Did Somebody Say Strategy?

Book Review: Dealing With Dilemmas

Dealing With Dilemmas: Where Business Analytics Fall Short
Frank Buytendijk, John Wiley & Sons, 2010

Once again, Frank has produced a work with a very high content-to-pages ratio: there is a lot of stuff in here!  And as he did in Performance Leadership: The Next Practices to Motivate Your People, Align Stakeholders, and Lead Your Industry, he manages to combine the philosophical and practical through theories and Real-world examples and case studies.
It's hard to classify "Dealing with Dilemmas," since it cover so many areas:
- strategy & decision making
- scenarios & resource allocation
- risk, ambiguity, constraints, assumptions
- morality & ethics
- alignment & culture
First of all, this is a really good overview of strategy - it's like a Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Management crash-course.
And he does a solid job of identifying 6 dilemmas that exist in every business:
- value vs. profit
- long term vs. short term
- top down vs. bottom up
- listen vs. lead
- inside out vs. outside in
- optimize vs. innovate
Then he neatly classifies those into "you versus me" and "now versus later," which both require different approaches.
Given Frank's pedigree, he ties the message of the book neatly into Enterprise Performance Management/Business Intelligence concepts and practices - like the Balanced Scorecard, Resource Planning, Finance, and Analytics.
There are plenty of interesting subjects - I was going to say tangents - in this book (like synthesis, the art of creating options, all the way to time-space dimension swapping, and the bit about meta-synthesis in the end), but Frank brings it all together so none of it feels tangential.  And, being a big fan of closed-loop management systems, you'll enjoy Franks "donut vs. the pretzel" treatment.
At it's heart, I think this is a Change Management book: changing our own context & behaviors - dealing with our own dilemmas - to help improve organization change for the better.  And I'll bet you'll never read another business book that asks "do you want sex, or do you want a cookie?"

1,000 Tweets

I'm coming up on Tweet # 1,000 (you can follow me at  http://twitter.com/rondimon )

My first was on 28 Nov, 2008 ("installing twitter") - almost 2 years ago!

I try to create value-added messages, or re-tweet useful messages for folks in my business communities, namely Finance & IT execs as well as Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence architects and consultants.

For example,

RT @JAdP: #BBBT founder of #Corda 's 9-step KPI Process - see slide 14 of @weckerson 's deck at http://tinyurl.com/26mz5au

The Sorry State of Data Analytics (MIT/IBM study) - http://tinyurl.com/2g7mtnq - start with questions, not data. #CIO

WOW! great eBook on Integrated Reporting. Must read for Finance & IT. #CFO #CEO #MBA #EPM #CPM #IFRS #HBS http://tinyurl.com/2apjtmz

Just answered "“Can you recommend a ...book for planning ... a BI Solution for a company?” on @focus http://tinyurl.com/2fkvv7j

Hope to see you in the twitterverse!

Ron

EPM as Early Warning System

I just got this e-mail in my inbox today, it's from my daughter's high school principal sent to all the teachers:

"The musical just closed this last weekend (which was a great show), so that is about 50 or 60 students who will now be more fully connected to their studies.  However, today starts the winter sports season tryouts.  That means that a new groups of up to 400 students are taking on something new.  The reason I am sending you this is because this week is “Tryout Week,” so their stress level will be a little elevated."

And that was it!  He was giving a heads-up to the staff on what to expect from the performance of some students and to help explain potential changes in usual performance.

If you have adopted the true philosophy of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), you could use it in the same way - to predict or at least alert stakeholders to potential variances in performance coming up.  For example, EPM can tell your sales management that, based on historical data, economic indicators, and other pertinent factors, that bookings will be off for the remainder of the quarter by 9 to 16% and some suggested mitigation activities could include additional price promotions, exceptional discounting for deals over $50,000, channel incentives, and so on.  Or that SG&A expenses are lower than anticipated, get ready to pull the trigger on some of those discretionary month-end spends like additional advertising.

How are you using EPM as an Early Warning System?