Thursday, December 29, 2011 5:09 PM by Administrator,
Båstad, Sweden 2011-12-29
Dear all,
I hope you enjoyed the Christmas weekend and that you had some time to rest and reflect on the year gone past. 2011, for sure, was a year of dramatic turns in the world economy. It required us all to deal with the extreme dynamics involved, and affected almost all businesses and operations without pardon.
For XLNS Consulting Group it was a year when we saw new client relationships established in both foreign and well known industries, and continued to work with clients already well into the successful execution of their overall strategies revised or conceived a few years ago.
Personally, I worked with some of the most challenging assignments of my professional career, some of which required gaining a much stronger understanding of new geographies, cultures and complexities. But I guess that’s part of being a trusted and ever-learning strategy adviser to clients in 2011. I very much enjoyed working and making new friends both in the U.S. and in Asia as some assignments had me travelling to China and Hong Kong where I worked with fellow professionals within our international network IMCN (Independent Management Consultancies Network, www.imcn.ch).
During 2011, I also completed my seminal education and professional training in the Strategy Management & Execution System at Harvard Business School and finally achieved the advanced certificate from Drs. Kaplan & Norton in Boston (MA) U.S.A. This is what the professional community would call the equivalent of having a black belt in the field of strategy. Over time it will benefit our most progressive clients seeking proactively to build their strategy and strategy process into a competitive advantage that contributes to creating more value and benefits to stakeholders and constituents.
For the first part of 2012 we see a pattern reminiscent of the paramount and genuine uncertainty that companies and organizations had to face in early 2009 in the wake of the (private sector) financial crisis. Most companies and organizations know, however, that every major crisis holds a number of opportunities and threats to be addressed proactively and through strategic positioning. The present sovereign financial crisis will be no exception. Current paralysis among executives will soon shift to analysis and lead to strategies being revised or crafted anew to capitalize on the developments following in the wake of the crises. Crises tend to benefit the strategic thinkers, the bold and the brave.
Let me know if you have any strategy thinking going for 2012 and onwards. I would be very interested to compare notes and share some of our thinking from the frontiers of strategy development and execution and that we accumulated since 1995.
All my best for a prosperous 2012,
Björn H. Lindbäck
Senior Partner & Adviser, XLNS Consulting Group