Disrupting your travel plans
The McKinsey Global Institute recently listed a dozen technologies with the potential to be so material as to disrupt the entire economy, over the next decade (see Disruptive Technologies: Advances that will transform life, business and the global economy): 1. Mobile…
Personal Productivity in the Digital Age
The Confessions of a Productivity Geek A bit off piste for the Strategy Exchange, I ended up giving a talk earlier this month on my own GTD-based productivity system, to a peer group of independent consultants, at the Elsie Whitely…
The Toilet Test
The picture above is a Japanese shinkansen, ‘bullet train’, exhibited at the National Railway Museum in York. This model in fact is obsolete. Arrangements to exhibit it there were originally made by Rod Smith, now Chief Science Advisor to the…
How to Sleigh your Rivals…
The Competitive Advantage of Santa Claus - Why do strategy gurus get their knickers’ in a twist over the likes of Apple and Amazon when the Christmas category killer has dominated his market niche for centuries? A raft of positioning advantages…
The Broken Wine Glass, Part III
Strategic Positioning in the Leisure Travel Industry “The prerequisite for effective environmental analysis is to distinguish the vital from the merely important” Robert M. Grant, Contemporary Strategy Analysis I guess we all read the papers, even if for some of…
Networks and Value Networks – the Case for Enlightened M&A
According to Scientists, as James May might say, roughly ‘x’ per cent of acquisitions (for values of ‘x’ between 40% and 90%) fail to deliver shareholder value (the share price doesn’t go up enough), royally hacking off our post-human, program-trading…
A Long Way From Athens
THE isles of Greece! the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace,— Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung! Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all, except their sun, is set….
The Broken Wine Glass, Part II
Strategic positioning in the leisure travel industry Part I attracted something of a cathartic outpouring of lengthy correspondence from a number of travel industry veterans. Some of the points made were: Tour operators were burdened with legacy cost structures while…
The Broken Wine Glass
Strategic positioning in the leisure travel industry Part I Not so very long ago, European leisure travel was dominated by the Foreign Package Holiday sector, itself dominated by a handful of behemoths. We called it the ‘wine glass model’. At…
Fuelling the Future
A review of Diesal? And Other Future Transport Fuels (60 minute briefing series) by Adrian Nixon. Can you make the cultural change from being miners to being farmers? Here’s how the author describes his own book: “This book is the…