An article “from the future” illustrating the trend away from serious strategy and planning in American companies. 

The integrity and identity of any business is to some degree dependent on the external pressures exerted upon it by the competitive environment. Strategic success in eliminating that pressure may ironically be the greatest threat to continued success.

Many are the businesses have been trapped by systems of jargon into thinking that summer is going to go on forever.

A rigorous step-by-step “left-brain” process is the best way to harness the talents of intensely competent “left-brain,” “autistic” managers to imagine entirely novel situations, challenges, opportunities – and strategies. 

Many executives will use the same group of people to tackle all types of problems. But different problems will require different-sized groups, with different types of people. 

The strategy process can often produce results that are the opposite of what the organization either expects or needs.

Tradeoffs are the most inescapable aspect of business strategy, if not life itself; they are also perhaps the most resolutely ignored. Scratch a strategic disaster, and usually you will come across a juicy unrecognized tradeoff.

Review of Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, which has some interesting parallels to the world of business strategy.

When a business organization is in a state of imminent collapse, its vertical structures – its “stovepipes” – often remain in place, long after their usefulness has dissipated. 

Conventional wisdom is often right, of course. But it is also often wrong. Unless planners bring their implicit assumptions to the surface and test them, their plans will be obsolete very quickly.