Collective Intelligence’s Kevin McDermott and FSG principal Peter Kennedy make the case for adopting scenario analysis as a tool for fostering innovative thinking. In the May 2011 issue of InnovationManagement they point to “strategic confidence” as a critical success factor in a world of disruptive and unpredictable change. 

Review of Walter Kiechel III’s The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the Corporate World (Harvard Business Press).

To every thing there is a season, and to this season Patrick Marren has written this thing.  

“Hitting the bullseye” with a seemingly prescient prediction is kind of neat, we would all agree.  But when the stakes are high, depending upon hitting the bullseye can be fatal. 

With apologies to P.G. Wodehouse, it is time to re-examine a topic I first took up several years ago: which way will the stock market go next? 

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” Variously attributed to Niels Bohr, Mark Twain, Robert Storm Peterson, Yogi Berra, Casey Stengel, Samuel Goldwyn, and others, this quote holds more truth now than ever. 

The Enterprise Risk Management discipline is still new, and few companies have done it all and done it right.

Next time you are sitting in a corporate strategy meeting, try to imagine the people in charge on stage, thrown into improvisation – how well would they do?   How well would you do? 

Why experts are still forced to give pinpoint forecasts of the future, even though everyone involved should know that such point forecasts are dangerous nonsense. 

The question “Are we in a recession?” is unanswerable until far too late – and almost always of no real use in decisionmaking in the real world.