Let’s start with the time before the baby arrives. The expecting parents are more or less in-formed about their future challenges. By this time, most parents have a general idea of how they want to live with the baby, how they want to bring the baby up and what kind of person it should (hopefully) become. Most parents wish their baby to become a strong, self-confident and happy person. Hopefully it will be very intelligent and will outsmart its little friends in the toddler group. Nevertheless, many issues still are very vague to them and they need to figure out many details. But not all of these details need to be decided right now. Many issues can wait until these particular situations arise. It will be easier and wiser to solve these questions with the detailed knowledge of the real-life situation.

You can compare this stage with the pre-startup phase of a new business. In this stage, the expectant entrepreneur has a general idea of what kind of business he is going to start and what he wants to achieve with it; i.e. he has developed an overall vision of his business. However, many details of his business plan still need to be worked out.

Than, the baby finally arrives. The young parents find themselves more than busy in their day-to-day live with the baby. They find out that there are a lot of questions they never thought about before and that need to be solved immediately. By that time, they have proba-bly developed a more detailed idea of their relationship with their baby and their general principles of childcare.

This is comparable with the start-up phase of a business. Despite all advance planning, managers have to work out the businesses routines and processes in detail. They have to bring their strategy to life. It is more than likely that they encounter some problems in this process. As with a new baby, they will come across questions they had not thought about before, and some aspects of their well-thought strategy may already turn out unrealistic.

So far, there is nothing surprising in my parallel between living with a baby and business strategy. It is, however, my experience during the next couple of months with the baby that reminded me of an important aspect of strategy: During baby’s first year, parents develop some routine and self-confidence. They develop their ‘strategies’ for major aspects for live with their baby, e.g. how they will handle sleeping problems, or how they find the fine line between baby’s needs and their own needs. Everything could be fine, except for the fact that the baby does not remain unchanged in its needs, behavior and circadian rhythm. What worked well until yesterday may be totally contra productive today. Hence, parents have to adapt their ways of doing almost constantly. They have to keep their ‘strategy’ very flexible. Ideally, they have a strong overall vision of how they want to bring their child up. This can serve them as a guiding line. For instance, parents may have decided that it is not right to let the baby cry to sleep. When their baby changes its sleeping pattern, they will have to find a new way to bring it to sleep. They won’t however start a sleep training program because that would violate one of their fundamental principles.

You may easily guess that businesses can find themselves in very similar situations. Some external conditions change and what worked well until now will not be as beneficial any more. As young parents, companies have to keep their strategies flexible and adaptive. Their overall vision and mission may serve them as guiding line for their overall direction that they intend to follow, even with their adapted strategy. This is very much what Mintzberg and Waters describe in their model of intended and emergent strategies.

There is one big difference, however. The difference is the rate parents and managers real-ize that they have to change something and take appropriate actions. Babies have a very powerful tool to enforce their needs. This is their voice. When something is not longer fine for the baby, it will ultimately start crying. Few parents will not react to that crying immediately. For managers, the situation is more difficult. Internal or external changes that would require an adaption of strategy are not always that obvious. Often they develop slowly and unno-ticed. Thus managers lose valuable time for their reactions.

My moral of the story is that managers should keep in mind what young parents always know: Remain flexible within your overall (strategic) directions. Look out for early signs of changes. The quicker you react, the better your results and the lower the damage.

But someday, they lost me as a loyal customer after several years. What had happened? The company had decided to introduce a customer loyalty program in order to increase my loyalty. They issued a customer card with which I could earn some bonus points that could be swapped into some ‘attractive presents’. That would not have troubled me. However, the guy at the counter probably had made it his personal mission to acquire me for this loyalty program. For several reasons I had decided that I already had more than enough loyalty cards in my wallet and did not want any more. (Especially since I had no idea what I should do with all those coffee machines, shower towels, training bags and the like that I could get for my bonus points). I rejected his offer several times. Unfortunately, this guy – although he perfectly recognized me – did not give up offering me his loyalty card every time. In the be-ginning my rejection was quite friendly. Some weeks later I felt the need to become a bit more explicit: ‘As I have already told you last time and the times before – I am definitely not interested in your loyalty card and I will not be in the future’. Nevertheless, this guy had made it his personal mission and challenge to convince me better. I had to endure his endless of-fers again and again.

This finally made me turn away. I discovered another gas station. It wasn’t located as con-veniently as the first one. But the little detour was less troublesome to me than the regular early-morning-discussion about loyalty programs. Thus, a business had lost a loyal and completely satisfied customer by trying to make him loyal.

Their mistake was their over-aggressive selling practice. It is a good idea to offer something to the customers that probably is of value to them. It is also a good practice to offer this new feature in a one-to-one way, i.e. to make a personal offer during the payment process. It is, however, a poor practice not to connect this approach with a bit of personalization. Here, they had simply missed to make a mental tick in the box ‘customer is definitely not interested’ (not to be mixed up with the box ‘customer is still undecided’) and to connect this information with the other information ‘customer already is a loyal and regular one’. These two pieces of information together should have led to the only conclusion that it was best not to bother me with this offer any more in the next future. It doesn’t matter if this process is made in the head of some shop attendant or in a computerized data management system. If the business is not able to make relevant connections between related pieces of information and to draw the right conclusions form them, their customer relationship efforts will have a good chance for failure.

Created and compiled by Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove of CrainerDearlove*, Thinkers 50 has established itself as the definitive biennial guide of both thinkers and ideas which have shaped strategic management thinking today. Among this year’s top thinkers are Indian-born management expert CK Prahalad (1), Malcolm Gladwell (2), and Paul Krugman (3). The entire top 50 list is available on this website.

“I am proud that two Tuck professors are recognized on this list of most influential living management thinkers. This dual honor is indication of the quality of our faculty,” Dean Paul Danos says. “Not only are Professors Govindarajan and D’Aveni at the forefront of strategic management thinking, they are also master teachers who inspire students. At Tuck we take great pride not only in developing new research but also in bringing that research into the classroom.”

Govindarajan, the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at Tuck and director of Tuck’s Center for Global Leadership, hits this year’s list at 24. Now working as a special adviser on innovation to GE, Govindarajan’s latest work was published in Harvard Business Review’s October edition. Co-authored with Jeff Immelt and Tuck colleague Chris Trimble, the article promotes a new concept pioneered by Govindarajan at GE called ‘reverse innovation.’

D’Aveni is professor of strategic management at Tuck and jumped significantly in the 2009 ranking, moving from 46 to 26 this year. According to the authors, D’Aveni’s star has been on the rise thanks to the prescience of his 1990s bestseller, Hypercompetition, which anticipated the business-scape of the last decade. His new book, Beating the Commodity Trap, is due out in January and tackles one of the biggest business issues of our time.

The ranking is compiled using a unique methodology. Thousands of people vote for the guru of their choice on the Thinkers 50 website. The top 100 names are then assessed against 10 criteria ranging from the originality and practicality of their ideas to their so-called “guru factor.” More than 3,500 votes were cast in the 2009 Thinkers 50 poll.

In addition to the main ranking, CrainerDearlove* provides an introduction to the thinkers they believe will shape the future. Sydney Finkelstein, Steven Roth Professor of Management at Tuck, was named as one of the few “On The Radar: Thinkers Shaping The Future.” Finkelstein is a prolific author with 11 books, including the best-selling Why Smart Executives Fail and co-author of his most recent book, Think Again.

For more information on Thinkers 50, visit its website.

So let’s have a look on my laptop screen which tools I use.

I have installed 5 small pieces of software which I found most helpful. Furthermore they are all free software. To be more specific, 4 are true open source programs and 1 is shareware but it works fine without registrations (there are no limitations within the unregistered version of the software). Let’s us start on the top of the left side.

Total Commander is an excellent file manager that has additional features like file compressing, ftp-server access and comparing folders. Some of you may remember the Norton Commander – and that is what “Total Commander” actually wants to be. Hence the second part of the name is commander. That piece of software is easy to use and helps you to organize all your files. The two window screen is most helpful. You can download the software on this website. TC is shareware and the programmer has been made releases in a constant way.

ToDoList is – as expressed by the name – a program to organize all your “to-do’s”. You can create and organize tasks and their subtasks, set priorities and structure your tasks by categories. There are dozens of flags to organize or to mark your tasks, and of course you can filter and group your tasks by those flags. You can download the software on this website. TDL is open source.

OpenProject is – as you can assume by its name – project management software. It has all what it takes to organize large projects and all essential features for organizing and monitoring project tasks (i.e. Gantt diagram, network plans, resource management) are in place. According to the website it has been downloaded over 1250000 times in over 142 countries. The only feature that does not work is the integrated pdf-file export, but you can easily work around by using a pdf-printer driver on your PC. You can download the software on this website. OP is open source.

Notepad ++ is a text editor. It has far more functions then the Window-system integrated text file editor. You can change the format/coding of text files. You can edit and manipulate different types of files, not matter it is a simple txt-file, C++, php, or an xml-file. You can work on several files at the same time, using the multi-view function. That is excellent software; I wonder that it is still open source software. You can download the software on this website.

Last but not least I use Free Mind. It’s easy-to-use software for mind mapping. You can do all the steps that you can do in mind mapping software, including exporting to html or xml. You can also copy and paste your mind maps to MS Word and Outlook. Open Mind is open source, too. You can download this software on this website.

Now it is up to you to manage you duties. There are excellent pieces of open source software available on the Internet, which can help you to become more productive.

On this website you have free access to the white paper (pdf format file).

The basic answer can be summarized as follows: E-Mail campaigns are quite different in comparison to print mail campaigns. Different reading habits when reading “online” require different structures and concepts for e-mail campaigns. Due to research results we know the following reading habits:

• An e-mail text is more browsed than read in detail.
• The attention to read the entire text needs to be attracted with anchor words or even buzz words.
• Only the first 10 rows will be absorbed in total.
• The reading rates online is lower than offline.
• Customers expect that the sender gets to the point as soon as possible.
• Customers will not follow all arguments to the bottom line.

Taking these reading and abortion styles into considering the following rules and recommendations can be derived:

• Write to your readers what is most important right at the beginning.
• The entire text of your mail should not excess the half of the letters text.
• The line of arguments should have a maximum of three layers.
• Your e-mail should be clearly arranged. Hence your mail needs more paragraphs compared to a letter.
• Each paragraph should contain only one core message.
• Avoid nested sentences.
• The salutatory address should include the sir name.

Of course, there are some other features that are important for the success of your e-mail campaign, too. Since a large number of websites have discussed those issues I will just summarize other important features. Here they are

• Adress management
• Return address
• Subject heading
• Target audience appropriate content

Good luck with your e-mail campaign.

This week I read a newspaper article about much older news. As it seems, these can be quite interesting again. Most people, including me, did not even notice it: one of Germany’s most popular TV news formats – Tagesschau - has been broadcasting its own issues from exactly twenty years ago since 1993. So today you can see the news from May 31st 1989. These newscasts are exactly as they were broadcasted originally, including slips of the tongue and weather forecast. Unfortunately, the time of the broadcast is 3 a.m. in the morning and thus, not very convenient for me.

What has all this to do with strategy? I think a lot. A 20 years old news format is not only entertaining. It is more than a recall of fashion trends, dreadful haircuts and log forgotten events. At the original broadcasting date, all this was brand new information, often still incomplete. Commentators were speculating about potential future effects of latest events. Nobody knew were all this would end. Nobody knew if a particular event would even have any relevant consequence or not.

When we see all this today, we know what happened afterwards. This makes a huge difference. I often write about the importance of thinking about the future for good strategic planning here. The difficult thing is to get predictions of the future right. There are a few early signs, indicators and trends. The first problem is to identify them at all. Secondly, it is hard to derive the correct conclusions from these. In this context, an old newscast is an excellent exercise for thinking about the future. We already know the major events of the next six to twelve months following that newscast. Thus it is much easier to identify early signs of relevance. Did people of that time realise that their latest news were indicators for larger things to come? Did they draw the right conclusions? If not, why? Was it even possible to foresee later events? If we answer these questions by hindsight, we may improve our ability to think about today’s events as early signs for future developments. We might learn that things take unexpected turns more often than we expect. Or we might learn to pay more attention to the little things. At least this exercise will remind us that events don’t always take the most likely development.

We know that the Berlin Wall fell in autumn 1989 and that Germany was reunited in 1990. We also know that Germany experienced and economic boom as a result of this reunification, although the East German economy almost completely broke down. I remember that I was convinced that Germany would not reunite during the next decades even in summer 1989. However, was it possible to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events that followed it already in May or June 1989? Why didn’t I see it? I guess I didn’t see it because these developments had been considered close to impossible for all my life. And yet they came.
On the other hand, today so many companies are caught by surprise by the current economic crisis. Was this crisis less likely than the fall of the Berlin Wall?

The truth is that most of those experiences can be proofed; furthermore there is a very high probability that you going to meet both types of consultants (the good ones and the bad ones) after several years in business. One typical kind of problem: Presented results look good on PowerPoint, but not in corporate practice. Process time is assumed to short; certain - in most cases hidden processes - have not been considered and hence do not appear in new flow charts. Essential details and former best practice will not be transferred to new solutions. (From my personal point of view in most cases those “details” and hidden processes make or break large projects, e.g. success of acquisitions, outsourcing). Another frequent problem can be observed in terms of knowledge that leaves the organization. Hiring external expertise for a certain period of time may solve your problems today (e.g. to implement a new IT system), but in some cases the organization will end up with a very expensive black box.

Similar problems can be observed when hiring interim managers for small period of time. The reason: Both groups (consultant, interim manager) are paid to deliver certain project results, but not to live the conditions and organizational surroundings they create. Hence the question is whether there is any chance that you can protect your organization and your team from those consulting dilemma (you need the external experience or the external capacities to fix your problems).

There is no general solution at all…however: The general recommendation is to organize at least an “internal resource” that reviews consulting results in terms of their feasibility and that manages the knowledge transfer from the consultants to you organization. (Of course you can expect that not all consulting firms will like this idea). The size of this resource depends on the size of your organization and the scope of the consulting project. A business model reengineering project of a medium size organization should be reviewed at least by 2 persons (no full time jobs, but 2 people with around 50 % capacity for this job would be great). In the matter of organizational hierarchy those people should not belong to the top management team; a middle manager and a colleague can be a good solution. Why 2 people? There are 2 different types of jobs to do! The most critical task of them is to see and to understand the entire picture of all consulting results as well as the secondary effects within the organization. Most project management structures are good at reviewing single projects (at least) or to get a clear picture whether the single project is able to deliver the expected results, but fail to describe secondary effects. It can also observed in practice that a good solution for project A does not cause a good condition for project B automatically.

But in some cases it can be essential to discuss small details in projects – but not all project review meetings are prepared to do so, in particular when the cycle of project reviews in one moth or even longer. In this case (this is the second type of job) you need a “process and data cruncher” (I derived this expression from number cruncher) who is able to test PowerPoint-good-looking workflows. Finding this person can be a hard job, but it is worth the effort. People with several years of experience in different roles and jobs in your organization can be a good point to start.

As a reminder – Porters model of Generic Strategies basically says that you should follow one of these generic strategies:

• Price leader / cost leader – Sell your product for the lowest price in the market. Don’t add bells and whistles; your customers are price sensitive. Examples are the cloths you can buy at Wal Mart.
• Differentiation – Have a unique product and sell it for a premium price. This is often equivalent to quality leadership (but not necessarily so). Examples are Gucci stores.
• Focus – I prefer the term niche strategy since it is more self-explaining. Have a product with a fair price that fulfils the needs of a customer segment that is not larger than a market niche. Examples are the cloths specially designed for carrying babies in a wrap or a sling, e.g. extra-wide coats or fleece covers for the baby

If you don’t follow one of these strategies you are ‘stuck in the middle’. There you will have a problem since there always is somebody with a product that has either a lower price or more attractive features than yours.

Of course, this is a model. Like all models it is a simplified description of reality. Doubtless, there are other strategies that can lead a business to success. You may, for instance, stick in Porters ‘middle’ but have a brilliant customer lock-in. Thus your customers stay with you despite lower prices or higher quality products around. On the other hand, I think it is not a bad strategic position to

• be well known for very competitive prices or
• to have the ‘must-have’ product everybody wants to get for whatever reason or
• to have a reputation as an excellent supplier in a particular market niche.

Coming back to where I started – why should these strategies be less viable during the current financial crisis? At first glance we may think that when the economy is down, Wal Mart’s cloth sales may be less affected than those of Gucci. Nevertheless, there are also good arguments why a strong brand is very important even during a crisis.

I already wrote that a good strategy may be even more important in a crisis as it is in a boom phase. A good strategy is always one that fits your company’s capabilities and competences. To use a bit of textbook terminology - these core competences should be the basis for your competitive advantage. On this basis you can develop a strategy that takes into account your current business environment and the expected future change of it. I think this is much easier than the other way around – determine a strategy to prosper in the current business environment and than develop the competences needed to implement that strategy (Although, of course, this may work too).

So if you have the capabilities to produce something at very low costs – fine! Go for it! Adjust your marketing efforts or anything else and offer your crisis-shaken customers an opportunity for savings.
If you have a long reputation for the excellent quality of your products – also fine! Make sure your customers understand that the lowest price does not necessarily mean the best value for money in the long run.
If you serve a niche – you may even be one of the lucky few whose market is not even affected by the crisis.

OK, those last examples are oversimplified. But I am sure you get my point. During a crisis it is more important than ever to have a good strategy. This may or may not be one of Porters Generic Strategies. But these strategies may or may not be good for a particular business in boom times too. So I don’t think that the phase of a business cycle has great impact on the viability of a general strategic approach.

ROBERT HALF INTERNATIONAL (RHI) is a global organization that is specialized in consulting and staffing services; its network includes more than 400 locations worldwide. It announced its new “Global Financial Employment Monitor 2008 – 2009″ that informs about current trends in hiring finance specialists. The report summarizes three major findings:

• Talent shortage: 56% of participants reported problems finding skilled staff, unchanged from the 2007 report.
• Staff retention: 58 % of participants are concerned or are very concerned about retaining top performers. In 2007 only 43 % were concerned.
• Flexible staffing: 31 % of participants “currently employing interim professionals reported increasing their use in the last three years.”

The research summary can be found as pdf-file on this site.