Strategy at Its Best

(MoneyWatch) 

Strategic blunders can happen in any area: managing change, understanding customers, coordinating resources. Even success creates problems for companies like Enron, who convince themselves they're invincible. The best way to avoid these types of breakdowns is to analyze your company objectively and make appropriate adjustments. Here's a selection of our top downloaded articles on strategy to help your company avoid common pitfalls.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Strategy

Source: Strategic Decisions Group

What strategic sins is your company making? Are you in danger of pride, delusion, or just plain wimpiness? This article outlines the seven strategic sins that businesses commonly make and provides insight on how to get your company back onto the path of righteousness.

Porter's Five Forces

Source: Palo Alto Software

You know you need to do your homework if your company wants to expand into new markets, but exactly what kind of information should you look for? This article breaks down Michael Porter's Five Forces theory, which says there are five important factors that every company needs to examine before tackling a new market: suppliers, buyers, entry/exit barriers, substitutes, and rivalry.

Conduct Your Own SWOT Analysis

Source: BNET

Use this BNET step-by-step guide to analyze your company's strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). Our handy SWOT matrix will help you match up your company's resources and capabilities to your threats and opportunities in the competitive environment. Then you'll use the results to choose one of four strategy types for addressing the strongest forces.

BNET Guide to Conducting a Competitive Analysis

Source: BNET

Feeling lost in the wilderness of competition? This BNET tool will walk you through the process of conducting a competitive analysis using the strategic group map technique. After answering a few questions, you'll be ready to draw a strategic map for your industry, illustrating competitive forces, your position, and your competitors' positions.

Achieving Synergy Between Competitive Intelligence and Market Research

Source: Strategy Dynamics Group

Integrating two sets of data can yield far greater outcomes than analyzing each one in a vacuum. This white paper recommends removing the organizational and analytic barriers between competitive intelligence and market research, particularly when they're handled by separate teams. It includes a set of integrative questions that will help you use the lens of the customer to understand your competitors, and vice versa.