Strategy implementation insights combining technical expertise with collaborative change management. Transform strategic intent into operational excellence.
A typical story?: A prestigious consulting firm arrives with frameworks and templates. They analyse, interview, and deliver an impressive strategy deck. Everyone nods during the final presentation. Six months later? The recommendations gather dust, and nothing has changed. This is the "do it for you" consultant trap which may even become the "do it to you" trap.
Strategic effectiveness isn't measured by document length or analytical complexity. When our half-page of practical decision rules impressed acquisition executives, it revealed a powerful truth: the best strategies provide clear guidance for daily decisions, emerge from business practice, and use simple rules everyone can understand and apply.
By bringing more senior executive team involvement to sales & operations planning (S&OP) with Integrated Business Planning (IBP) there was an expectation that this would enable better execution of strategy. However, too often IBP implementations do not lead…
At DuPont, I was fortunate to work with Pete Compo as the ideas forming the Emergent Approach to Strategy were developed. In recent years I has been involved in the preparation of the Emergent Approach to Strategy and am the first affiliated partner to deliver to help product line and business teams design and implement adaptive strategies.…
The most common leadership failure is treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems—particularly true in strategy development. While technical problems can be solved by experts with known techniques, strategy requires learning new ways, changing attitudes, and adopting experimental mindsets. Arkaro's "done with you" approach addresses strategy as the adaptive challenge it truly is. This failure is particularly true in strategy design and implementation as the discipline of strategy has not yet caught up to the needs of adaptive challenges.
Would you organise a dinner party with friends without checking on food preferences that might have changed, or competing events that might impact scheduling? Of course not, yet businesses do initiate innovation programmes without making similar checks, or as Rumelt suggested “What’s really going on here?”, or perhaps even Marvin Gaye’s shorter “What’s Going On”
The Emergent Approach is a new theory and practice of strategy built on an adaptive view of change and innovation in contrast to “planning” the future. Why is a book on strategy needed?
As a young boy mesmerised by murmurations of starlings with my grandad in Norfolk I was filled with curiosity. How could the birds be organised to perform such complex dynamic manoeuvres? Little did I realise then how these summer evening displays would influence my business thinking in years to come..