Strategy as revolution

How often does the strategic-planning process start with senior executives asking what the rest of the organization can teach them about the future? Not often enough, argues Gary Hamel. In many companies, strategy making is an elitist procedure and ?strategy? consists of nothing more than following the industry's rules. But more and more companies, intent on overturning the industrial order, are rewriting those rules. What can industry incumbents do? Either surrender the future to revolutionary challengers or revolutionize the way their companies create strategy. What is needed is not a tweak to the traditional strategic-planning process, Hamel says, but a new philosophical foundation: strategy is revolution. Hamel offers ten principles to help a company think about the challenge of creating truly revolutionary strategies. Perhaps the most fundamental principle is that so-called strategic planning doesn't produce true strategic innovation. The traditional planning process is little more than a rote procedure in which deeply held assumptions and industry conventions are reinforced rather than challenged. Such a process harnesses only a tiny proportion of an organization's creative potential. If there is to be any hope of industry revolution, senior managers must give up their monopoly on the creation of strategy. They must embrace a truly democratic process that can give voice to the revolutionaries that exist in every company. If senior managers are unwilling to do this, employees must become strategy activists. The opportunities for industry revolution are mostly unexplored. One thing is certain: if you don't let the revolutionaries challenge you from within, they will eventually challenge you from without--in the marketplace.     

Strategy as active waiting

Successful executives who cut their teeth in stable industries or in developed countries often stumble when they face more volatile markets. They falter, in part, because they assume they can gaze deep into the future and develop a long-term strategy that will confer a sustainable competitive advantage. But visibility into the future of volatile markets is sharply limited because so many different variables are in play. Factors such as technological innovation, customers' evolving needs, government policy, and changes in the capital markets interact with one another to create unexpected outcomes. Over the past six years, Donald Sull, an associate professor at London Business School, has led a research project examining some of the world's most volatile markets, from national markets like China and Brazil to industries like enterprise software, telecommunications, and airlines. One of the most striking findings from this research is the importance of taking action during comparative lulls in the storm. Huge business opportunities are relatively rare; they come along only once or twice in a decade. And, for the most part, companies can't manufacture those opportunities; changes in the external environment converge to make them happen. What managers can do is prepare for these golden opportunities by managing smart during the comparative calm of business as usual. During these periods of active waiting, leaders must probe the future and remain alert to anomalies that signal potential threats or opportunities; exercise restraint to preserve their war chests; and maintain discipline to keep the troops battle ready. When a golden opportunity or"sudden death"threat emerges, managers must have the courage to declare the main effort and concentrate resources to seize the moment.     

Strategy as simple rules

The success of Yahoo!, eBay, Enron, and other companies that have become adept at morphing to meet the demands of changing markets can't be explained using traditional thinking about competitive strategy. These companies have succeeded by pursuing constantly evolving strategies in market spaces that were considered unattractive according to traditional measures. In this article--the third in an HBR series by Kathleen Eisenhardt and Donald Sull on strategy in the new economy--the authors ask, what are the sources of competitive advantage in high-velocity markets? The secret, they say, is strategy as simple rules. The companies know that the greatest opportunities for competitive advantage lie in market confusion, but they recognize the need for a few crucial strategic processes and a few simple rules. In traditional strategy, advantage comes from exploiting resources or stable market positions. In strategy as simple rules, advantage comes from successfully seizing fleeting opportunities. Key strategic processes, such as product innovation, partnering, or spinout creation, place the company where the flow of opportunities is greatest. Simple rules then provide the guidelines within which managers can pursue such opportunities. Simple rules, which grow out of experience, fall into five broad categories: how- to rules, boundary conditions, priority rules, timing rules, and exit rules. Companies with simple-rules strategies must follow the rules religiously and avoid the temptation to change them too frequently. A consistent strategy helps managers sort through opportunities and gain short-term advantage by exploiting the attractive ones. In stable markets, managers rely on complicated strategies built on detailed predictions of the future. But when business is complicated, strategy should be simple.     

Strategy as stretch and leverage

Global competition is not just product versus product or company versus company. It is mind-set versus mind-set. Driven to understand the dynamics of competition, we have learned a lot about what makes one company more successful than another. But to find the root of competitiveness--to understand why some companies create new forms of competitive advantage while others watch and follow--we must look at strategic mind-sets. For many managers, "being strategic" means pursuing opportunities that fit the company's resources. This approach is not wrong, Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad contend, but it obscures an approach in which "stretch" supplements fit and being strategic means creating a chasm between ambition and resources. Toyota, CNN, British Airways, Sony, and others all displaced competitors with stronger reputations and deeper pockets. Their secret? In each case, the winner had greater ambition than its well-endowed rivals. Winners also find less resource-intensive ways of achieving their ambitious goals. This is where leverage complements the strategic allocation of resources. Managers at competitive companies can get a bigger bang for their buck in five basic ways: by concentrating resources around strategic goals; by accumulating resources more efficiently; by complementing one kind of resource with another; by conserving resources whenever they can; and by recovering resources from the market-place as quickly as possible. As recent competitive battles have demonstrated, abundant resources can't guarantee continued industry leadership.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Strategy as a portfolio of real options

In financial terms, a business strategy is much more like a series of options than like a single projected cash flow. Executing a strategy almost always involves making a sequence of major decisions. Some actions are taken immediately while others are deliberately deferred so that managers can optimize their choices as circumstances evolve. While executives readily grasp the analogy between strategy and real options, until recently the mechanics of option pricing was so complex that few companies found it practical to use when formulating strategy. But advances in both computing power and our understanding of option pricing over the last 20 years now make it feasible to apply real-options thinking to strategic decision making. To analyze a strategy as a portfolio of related real options, this article exploits a framework presented by the author in "Investment Opportunities as Real Options: Getting Started on the Numbers" (HBR July-August 1998). That article explained how to get from discounted-cash-flow value to option value for a typical project; in other words, it was about reaching a number. This article extends that framework, exploring how, once you've worked out the numbers, you can use option pricing to improve decision making about the sequence and timing of a portfolio of strategic investments. Timothy Luehrman shows executives how to plot their strategies in two-dimensional "option space," giving them a way to "draw" a strategy in terms that are neither wholly strategic nor wholly financial, but some of both. Such pictures inject financial discipline and new insight into how a company's future opportunities can be actively cultivated and harvested.     

Evolution and ecology

In recent years there has been growing awareness, among the general public, government and business, of the environmental problems threatening the Earth. This new consciousness challenges outmoded Newtonian models, reintroducing the interrelatedness of living beings, and posing the existential question of survival. The birth of this consciousness can be seen as the start of an important evolutionary step for humankind. This article examines the nature of evolution up to the present phase. It postulates that ecological consciousness may contribute to the development of an expanded worldview and the reintroduction of spiritual and philosophical factors into political and entrepreneurial decision making, thus offering new potential for human growth and enrichment.     

作为投机策略的噪声交易:一个交易操纵模型

噪声交易通常被认为是外生的,噪声交易者也往往被认为是市场的当然输家.但在存在主动性的噪声交易的交易操纵模型中,通过将噪声交易作为一种策略,操纵者可以获得比普通投资者更为精确的信息,从而为后期的投资赢利占得先机.由于这种投资行为仅通过交易,而不需要其它行为及信息上的优势来实现,这是一种典型的交易操纵行为.     

银行资本管理工程化的逻辑框架与实施策略

银行资本管理是基于风险管理、财务管理基础上的战略管理,是衡量与协调风险、收益、规模和成长性的最有效工具之一,在现代银行经营管理中作用日益重要。本文首先总结了资本管理的相关理论,阐述了以经济资本管理为主,账面资本管理和资本充足率管理为辅的现代商业银行资本管理的总体架构。在此基础上提出了以工程化方式,统筹协调、循序渐进,逐步构建现代银行资本管理体系。现代银行资本管理体系建设内容主要包括过程管理、制度体系和信息系统三方面,其中,过程管理是资本管理体系的核心;现代化银行资本管理体系实施途径主要包括组织因素和阶段因素。     

银行资本管理工程化的逻辑框架与实施策略

银行资本管理是基于风险管理、财务管理基础上的战略管理，是衡量与协调风险、收益、规模和成长性的最有效工具之一，在现代银行经营管理中作用日益重要。本文首先总结了资本管理的相关理论，阐述了以经济资本管理为主，账面资本管理和资本充足率管理为辅的现代商业银行资本管理的总体架构。在此基础上提出了以工程化方式，统筹协调、循序渐进，逐步构建现代银行资本管理体系。现代银行资本管理体系建设内容主要包括过程管理、制度体系和信息系统三方面，其中，过程管理是资本管理体系的核心；现代化银行资本管理体系实施途径主要包括组织因素和阶段因素。     

Complexity and thermodynamics : Towards a new ecology

This article proposes a thermodynamic paradigm for the development of ecosystems. Ecosystems are viewed as non-equilibrium structures and processes, open to material and energy flows. It is suggested that as ecosystems grow and develop, they should increase their total dissipation by developing structures and processes to assist energy degradation. Species which survive in ecosystems are those that funnel energy into their own production and reproduction and contribute to autocatalytic processes which increase the total dissipation of the ecosystem. These studies may allow for the development of measures useful to environmental management and may help the science of ecology with a much needed theoretical framework.     

Industry versus ecology: environment in the new Europe

This paper examines the role of the environment in Central and Eastern European states by pursuing the incompatibility between the economic development needed to maintain the democratic institutions already in place, and the crisis levels of environmental degradation in so many areas of Eastern and Central Europe. It is believed that costs of reversing environmental damages in these areas, and the implementation of sustainable development policies and technologies, are so great that the Eastern European states will be unable to meet them, which may lead to a further decline in the environmental quality in both CEE and the EU. This ability to impact the EU's environment could be the major factor in a decision by the EU to implement environmental taxes against these states. As a result, the possibility is raised that Russia may provide an alternative to the EU in the formation of a economically based bloc, with implications for trade, environment and security issues.     

Predators and prey: a new ecology of competition

Much has been written about networks, strategic alliances, and virtual organizations. Yet these currently popular frameworks provide little systematic assistance when it comes to out-innovating the competition. That's because most managers still view the problem in the old way: companies go head-to-head in an industry, battling for market share. James Moore sets up a new metaphor for competition drawn from the study of biology and social systems. He suggests that a company be viewed not as a member of a single industry but as a part of a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries. In a business ecosystem, companies "co-evolve" around a new innovation, working cooperatively and competitively to support new products and satisfy customer needs. Apple Computer, for example, leads an ecosystem that covers personal computers, consumer electronics, information, and communications. In any larger business environment, several ecosystems may vie for survival and dominance, such as the IBM and Apple ecosystems in personal computers or Wal-Mart and K mart in discount retailing. In fact, it's largely competition among business ecosystems, not individual companies, that's fueling today's industrial transformation. Managers can't afford to ignore the birth of new ecosystems or the competition among those that already exist. Whether that means investing in the right new technology, signing on suppliers to expand a growing business, developing crucial elements of value to maintain leadership, or incorporating new innovations to fend off obsolescence, executives must understand the evolutionary stages all business ecosystems go through and, more important, how to direct those changes.     

A holistic human ecology approach to sustainable agricultural development

This article discusses the possibility of sustainable agricultural development and how it could be put into effect. It is argued that sustainable development must be implemented in accordance with holistic and autonomous principles, and that it must comply with the laws of the natural and sociocultural environment in which it is embedded. Two examples of the holistic human ecology paradigm are given, in the contexts of sustainable agrarian and developmental policy.     

关于金融科技产业发展战略研究——以江苏省为例

金融业对经济的发展具有巨大推动作用,是经济增长的动力源。金融科技有利于优化金融业流程,降低金融的成本,提高金融服务的效率与能力,控制金融的风险。金融科技产业的发展既可以充分加强科技在金融业的应用,同时对国民经济也具有直接的贡献。金融科技产业作为一个新兴产业,其发展具有固有的规律性和特征,研究区域金融科技产业的发展有利于推动全国金融科技产业的发展。     

关键词：资本战略

成功的盈利模式就是引导和保障企业能够持续地赚取超额利润并及时更新的机制．这个战略问题与营运资本有着复杂的关联性。     

“上兵伐谋”和“上下同欲者胜”

孙子兵法言，“上兵伐谋”，“上下同欲者胜”，经营管理如同用兵作战，谋划战略并有效地激励将士，胜数的天平就自然会向你倾斜。     

博物馆“官路”

西方博物馆起源于私人收藏,在漫长的历史形成和内在文化动力的催化下,随着个人藏品的公开展览,逐渐形成了非营利性质的现代博物馆的概念。而在中国,博物馆这个舶来概念,经过计划经济的重塑,成为了由各级政府官设、官管、官出钱的事业单位。伴随着故宫突发事件迭起,官办博物馆体制改革的呼声再度热化。     

走出一片天

“走出去”的开放战略不是权宜之计，不是短期目标，而是建立在对我国基本国情和国际经济发展趋势科学分析基础上的长远而现实的选择，具有重大而深远的战略意义。