Random Musings:

The Education of Andy Grove

Harvard historian Richard Tedlow's lengthy article on Andy Grove in Fortune is not to be missed. It might have also been called Zen and The Art of Corporate Maintenance, or more simply, Zen Strategy Master. The story of Intel and Grove have been told before, of course, but Tedlow's article distills the important lessons. A snippet from the article setup:

Executive Risk Handbook

Fortune Magazine has an article by columnist Geoffry Colvin addressing risk management. Many companies have failed to learn the key lessons of risk management, including the need to build scenarios. Colvin writes:

Strategies for the Policy Arena

In addition to organizational settings, the tools for dynamic strategy analysis, decision-making, and implementation discussed here have broad application to critical policy domains. Examples of these key policy domains include global warming, homeland security, infectious diseases such as HIV or the next influenza pandemic, nuclear terrorism, and bioterrorism threats such as smallpox and especially genetically reengineered smallpox.

Each of these policy domains has been largely seen as involving too many actors, too many countries, too many decision-makers, and are so complex as to elude proper analysis. Cynics say that even if one could emerge from a project with the preferred scenario in hand, implementing that plan is so difficult as to undercut the value of the planning.

Maybe so. The proof is, of course, in the eating of the pudding (and not in the pudding itself).

But for complex issue domains, scenario planning provides many of the required tools. {See Bob Horn's work for some complementary Visual Language tools such as "mess maps," argumentation analysis, and other techniques.}

Scenario planning projects are excellent ways of bring policy makers, foundation staff, lobbyists, domain experts, business people, academics, organized interest groups, and other issue constituents together to share knowledge and explore diverse options.

For those seeking to influence policy, these scenario planning projects have the following benefits:

• Understanding policy options and likely consequences of action and of inaction.
• Formulating an action plan that address actors and influencers at all levels
• Identifying key leverage points and policies; where to apply effort.
• Understanding which forces are aligned with and which forces are opposed to each policy direction.
• Identifying currently neutral actors and their likely direction so that they can be mobilized or incented to remain neutral as appropriate to the policy objectives.
• Laying a foundation for multilateral cooperation among nations, NGOs, and other actors.
• Understanding when, where, and how to spend scare financial resources.