All Intelligence Briefings that have been published by Rodenberg Tillman & Associates can be found here.
This statement is the key message in a crucial publication in HBR in June 2016, about the extremely expensive mistakes in M&A, which seem to be unstoppable! This has been going on for 40-50 years!
The above statement illustrates the dramatic situation in the financial markets where no one, no one at all, has any control. This is what we face daily in our strategic intelligence practices. We provide some insight as to why we cannot rely on the financial system, or on presidents, prime ministers, politicians or central bankers.
The 23rd June, 2016, is a historic date in the development of the EU: it is the day on which the British voted for Brexit. Our politicians still believe that all good things in the world come as a result of their actions. However, the economic reality is that our success in trade depends far more on fundamental factors such as ‘comparative advantage’, and whether we design and make things that others want to buy, than on politician’s bureaucratic schemes.
The core activity of our firm is to deliver strategic intelligence solutions to our clients.You might think “So what?” We can’t influence the performance of our national economies, so we have to live with it. But this totally wrong.
Do we really believe the truth when we hear it, even if it is not what we want to hear? That is strategic intelligence at its core: critical thinking, perspectives over and above facts, challenging assumptions, and determining the course of future action. On one occasion, I was presenting to one of the leading business groups in the Netherlands, and at the end, the CEO of a top-25 listed company asked us what kind of differentiating tools we use to determine the possible courses of future actions.
This statement demonstrates a potential problem. One example is that of the European Central Bank (ECB), with their new headquarters in Frankfurt, financed with even more debt in a financial world led by overconfidence and exuberance. The eurozone has been in a slow-motion crisis for some 7-8 and no one seems to be in charge: neither Draghi, Merkel, Tusk, Juncker or anyone else. The ECB doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation.
The above is one of the testimonials concerning our Master Class held in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2016 with 45 business professionals attending from a wide variety of industry sectors. It was a real challenge for us to work with these Israeli professionals in what is seen as the “cradle of the most advanced intelligence practices in the world”. Our host was the Israel Export Institute.
Companies have a tendency to compete on the basis of their core competencies rather than on the basis of those attributes that really distinguish them in the eyes of their customers. Core competencies seem to be a safe approach but are not the best route to business success. Your focus should be ‘outwards-in’ rather than ‘inwards-out’.
Many firms still follow the traditional approaches to strategy that were designed for more stable times, emphasizing analysis and planning and focused on maximizing short-term performance rather than long-term robustness. In early 2016 Harvard Business Review published research dealing with 30,000 public US-companies over a time span of 50 years.
Most management models lead unnecessary and enormous cost increases with a large chance of hugely disastrous decisions, because top managers are hardly ever corrected, according to Gary Hamel. We need decisions based on responsibility and not on company position. CEOs and boards of management show ‘Sun-King’ behavior with too much distance from the shop-floor, leading to wrong strategic decisions.