In 1966, Time magazine published a cover article posing the question, "Is God Dead?" Asked about the possibility, former President Eisenhower reportedly responded, "That's funny. I was just talking with Him this morning." Some of us are beginning to feel the same way about trendy assertions that strategy is dead. You may have read one such proclamation in the Jan. 25 Wall Street Journal. "Strategy, as we knew it, is dead," argued Walt Shill, who leads Accenture's North American consulting practice. An article titled "Strategic Plans Lose Favor" goes on to quote him saying, "Corporate clients decided that increased flexibility and accelerated decision making are much more important than simply predicting the future." If you believe strategy consists of predicting the future, or making plans, please feel free to take a chair next to Mr. Shill in the front row of mourners. On your seat you'll find a copy of Henry Mintzberg's 1994 book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, which should completely disabuse you of any residual hope you may have held out for the corporate planning process.

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The story behind our featured video of the month is the perfect example of generational change. A perfect case study in what happens when organisations fail to recognise the changing nature of the market and fail to adapt their business models to suot the market. It is OKGo that has shown creative leadership here, not EMI. It is worth reading their blog to see how well they handled this.

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Regardless of your politics, the closing quote delivered at TED this week by David Cameron, the leader of the current British conservative party leader somehow seems to me so poignant right now. The odd thing is the quote comes from a speech made by  Robert Kennedy in the early 60’s . It's long, but so powerful it's worth repeating in its entirety:

    "For too long we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product now is over 800 billion dollars a year, but that gross national product, if we judge the United States of America by that, that gross national product counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic squall. It counts Napalm, and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our city. It counts Whitman's rifles and Speck's Knifes and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play; it does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worth while. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."



Einstein, Ford, Picasso and Edison rarely said the word innovation and neither should you. Every Fortune 500 crowd I've said this to laughs and agrees. The abuse of words like innovation, disruption, game changing and breakthrough is killing us. We're tripping over our own egos, lost in the ignorance of romance for the vagaries of pseudo-thinking associated with these words. The more often people in a company use this word, the less likely anything worthy of that label is actually happening, as it's often the confused and the desperate who believe simply saying a word again and again like a magic spell causes anything at all to happen.

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I read with interest Business Week entitled why CEO's don't get innovation by Stefan Lindegaard another innovation speaker, network facilitator, and adviser on open innovation and intrapreneurship. He runs all the usual arguments about the inability of organisations to innovate, the spurious argument that leaders now emerging with MBAs are the first with innovation subjects in their degrees (that stat certainly doesn't stack up with our research which is telling us globally universities are failing badly with MBAs, most of whom don't have innovation in their programmes anyway) and summarises with this meaningless statement

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