If you are dissatisfied with strategy-making based on information, backward-looking analysis, management controls and problem-solving after the event, but you would still like to make a positive contribution to thinking about the future, it is time for strategic intelligence.
In the fall of 2015, we published our book “Big Boys Big Egos and Strategic Intelligence”, the fifth book in a row on business-, competitive- and strategic intelligence since 2000. Scientific research on narcissism lies at the basis of this book, which is based on a sample of 950 CEOs of the S&P top-500 companies during the period 1992-2009.
In 2015, a high-technological corporation in the Netherlands, Royal Imtech, with some 22,000 employees, active in infrastructure, building & construction, maintenance & control, ran into financial trouble. The main causes of this bankruptcy were the inflated egos of the former CEO and CFO, who had both held positions from 2002 till February 2013, acting like ‘sun-kings’, and a lack of monitoring and control.
Many years ago, Michael Porter said that strategy is about making choices differently from your rivals. It is interesting to make the connection with Professor David Teece of the University of California at Berkeley, regarding ‘dynamic capabilities’, the internal company drivers of strategy that point towards competitive positioning. Teece draws a distinction between ordinary and dynamic capabilities. Ordinary capabilities are a set of learned processes and activities that enable a company to produce a particular outcome and are similar to best practices.
A short story: “It is July 2015 on the shores of the Mediterranean. Times are tough, everyone is in debt and everyone lives on credit. Suddenly a rich tourist comes to town; he enters a hotel and puts a € 100 note on the reception counter to inspect some of the upstairs rooms for that evening. The hotel owner takes the € 100 note and runs to the butcher to pay his debt. The butcher takes the € 100 note and runs to the supplier of feed and fuel to pay his debt.
Trust in society is under huge pressure. We can see some extremely negative developments which are out of the control of our politicians, who unfortunately do not have the courage to take the necessary tough decisions.
Strategic intelligence enables top management to foresee the opportunities and threats in a timely fashion. At the end of the day who is accountable? Being agile as a company depends on developing two key capabilities: responsiveness and organizational flexibility. Many of us see new business opportunities. However, most of us are concerned that our companies lack the skills needed to meet future competitive threats.
In our book “Strategic Intelligence in Future Perspectives 2.0” we discussed a wide variety of some twenty-five companies that lost momentum because they failed to react in a timely fashion to discontinuous changes in their external business development. We described why this happens to so many companies and what can be done to overcome this. Here we explain how to do this.
“Why don’t companies last forever? Why do so many companies face serious problems after years of success? Why does management not react if the success rate of organizations comes to an end?”This is because your company’s internal business intelligence dashboards, your big-data analytics, and the managers with titles like market insights, customer insights, marketing intelligence and market intelligence do not deliver the right intelligence!
We generally never deal with the same topic three times in a row. But in this case we have to, because there is so much wrong in the financial sector. What do you think about the above quote from the Bank of England’s Chief Economist, listed by TIME Magazine as being in the Top-100 most influential people in the world? To us this of great concern, though most people in the world don’t realize it.