“One of the stories that came to mind during this program occurred back in the 70s when I was at Talon division of Textron. The corporate big whigs were coming to the home office of our company and our executives wanted everything to look it%u2019s best so they hired some tractor trailers to drive our work in process inventory around town during the plant tour. This was way before Just-in-Time inventory and demonstrates an underlying problem at that company where there was more time and effort spent on serving corporate than on serving the customer.”

Blue Ocean Strategy & The Product Life Cycle – Taking Aim Free Newsletter

This is not as uncommon as it sounds back then. While I missed the 70′s, I did get to hear the stories of things they did at that time. This does not seem out of place at all, and its not unlike the other games played in the corp world. WIP is bad, inventory is bad, so the game is to hide it, if not physicially, at least on paper. No wonder we have such a bear of a time competing with such legacy practices, that no doubt still show up from time to time.

I also thought the secion on the strategy campus was a worthwhile read. Strategic planning is often times a numbers shifting game, based upon limited data and all too often overley optimistic estimates based upon a flawed spreadsheet model.

The first tool is the Strategy Canvas where a value curve is created that depicts a company’s relative performance across its industry’s factors of competition. Once the value curve is created, there are four actions including:

* Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated?
* Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard?
* Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard?
* Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?

Once in print, this all seems so obvious and when combined with an historical perspective, helps to point to obvious directions for the future.

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