Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [146]
15. See Raynor (2007, Chapter 2) for the full story.
16. Sony did in fact pursue a partnership with Matsushita, but abandoned the plan in light of Matsushita’s quality problems. Sony therefore opted for product quality while Matsushita opted for low cost—both reasonable strategies that had a chance of succeeding.
17. As Raynor writes, “Sony’s strategies for Betamax and MiniDisc had all the elements of success, but neither succeeded. The cause of these failures was, simply put, bad luck: the strategic choices Sony made were perfectly reasonable; they just turned out to be wrong.” (p. 44).
18. For an overview of the history of scenario planning, see Millet (2003). For theoretical discussions, see Brauers and Weber (1988), Schoemaker (1991), Perrottet (1996), and Wright and Goodwin (2009). Scenario planning also closely resembles what Makridakis, Hogarth and Gaba (2009a) call “future perfect thinking.”
19. For details of Pierre Wack’s work at Royal Dutch/Shell, see Wack (1985a; 1985b).
20. Raynor actually distinguishes three kinds of management: functional management, which is about optimizing daily tasks; operational management, which is focused on executing existing strategies; and strategic management, which is focused on the management of strategic uncertainty. (Raynor 2007, pp. 107–108)
21. For example, a 2010 story about Ford’s then CEO claimed that “What Ford won’t do is change direction again, at least not under Mr. Mulally’s watch. He promises that he—and Ford’s 200,000 employees—will not waver from his ‘point of view’ about the future of the auto industry. ‘That is what strategy is all about,’ he says. ‘It’s about a point of view about the future and then making decisions based on that. The worst thing you can do is not have a point of view, and not make decisions.’ New York Times, January 9, 2010.
22. This example was originally presented in Beck (1983), but my discussion of it is based on the analysis by Schoemaker (1991).
23. According to Schoemaker (1991, p. 552), “A deeper scenario analysis would have recognized the confluence of special circumstances (e.g. high oil prices, tax incentives for drilling, conducive interest rates, etc.) underlying this temporary peak. Good scenario planning goes beyond just high-low projections.”
24. See Raynor (2007, p. 37).
CHAPTER 8: THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS
1. Some more details about Zara’s supply chain management are provided in a Harvard Business Review case study of the company (2004, pp. 69–70). Additional details are provided in Kumar and Linguri (2006).
2. Mintzberg, it should be noted, was careful to differentiate strategic planning from “operational” planning, which is concerned with short-term optimization of existing procedures. The kind of planning models that don’t work for strategic plans actually do work quite well for operational planning—indeed, it was for operational planning that the models were originally developed, and it was their success in this context that Mintzberg believed had encouraged planners to repurpose them for strategic planning. The problem is therefore not that planning of any kind is impossible, any more than prediction of any kind is impossible, but rather that certain kinds of plans can be made reliably and others can’t be, and that planners need to be able to tell the difference.
3. See Helft (2008) for a story about the Yahoo! home page overhoul.
4. See Kohavi et al. (2010) and Tang et al. (2010).
5. See Clifford (2009) for a story about startup companies using quantitative performance metrics to substitute for design instinct.
6. See Alterman (2008) for Peretti’s original description of the Mullet Strategy. See Dholakia and Vianello (2009) for a discussion