Strategy

If there's one thing we hate, it's dumb strategies.

We hated it when AT&T decided to go into the cable business. We hated it when Daimler bought Chrysler.

We particularly hate strategies that somebody read in a book somewhere. When someone goes into a company and says, "We're going to focus on our core competencies," well, it reminds me of the time a good friend took us aside one day and said, in all seriousness, "The trick with the stock market is to buy low and sell high."

Dumb strategies are usually created by smart, imaginative people. They don't lack for ideas. But they do lack three things:

• Detailed knowledge of what is going on in their own organizations
• A sense of what has happened when the strategy was tried before. (And believe us, all strategies were tried before.)
• The courage to think through the consequences.

You know what? We can't help too much with the last one. But we can help a lot with the first two. We can provide the eyes and ears you need to find out what you need to find out, without throwing everybody into a tizzy. And we have done the research into what has happened when other companies have tried the same thing.

If you are interested in talking more to us about the work we've done developing strategies, please contact us.