Everything old is new again... and again... and again...

From the June 2021 Sloan Management Review:

Why Good Arguments Make Better Strategy

Great leaders create ways of engaging their teams that can cut through this strategic fog. They may adopt frameworks to guide their analysis, but they expect participants in strategy discussions to contribute coherent reasoning and defensible ideas. Amazon is well known for its requirement that major initiatives be proposed in the form of a six-page memo. The virtue of the memo — versus a slide deck — is that writing in full sentences and paragraphs forces leaders to clarify how their ideas connect to each other. Similarly, Netflix has driven stunning transformations in the media landscape in part through its success at encouraging its leaders to debate ideas frankly and its willingness to empower them to take risks without waiting for an annual strategy planning process. It is no surprise that CEO Reed Hastings views working from home as “a pure negative” for the company, in part because “debating ideas is harder now.”

The emphasis on vigorous debate at Netflix and Amazon clarifies a truth that many approaches to strategy obscure: At their core, all great strategies are arguments. Sure, companies can and do get lucky; sellers of hand sanitizer, for instance, have done very well during the pandemic. But sustainable success happens only for a set of logically interconnected reasons — that is, because there is a coherent logic underlying how a company’s resources and activities consistently enable it to create and capture value. The role of leaders is to formulate, discover, and revise the logic of success, making what we call strategy arguments.

Amazing discoveries by Amazon and Netflix. Cutting edge insight – breakthrough thinking.

Or something

The war on Powerpoint isn't measured in years; it's measured in decades.

Soon we will refer t it as a multi-generational struggle.

2006

Louis Gerstner started shaking things up at IBM in 1993 by banishing slides and bullet points. He recounted his triumph in his 2002 book.

Before that the Harvard Business Review hailed 3M for reinventing strategic planning by using prose.

Strategic Stories: How 3M Is Rewriting Business Planning (1998)

Imagine how much time, effort, and money could be saved if B-schools assigned real books instead of ephemera.

Reading makes a full Man, Meditation a profound Man, discourse a clear Man.



My brother, Cecil Edward Chesterton, was born when I was about five years old; and, after a brief pause, began to argue. He continued to argue to the end. . . . I am glad to think that through all those years we never stopped arguing; and never once quarrelled. Perhaps the principle objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument



Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man; and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend

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