Developing and reviewing strategy

We have helped a number of organisations develop or rethink their strategy. We have also helped with making business cases for change and new investment in technology.

In his book ‘Good strategy, bad strategy. The difference and why it matters [1]’, Richard Rumelt says: ‘good strategy is the exception, not the rule. More and more organizational leaders say they have a strategy but they do not’. There can be a lot of confusion around defining strategy. Strategy is not well intentioned but vague goals. Strategy is not:

• vision : where we want to be-an indeterminate future goal
• mission: why the organization exists -the motivation for being in the business
• values: what we believe in and how we will behave

The above may be valuable but they are not strategy.  According to Rumelt: ‘A good strategy has…a kernel [that] contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy and coherent actions.’ So strategy is about what organisations do.

Publications and presentations on strategy

Ken was the keynote speaker at the 2011 National Acquisitions Group (NAG) conference in Manchester . His theme was ‘Time for  strategy.’

Ken spoke at the PTFS Europe and Loughborough University Dept. of Information Science seminar on ‘the evolution of open source library systems’  at Loughborough on 20th September 2011 Strategy, business case and open source for libraries.

Strategy for public libraries

Maybe you wonder why libraries are closing or opening hours are being reduced? You might pause to ask why your library doesn’t offer ebooks while some others do. If you are a librarian you might want to know what rationale is used to judge whether users should be charged for access to the Internet. Should service provision be outsourced to a commercial company?  Can you identify what Richard Rumelt calls, in his book ‘Good Strategy: Bad Strategy, ‘ a ‘guiding principle’ against which these things can be judged?