The Internal Consulting group (ICG), in partnership with CISI, has published the fourth edition of 2022 of
The Insights Review. ICG is a global network of consultants, with the goal of aiding professionals in their career effectiveness and development.
The Insights Review is a collection of abstract reviews of relevant ‘open published’ perspectives and research reports. The abstracts allow you to scan quickly for the most relevant content, and include links to the full articles.
Article of the MonthArticle of the Month is 'Getting strategy wrong: & how to do it right instead' – McKinsey
From the abstract
Your reviewer has been a huge fan of Richard Rummelt’s work since reading Good strategy, bad strategy. This article ‘strategically’ published by McKinsey summarizes his new book The crux: How leaders become strategists (Public Affairs, 2022). It is a tour de force depiction of what the essence of real strategy is and why so few executives have the time, experience, and expertise to get it right. Rummelt makes three key points.
The first is that strategy is gnarly. This is a cute way of describing complexity in the way Jay Forrester and Peter Senge first did with systems thinking. Problems are embedded in multi-dimensional systems with cause and effect loops that are not readily identifiable, so imagining you can pull one lever (the silver bullet) and a hockey stick will result is naive to say the least.
Second, you need to identify the crux of the problem. In his earlier book, he called this the strategy pivot point (which is another way of saying ‘what really makes a difference?’) What are the core constraining factors and where can additional resources drive sustainable incremental performance?
And third, the lever in strategy which this reviewer often finds adds the most value: coherence. How do the component parts of a strategy strengthen each other to create reinforcing loops, rather than competition for resources and customers?
We hope you enjoy reading it and please do get in touch with any comments and suggestions.
Read the fourth edition of 2022