Advanced Systems Foundry

Review: Strategic Intuition (Duggan, 2008)

The author discussed how does a success strategy
being created (or discovered). Innovation and creativity are based on
extensive and deep knowledge and experience, and an open, humble mind.
Nobody can predict the future, but we can get prepared and equipped with
deep knowledge (like creating strategy options), then actively search for
opportunities and changing objectives, with continuously reconstructions on
our intelligent memory (intuition, experience, and knowledge; they are
an single entity, not a few subbrain’s combination). Finally, based on
reconstruction of extensive knowledge legacy, a solution emerges in
correspondence to the opportunity/crisis. Historic innovations are not
coming from analysis or imagine, but intuitions of adopting and reassemble
existing resources. Therefore, the first thing is mission, then strategies,
objectives, and execution, not objective first. Moreover, to achieve
the mission, strategies can be replaced to react to environment changes.

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Review: The Strategy Paradox (Raynor, 2008)

This book focused on management of uncertainty
(including risk), and proposed a 4-step method to avoid making strategic
decision by guess or just leaving the profitable opportunities with greater
risk. The main idea of the method is based on creating and operating
“strategic options” instead of vast investment into an emerging opportunity.
The board sould focus on the strategic options to maintain the strategy
flexibility to the changing market, instead of making commitment
according to the “forecast of the future”. “The future” could not be predicted.
However, the range of the trend/future is much clearer than unprovable
predictions. Thus, a firm should create a series of scenes of the uncertain
future, and find core elements in most of the scenes. then create strategic
options and manipulate them to create higher margin of profit with lower
potential risk. If the option reveals a bright prospect, the commitment can be
made to invest more resources. Create strategy portfolio, not pursue a single
strategy. I think it resembles adding feed back loop to observe the outcome
error of the input and adjust its output according to the error.

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