamental roles of a leader. Typically, this requires a series of well-run meetings that progress the discussion until a workable solution is identified and embraced. However, despite this being a common process in organizational life, most people would say it seldom operates smoothly and frequently leads to less optimal solutions and lukewarm implementation.
Bob Woodward has made a career of writing about the inner workings of the White House. His reporting is so in-depth, you wonder how he manages…
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Strategy
Rock musicians are rarely who we look to for examples of strategic thinkers. In the genre’s heavy hitters such as Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Jimi Hendrix, we find careers and even lives lost to scandals, drugs, and burnout. The typical American image of a rock star tends to be someone that exists in the moment, lives hard, and likely does not plan for the future. In spite of this, strategic thinking would seem a necessity in the music industry – one of the most competitive areas imaginable.
Most highschoolers who pick up…
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Strategy
There are a some things in life most of us just didn’t see coming; movie casting choices, fashion trends, fusion restaurants. But most of the big events that shaped our generation like wars, pandemics, and financial crises provided warning signs we chose to ignore. President George W. Bush said in November 2005, “In a pandemic, everything from syringes to hospital beds, respirators, masks and protective equipment would be in short supply.” Then in 2014, President Obama said, “there may and likely will come a time in which we have an airborne disease that is deadly. And in…
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Strategy
In 1942, the British military leaders faced a very difficult choice. The war was going badly, their allies U.S. and Russia were pushing to do something bold, and British leadership didn’t see any good options. The Americans wanted to move quickly to invade France even though their troops were not battle tested. The Russians were getting hammered by the Germans and wanted Britain and the U.S. to start a second front in Europe to relieve the pressure.
The British had developed plans for a smaller invasion (Operation Jubilee) but all their military planners felt the most…
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Strategy
Predicting the future is both extremely valuable and practically impossible. The further out you aim your predictions, the more difficult it becomes. So when futurists take a stab at painting a picture fifty or a hundred years in the future, we pay less attention to the specifics and more to the direction and the possibilities. In Mauro Guillen’s book 2030 (published in 2020), he takes a more reasonable time frame of just a decade. Not surprisingly, his book projects today’s technological breakthroughs and demographic certainties and concludes that by 2030 foundations will be laid for a different trajectory.
The book…
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