Narratives of the future: Suspending disbelief in forest-sector scenarios

Scenario analysis considers highly uncertain future conditions. The method involves developing and analyzing plausible narratives of the future and evaluating them for a range of implications. The power of scenarios lies in creating and considering compelling stories about the future. Thus, narrative, defined as an account of a series of events, is central to the process and plays a pivotal role in engaging participants in a scenario analysis exercise. While a good scenario story can engage individuals and influence their suspension of disbelief, we know little about how participants actually respond to the scenarios so they can, and will, suspend disbelief in scenario outcomes.We explored the role of narrative in suspension of disbelief in a scenario-based study of the long-term future of Canada's forests and forest sector. We discovered that specific aspects of the scenario narratives themselves influenced participants’ suspension of disbelief. While interacting with the scenario narratives, participants actively worked to suspend disbelief by creating new narratives or accessing other existing ones, and by projecting themselves into the scenarios as characters in the stories. Our results may help scenario writers, practitioners, and researchers understand what, in one project, cued people's abilities to suspend disbelief and engage productively in discussions about possible futures.     

Strategic transfer pricing,absorption costing,and observability

This paper analyses the use of transfer pricing as a strategic device in divisionalized firms facing duopolistic price competition. When transfer prices are observable, both firms’ headquarters will charge a transfer price above the marginal cost of the intermediate product to induce their marketing managers to behave as softer competitors in the final product market. When transfer prices are not observable, strategic transfer pricing is not an equilibrium and the optimal transfer price equals the marginal cost of the intermediate product. As a strategic alternative, however, the firms can signal the use of transfer prices above marginal cost to their competitors by a publicly observable commitment to an absorption costing system. The paper identifies conditions under which the choice of absorption costing is a dominant strategy equilibrium.     

The Influence of Integrated Reporting on Business Model and Strategy Disclosures

Business model (BM) and strategy disclosures could provide investors with relevant information. This study offers a platform for future research on BM and strategy disclosure and is the first to analyse the change in BM and strategy disclosures after the introduction of an integrated reporting (IR) requirement, to propose a framework for disclosure quality analyses, and to analyse how companies disclose the relationship between their BM and strategy. The findings show that BMs and strategy were not disclosed before the requirement to publish an integrated report in South Africa, but were disclosed thereafter. By 2014, companies used diagrams, flow charts, and informative narratives of business plans and value chains. Companies now disclose their strategic goals more transparently, but still do not link these goals to BMs, key performance indicators, risks or opportunities. The findings provide insight into disclosures that improved since the IR requirement and matters that are still not fully disclosed, which would be of interest to regulators tasked with investor protection.     

The office of strategy management

There is a disconnect in most companies between strategy formulation and strategy execution. On average, 95% of a company's employees are unaware of, or do not understand, its strategy. If employees are unaware of the strategy, they surely cannot help the organization implement it effectively. It doesn't have to be like this. For the past 15 years, the authors have studied companies that achieved performance breakthroughs by adopting the Balanced Scorecard and its associated tools to help them better communicate strategy to their employees and to guide and monitor the execution of that strategy. Some companies, of course, have achieved better, longer-lasting improvements than others. The organizations that have managed to sustain their strategic focus have typically established a new corporate-level unit to oversee all activities related to strategy: an office of strategy management (OS M). The OSM, in effect, acts as the CEO's chief of staff. It coordinates an array of tasks: communicating corporate strategy; ensuring that enterprise-level plans are translated into the plans of the various units and departments; executing strategic initiatives to deliver on the grand design; aligning employees' plans for competency development with strategic objectives; and testing and adapting the strategy to stay abreast of the competition. The OSM does not do all the work, but it facilitates the processes so that strategy is executed in an integrated fashion across the enterprise. Although the companies that Kaplan and Norton studied use the Balanced Scorecard as the framework for their strategy management systems, the authors say the lessons of the OSM are applicable even to companies that do not use it.     

The competitive dynamics of network-based businesses

Telecommunications carriers, transportation companies, and banks are among the many network-based businesses--companies that move people, goods, or information from various points to various other points. Managers have long assumed that customers valued all links in these networks equally. It was thought that banking customers, for example, sought access to all of the branches throughout the network or that shipping customers wanted to be able to send packages everywhere. Intuitively, managers thought that many of their customers' needs were, in reality, narrower, but they had no way of knowing which links were most important. New computing power and robust mapping software now make it possible to understand network customers better. In applying this technology, the authors, both consultants from McKinsey & Company, have uncovered three distinct usage patterns: one in which all links are, indeed, valued equally; another in which customers concentrate their use in particular zones; and a third in which customers value only individual links. Each of these patterns requires a different strategy to direct executives in making the decisions fundamental to managing any network-based business: whether to open or close outlets, whether to connect their network to others, and how to organize business units so that they reflect the network's structure. Those who don't spot the patterns or understand their strategic implications will find themselves on the losing end of the network battle.     

2000年的企业战略经营战略的新潮流及其对中国企业家的意义

<正> 企业的经营战略随着时代的变迁发生了很大的变化。 20世纪60～70年代,企业内部的业务组合管理占主流。随着多元化的发展,形成了综合性的企业集团,如何实现不同业务之间最适当的资源分配成了一个很大的课题。波士顿顾问公司的产品组合矩阵也是在这个时期开发出来的。     

Charting your company's future

Few companies have a clear strategic vision. The problem, say the authors, stems from the strategic-planning process itself, which usually involves preparing a large document, culled from a mishmash of data provided by people with conflicting agendas. That kind of process almost guarantees an unfocused strategy. Instead, companies should design the strategic-planning process by drawing a picture: a strategy canvas. A strategy canvas shows the strategic profile of your industry by depicting the various factors that affect competition. And it shows the strategic profiles of your current and potential competitors as well as your own company's strategic profile--how it invests in the factors of competition and how it might in the future. The basic component of a strategy canvas--the value curve--is a tool the authors created in their consulting work and have written about in previous HBR articles. This article introduces a four-step process for actually drawing and discussing a strategy canvas. Readers will learn how one European financial services company used this process to create a distinct and easily communicable strategy. The process begins with a visual awakening. Managers compare their business's value curve with competitors' to discover where their strategy needs to change. In the next step--visual exploration--managers do field research on customers and alternative products. At the visual strategy fair, the third step, managers draw new strategic profiles based on field observations and get feedback from customers and peers about these new proposals. Once the best strategy is created from that feedback, it's time for the last step--visual communication. Executives distribute "before" and "after" strategic profiles to the whole company, and only projects that will help move the company closer to the "after" profile are supported.     

How to invest in social capital.

Business runs better when people within a company have close ties and trust one another. But the relationships that make organizations work effectively are under assault for several reasons. Building such "social capital" is difficult in volatile times. Disruptive technologies spawn new markets daily, and organizations respond with constantly changing structures. The problem is worsened by the virtuality of many of today's workplaces, with employees working off-site or on their own. What's more, few managers know how to invest in such social capital. The authors describe how managers can help their organizations thrive by making effective investments in social capital. For instance, companies that value social capital demonstrate a commitment to retention as a way of limiting workplace volatility. The authors cite SAS's extensive efforts to signal to employees that it sees them as human beings, not just workers. Managers can build trust by showing trust themselves, as well as by rewarding trust and sending clear signals to employees. They can foster cooperation by giving employees a common sense of purpose through good strategic communication and inspirational leadership. Johnson & Johnson's well-known credo, which says the company's first responsibility is to the people who use its products, has helped the company in time of adversity, as in 1982 when cyanide in Tylenol capsules killed seven people. Other methods of fostering cooperation include rewarding the behavior with cash and establishing rules that get people into the habit of cooperating. Social capital, once a given in organizations, is now rare and endangered. By investing in it, companies will be better positioned to seize the opportunities in today's volatile, virtual business environment.     

Making strategy: learning by doing

Companies find it difficult to change strategy for many reasons, but one stands out: strategic thinking is not a core managerial competence at most companies. Executives hone their capabilities by tackling problems over and over again. Changing strategy, however, is not usually a task that they face repeatedly. Once companies have found a strategy that works, they want to use it, not change it. Consequently, most managers do not develop a competence in strategic thinking. This Manager's Tool Kit presents a three-stage method executives can use to conceive and implement a creative and coherent strategy themselves. The first stage is to identify and map the driving forces that the company needs to address. The process of mapping provides strategy-making teams with visual representations of team members' assumptions, those pictures, in turn, enable managers to achieve consensus in determining the driving forces. Once a senior management team has formulated a new strategy, it must align the strategy with the company's resource-allocation process to make implementation possible. Senior management teams can translate their strategy into action by using aggregate project planning. And management teams that link strategy and innovation through that planning process will develop a competence in implementing strategic change. The author guides the reader through the three stages of strategy making by examining the case of a manufacturing company that was losing ground to competitors. After mapping the driving forces, the company's senior managers were able to devise a new strategy that allowed the business to maintain a competitive advantage in its industry.     

Competing on capabilities: the new rules of corporate strategy

In the 1980s, companies discovered time as a new source of competitive advantage. In the 1990s, they will discover that time is only one piece of a more far-reaching transformation in the logic of competition. Using examples from Wal-Mart and other highly successful companies, Stalk, Evans, and Shulman of the Boston Consulting Group provide managers with a guide to the new world of "capabilities-based competition." In today's dynamic business environment, strategy too must become dynamic. Competition is a "war of movement" in which success depends on anticipation of market trends and quick response to changing customer needs. In such an environment, the essence of strategy is not the structure of a company's products and markets but the dynamics of its behavior. To succeed, a company must weave its key business processes into hard-to-imitate strategic capabilities that distinguish it from its competitors in the eyes of customers. A capability is a set of business processes strategically understood--for example, Wal-Mart's expertise in inventory replenishment, Honda's skill at dealer management, or Banc One's ability to "out-local the national banks and out-national the local banks." Such capabilities are collective and cross-functional--a small part of many people's jobs, not a large part of a few. Finally, competing on capabilities requires strategic investments in support systems that span traditional SBUs and functions and go far beyond what traditional cost-benefit metrics can justify. A CEO's success in building and managing a company's capabilities will be the chief test of management skill in the 1990s. The prize: companies that combine scale and flexibility to outperform the competition.     

Bringing minds together

Boston Scientific founder John Abele has been party to his share of groundbreaking innovations over the years. But the revolutionary advances in medical science that these breakthroughs brought about were not the efforts of one firm alone, let alone one inventor. Abele tells two fascinating stories of collaboration--one about Jack Whitehead's upending of hospitals' blood and urine testing procedures and the other about Andreas Gruentzig's success in bringing balloon catheterization into the cardiology mainstream. Both Whitehead and Gruentzig spearheaded the emergence of entirely new fields, bringing together scientist-customers to voluntarily develop standards, training programs, new business models, and even a specialized language to describe their new field. The process of collaboration, Abete says, is fraught with contradictions and subtlety. It takes consummate leadership skills to persuade others to spend countless hours solving important problems in partnership with people they don't necessarily like. Moreover, managing egos so that each person's commitment, energy, and creativity is unleashed in a way that doesn't disadvantage others requires an impresario personality. Finally, true authenticity--something that few people can project--is critical for earning customers' trust and convincing them that their valuable contributions won't be used for anything other than moving the technology forward.     

Strategic sourcing: from periphery to the core

As globalization changes the basis of competition, sourcing is moving from the periphery of corporate functions to the core. Always important in terms of costs, sourcing is becoming a strategic opportunity. But few companies are ready for this shift. Outsourcing has grown so sophisticated that even critical functions like engineering, R&D, manufacturing, and marketing can-and often should-be moved outside. And that, in turn, is changing the way companies think about their organizations, their value chains, and their competitive positions. Already, a handful of vanguard companies are transforming what used to be purely internal corporate functions into entirely new industries. Companies like UPS, Solectron, and Hewitt have created new business models by concentrating scale and skill within a single function. As these and other function-based companies grow, so does the potential value of outsourcing to all companies. Migrating from a vertically integrated company to a specialized provider of a single function is not a winning strategy for everyone. But all companies need to rigorously reassess each of their functions as possible outsourcing candidates. Presented in this article is a simple three-step process to identify which functions your company needs to own and protect, which can be best performed by what kinds of partners, and which could be turned into new business opportunities. The result of such an analysis will be a comprehensive capabilities-sourcing strategy. As a detailed examination of 7-Eleven's experience shows, the success of the strategy often hinges on the creativity with which partnerships are organized and managed. But only by first taking a broad, strategic view of capabilities sourcing can your company gain the greatest benefit from all of its sourcing choices.     

金融危机：商业银行觅境外并购之“机”

商业银行的境外并购,有助于深入推进国际化战略,拓展海外市场、优化业务结构、推动经营战略调整、增强协同效应。受金融危机影响,国内银行并购潜在对象增多、并购竞争对手减少、并购成本下降,越来越多的境外并购机会呈现在我国商业银行的面前。商业银行应选择文化接近、经营理念和模式易于融合的并购对象,采用实物期权定价方法估价被并购银行,做好并购整合,取得境外并购的成功。     

国有商业银行实施战略转型的动因、路径和策略研究

商业银行战略转型是指商业银行根据外部监管、竞争、客户及技术等环境的变化在业务、产品、区域和盈利结构上进行重大的调整及变化。因此,商业银行在实施战略转型时其自身与环境的一致性随着时间的变化在形式、内涵、状态上所表现出来的差异,足以影响商业银行的生存和可持续发展。本文运用平衡型战略变化模型,指出影响国有商业银行战略转型的外部环境变化因素主要为国内经济发展、入世承诺兑现、信息技术应用、客户需求变化、竞争压力升级这五个方面,内部阻力因素主要为思维、结构、制度和人才这四个方面,在此基础上,文章提出了国有商业银行战略转型的实施路径和具体策略安排。     

Telling tales

A carefully chosen story can help the leader of an organization translate an abstract concept into a meaningful mandate for employees. The key is to know which narrative strategies are right for what circumstances. Knowledge management expert Stephen Denning explains that, for optimal effect, form should follow function. Challenging one professional storyteller's view that more is better, Denning points out that it's not always desirable (or practical) to launch into an epic that's jam-packed with complex characters, cleverly placed plot points, an intricate rising action, and a neatly resolved denouement. True, if listeners have time and interest, a narrative-savvy leader can use a vividly rendered tale to promote communication between management and staff, for instance, or even to foster collaboration--especially when the story is emotionally moving. However, if the aim is to motivate people to act when they might not be inclined to do so, it's best to take an approach that's light on detail. Otherwise, the particulars can bog listeners down and prevent them from focusing on the message. Drawing on his experiences at the World Bank and observations made elsewhere, the author provides several dos and don'ts for organizational storytellers, along with examples of narratives that get results. The sidebar "A Storytelling Catalog" presents seven distinct types of stories, the situations in which they should be told, and tips on how to tell them. Many of these aren't even stories in the "well-told" sense--they run the rhetorical gamut from one-liners to full-blown speeches--but they succeed because they're tailored to fit the situation. So even though it's common in business to favor the analytical over the anecdotal, leaders with the strength to push past some initial skepticism about the enterprise of storytelling will find that the creative effort pays off.     

激进战略与企业现金持有——预防性动机还是代理动机

以2007-2016年A股非金融上市公司为样本,考察了公司战略激进程度对现金持有决策的影响,并从现金持有价值与竞争效应两个角度,探讨不同公司战略类型下现金持有经济后果的差异。研究结果显示：公司战略越激进,企业现金持有水平越高;并且战略越激进,现金持有价值越高,现金的竞争效应越强。进一步研究表明：随着融资约束和经济政策不确定性的提高,采取激进战略的公司,现金持有水平进一步提高。这说明公司战略是影响现金持有决策的重要因素,而战略激进的公司持有大量现金主要是出于预防性动机,而非代理动机。     

商业银行如何进行业务创新

中国即将加入WTO，大批外资金融机构将登陆抢占市场，国内商业银行将面临前所未有的竞争。要想在激烈的竞争中立于不败之地，必须进行金融创新，因为今后的竞争就是创新的竞争，商业银行只有不断地推陈出新，才能跟上时代的步伐，文章以商业银行的业务创新为切入点，从资产业务、负债业务和中间业务三大方面进行分析，以探求商业银行的创新策略。     

The end of corporate imperialism

As they search for growth, multinational corporations will have no choice but to compete in the big emerging markets of China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil. But while it is still common to question how such corporations will change life in those markets, Western executives would be smart to turn the question around and ask how multinationals themselves will be transformed by these markets. To be successful, MNCs will have to rethink every element of their business models, the authors assert in this seminal HBR article from 1998. During the first wave of market entry in the 1980s, multinationals operated with what might be termed an imperialist mind-set, assuming that the emerging markets would merely be new markets for their old products. But this mind-set limited their success: What is truly big and emerging in countries like China and India is a new consumer base comprising hundreds of millions of people. To tap into this huge opportunity, MNCs need to ask themselves five basic questions: Who is in the emerging middle class in these countries? How do the distribution networks operate? What mix of local and global leadership do you need to foster business opportunities? Should you adopt a consistent strategy for all of your business units within one country? Should you take on local partners? The transformation that multinational corporations must undergo is not cosmetic--simply developing greater sensitivity to local cultures will not do the trick, the authors say. To compete in the big emerging markets, multinationals must reconfigure their resources, rethink their cost structures, redesign their product development processes, and challenge their assumptions about who their top-level managers should be.     

The competitive advantage of corporate philanthropy

When it comes to philanthropy, executives increasingly see themselves as caught between critics demanding ever higher levels of "corporate social responsibility" and investors applying pressure to maximize short-term profits. In response, many companies have sought to make their giving more strategic, but what passes for strategic philanthropy is almost never truly strategic, and often isn't particularly effective as philanthropy. Increasingly, philanthropy is used as a form of public relations or advertising, promoting a company's image through high-profile sponsorships. But there is a more truly strategic way to think about philanthropy. Corporations can use their charitable efforts to improve their competitive context--the quality of the business environment in the locations where they operate. Using philanthropy to enhance competitive context aligns social and economic goals and improves a company's long-term business prospects. Addressing context enables a company to not only give money but also leverage its capabilities and relationships in support of charitable causes. The produces social benefits far exceeding those provided by individual donors, foundations, or even governments. Taking this new direction requires fundamental changes in the way companies approach their contribution programs. For example, philanthropic investments can improve education and local quality of life in ways that will benefit the company. Such investments can also improve the company's competitiveness by contributing to expanding the local market and helping to reduce corruption in the local business environment. Adopting a context-focused approach goes against the grain of current philanthropic practice, and it requires a far more disciplined approach than is prevalent today. But it can make a company's philanthropic activities far more effective.