Inside Corporate Strategies

New York. A research-team of Inside Insight set out to reveal the underlying truth about corporate strategies. At university, the team found, a lot of different management techniques are taught in great detail, and every year numerous new books are published that deal with some more management techniques in even greater detail, which usually involves a considerable amount of buzzwords (in order to hide the fact that the so-called "new management technique" is just plain common sense and the author of the book a complete moron).

As every graduate is soon to find out, however, the one thing they all have in common is this: They don't work.

As Inside Insight has discovered, the first and foremost reason is that they usually completely ignore the problem they should be resolving.

This can best be illustrated by a very simple example. Let's take, for instance, that you are riding a horse to get from A to B. Somewhere in the middle, you discover that getting to point B will be rather tricky because the horse has stopped, laid down, refrained from breathing, and apparently is quite dead.

Actually, the true essence of corporate strategies can be revealed using this wonderful little example. Because Management would deal with this problem in several different ways:

• Promise a big incentive to the rider should he manage to get the horse to ride to point B anyway
• Fire the rider and get a head-hunter to hire a new one
• Buy a new whip-lash
• Remain riding the horse on the grounds that we have always ridden a horse this way and that there is no reason whatsoever to change the strategy
• Build a task-force to revive the horse
• Get a multi-disciplinary team with at least two marketers and an accountant to analyse the dead horse and come up with creative solutions
• Visit other companies during a fact-finding mission to investigate how they ride dead horses
• Set up a new policy which forbids horses to die at unspecified moments
• Increase the training efforts for the riders
• Set new targets and pay a high bonus if they are over-achieved
• Compare different dead horses and analyse the added-values of them as opposed to the costs involved in burying them
• Change the criteria that define when a horse is dead, declare it is alive by the new standards, and insist on it continuing to ride
• Get consultants from outside to tell that the problem is that the horse is dead
• Combine several dead horses in order to make them quicker
• Increase the budget, especially marketing spendings
• Invent a new incentives-scheme to increases the dead horses' performance
• Invest in a new study that explores the option of riding the dead horse with two riders
• Declare that in our company horses are dead "better, quicker and cheaper" than in any other company and make that the key proposition of your communication strategy
• Hire an advertising agency to develop a campaign in order to promote that "the path is important, not the destination"
• Found a study group to explore the usages of dead horses for accounting purposes
• Sell the dead horse and call it "know-how transfer"
• Hold a conference and declare that dead horses are the future
• Get an update for the dead horse to ensure it is Y2K proof and ISO9001-certified
• Build a website to "engage in an ongoing, sustainable one-on-one dialogue with every dead horse on a global scale"