Don’t adapt to the market – shape it

Citation

Henry, C. (2005), "Don’t adapt to the market – shape it", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 33 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2005.26133faf.001

Don’t adapt to the market – shape it

The periscopic media tour

Don’t adapt to the market – shape it

New schools of strategy typically fall into the complexity theory trap: they assume that the best that once can hope for in complex, rapidly evolving environments is to rapidly adapt to changing conditions. Adaptation is certainly one strategy and an element in all of all strategies. But in rapidly changing environments, firms have another option: shaping strategies. Unlike the situation in more stable markets, companies in rapidly changing environments have more strategic degrees of freedom in shaping outcomes.

Even very small companies with appropriate insight can shape market evolution. Of course, they cannot determine outcomes with certainty, but with appropriate statements of long-term direction, they can increase the probability of favorable outcomes. Witness the success of Microsoft in shaping the development of the computer industry. In fact, many of the great success stories of the 1980s and 1990s – Wal-Mart and Dell come to mind – were led by strong founders who defined long-term statements of direction that helped shape the evolution of their respective markets. It may be hard to recall now, but these companies were all quite small as recently as the 1980s, yet they managed to have enormous impact in reshaping their industries.

The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization, John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, (Harvard Business School Press, 2005).

Let customers benefit directly from training and development

GE’s Crotonville training center opens many of its programs to customers, particularly in emerging markets. By including key customers and thus educating the value chain in its language and, management philosophy, and decision processes, GE finds it can shape how customers think and act – thereby redefining the rules of engagement and succeeding quickly in new markets.

Few companies take full advantage of the opportunities their own training programs offer. Most internal courses draw students only from within the company, even though the payback may often be huge and the incremental costs of adding a few outside participants are diminishingly small. Consider the advantages of identifying customers who would be well served by the content of a course, inviting them to attend, and building relationships with them during the program. One company now requires 10 percent of the seats in all its courses to be open to customers and encourages sales and marketing to promote the benefits of course attendance as part of the sales package – a special offer that valued customers welcomed.

The HR Value Proposition, Dave Ulrich, (Harvard Business School Press, 2005).

Radical innovation and the project management mentality

A corporate manager described the challenges of radical innovation as follows: “There are four risks in innovation. The traditional ones are technology and market risks. These are the ones that most often put incremental innovation at risk. But there are two additional risks: funding and people. Will I have the funding? And will I have the right people? These questions are irrelevant to incremental efforts, but they are critical for breakthroughs. If I have the funding and the right people, I’ll have the technology and market understanding. Companies like Cisco have huge networks inside and outside to know where technology and the market are going. If they don’t have the talent to pursue an opportunity, they go out and buy it. Venture capitalists focus on funding and people; project managers focus on technology and markets. The key for breakthroughs is not to run a project but to create innovative technologies and business models; it is not about hurdle rates but about creating intellectual capital. It is not about filling a pipeline, but being exposed to deals and managing risks – do I want to share the risks and with whom? Radical innovation comes from breaking the project mentality.”

Making Innovation Work, Tony Davila, Marc Epstein and Robert Shelton, (Wharton School Publishing, 2005).

Globalization and the future of the welfare state

The salient feature of globalization is that it allows financial capital to move around freely; by contrast, the movement of people remains heavily regulated. Since capital is an essential ingredient of production, individual countries must compete to attract it, this inhibits their ability to tax and regulate it. Under the influence of globalization, the character of our economic and social arrangements has undergone a radical transformation. The ability of capital to go elsewhere undermines the ability of the state to exercise control over the economy. The globalization of financial markets has rendered the welfare state that came into existence after World War II obsolete because the people who require a social safety net cannot leave the country, but the capital the welfare state used to tax can.

On Globalization, George Soros (PublicAffairs, paperback edition, 2005).

The barrier to collaboration

Adversarial commerce has become so entrenched as the way business operates that we often are not aware of its costs or the problems it can create. Certainly, its use is not very often intentional or deliberate; it seems to build up over time within companies without an overt decision to adopt some of the associated behavior. Understanding that it is often subtle, or hidden, might help businesses understand some of the more serious situations that can occur. At least four major business attributes drive the trend toward adversarial commerce: distrust, poor communications, limited planning, and a constant quest for complete control. These ultimately add costs to the way of doing business and slow the response to changes that occur in the marketplace. Not only are their deleterious effects costing companies money – they also are the main items hampering change.

Score! A Better Way to Do Business: Moving From Conflict to Collaboration, Thomas T. Stallkamp, (Wharton School Publishing, 2005).

Can Wal-Mart move upscale?

Retailers can drop from the luxury market to the mass market. (See, for example, the cheaper Jaguar X-types and the more expensive XK models.) But it’s not clear they can do the reverse and move from low-end to high-end. What if Hyundai were to unveil a $50,000 luxury SUV? It would have difficulty getting its existing customers to trade up. If they could afford to – or wanted to – pay $50,000 for a car, they probably wouldn’t be Hyundai customers in the first place. And snobbish Lexus owners wouldn’t deign to consider a premium-priced Hyundai. McDonald’s probably wouldn’t do too well with a $15 McKobe burger. The connoisseurs would wrinkle up their well-trained noses in distaste, and the regulars would be priced out of the market.

“Wal-Mart, meet Prada: the low-end retailer wants to go upscale. Here are some tips,” Daniel Gross, Slate, June 7, 2005, http://slate.msn.com/id/2120438/

Rip-mix-burn culture creation

Larry Ellison just put another nail into the coffin of software sentimentality. A mere six months after Oracle’s rancor-filled takeover of PeopleSoft, Ellison’s company yesterday delivered strikingly strong financial results, not just in its database business but in applications as well. The numbers undercut the popular notion that mergers of software firms are horribly difficult, if not inherently doomed.

Because the value of software makers lies in the creativity of their “human assets,” the old thinking went, you couldn’t apply tough management discipline in quickly consolidating two organizations and ripping out redundancy. Cultural friction would get in the way; sensitive knowledge-workers would walk. Here’s how IBM’s Joe Marasco put it last year: “The largest single reason for failure when two software companies combine is cultural incompatibility. Even if the two cultures are similar, merging them can be difficult for a vast variety of technical reasons. Plus, if the two companies are located some distance from one another, there is insularity because of the separation. Whatever the root cause, in the face of fundamental incompatibility, most software mergers fail, plain and simple.”

Ellison’s approach flew in the face of the conventional wisdom. As he tells BusinessWeek, he applied GE’s hard-nosed, to-hell-with-culture acquisition philosophy in combining the two big software houses: “We had a clear plan. A lot of things were done in 30 days, including integrating the two sales forces. The secret to these mergers is to make the hard decisions and move quickly. The problem with a lot of mergers in the tech industry is they’re not real mergers. People don’t eliminate duplication of effort. We wanted to get the economies immediately.” It’s the rip-mix-burn method, and it seems to have worked.

“To hell with culture,” Nicholas Carr, Rough Type, June 30, 2005, www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/06/tohellwithcu.php

Cultural significance

Culture is your organization’s DNA – the blueprint for everything you do. To be better at innovating – your culture must expect and foster innovation. To improve customer satisfaction – your culture must expect and foster great service. Great leaders realize this. They know that “culture” isn’t a single item on a task list. And it can’t be delegated to a committee. It’s all encompassing. It’s the real work – and legacy – of leaders.

“Leading Ideas: Culture Drives Success,” Fast Company blog, July 27, 2005, http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2005/07/27/leadingideasculturedrivessuccess.html

When do customer loyalty programs work?

Half of the ten largest US retailers – including drug and grocery stores, mass merchandisers, hotels and airline companies – offer “frequent customer” loyalty programs. A new university study provides the most realistic assessment yet of such programs and warns that they may be profitable only if companies use excess capacity to provide the rewards.

Customer loyalty programs, such as airlines’ frequent flyer incentives, are very popular among both consumers and retailers. Because of the common belief that loyal customers purchase more and pay premium prices, and the cost of selling to them is less than to the occasional buyer, companies believe loyalty programs are worth the investment. A new study by university researchers shows that firms with excess production or service capacity are most likely to profit from customer loyalty programs.

“An example of excess capacity is an airline taking off with empty first-class seats,” explains Siddharth Singh, an assistant professor of management at Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management and co-author of a study that explores the profitability and financing of customer loyalty programs in a competitive market. “The airline could potentially use those seats as rewards for loyal economy class passengers, thus using existing resources to buy customer loyalty.” On the other hand, without the availability of spare capacity to absorb the cost of such rewards, Singh says, a company’s customer loyalty program might not be profitable.

Using a game theoretic framework, Singh and his colleagues, Dipak C. Jain at Northwestern University and Trichy V. Krishnan with the National University of Singapore, analyze certain factors that prior studies have not considered when analyzing the profitability of these types of programs. The result is a more realistic picture of when and how companies can expect to profit from a customer loyalty reward program.

“Does it pay to reward customer loyalty? Only if you have rewards to spare,” Rice University, www.explore.rice.edu/explore/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=7533

Outsourcing IT?

A big chunk of what we do in the IT business – stuff like running networks and application systems, and installing and supporting packaged software – is necessary but no longer strategic to most organizations. Ironically, because we have gotten so good at these things, they have become commoditized. Now it often does make sense to outsource them to an IT utility, just as we outsource the production and delivery of electricity to an electric utility.

“Is IT a utility or a profession?” Michael H. Hugos, Computer World, July 27, 2005, www.computerworld.com

Whither IT?

Most of the machinery of modern management is directed toward making sure that we build the system right. Our processes for defining requirements, assigning resources, estimating completion timing and managing compliance with milestones are all aimed at building the thing right. All these processes presume that we already know what the right thing is.

But, of course, we don’t in IT. In IT, we are almost always figuring out what the right thing is while we are building it. This is a direct consequence of the nature of the final product – changeable and rapidly changing, intangible and difficult to foresee, presenting problems and opportunities that can be discovered only as the product nears actual use. The problem in IT is not just building the system right but also building the right system. And the latter problem is harder than the first. Building an already well-understood product is a matter of complying with a plan. Figuring out what that right thing is – well, that’s a matter of problem finding, diagnosis, creative problem solving and experimentation, all in real-time. Cisco knew the project would require midcourse decisions and changes, and that this would involve far more than just following directions.

Because IT products have special characteristics, we won’t get it right the first time. We can’t. Enforcing a “get it right the first time” ethos will primarily cause people to hide the important problems discovered on the front lines. Instead, these problems will be encountered when they become so severe that they cannot remain hidden. This is where the most spectacular project failures come from. Even if you avoid spectacular failure, you may succeed only in implementing the system you initially thought you wanted rather than one that you’ve since discovered would be much better.

“No crystal ball for IT” Rob Austin, CIO Magazine, July, 2005, www.cio.com/archive/070105/keynote.html

Does IT improve performance?

Additional spending on information technology can raise productivity, but only in well-managed companies. IT investments can play a critical role in raising business productivity. But a study of 100 manufacturing companies in France, Germany, the UK and the USA found that IT investments have little impact unless they are accompanied by first-rate management practices, which, by contrast, can boost productivity on their own. We rated companies on how well they used three important management practices: lean manufacturing, which cuts waste in the production process; performance management, which sets clear goals and rewards employees who reach them; and talent management, which attracts and develops high-caliber people. The companies that had the highest marks in these areas became more productive, with or without higher spending on IT. Those that combined good management practices with IT investments did best of all.

“Does IT improve performance?,” The McKinsey Quarterly, June, 2005.

Opportunity recognition

If we look at what differentiates successful entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful ones, the most important craft is opportunity recognition. This is a process that we have learned how to systematize and teach to entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs who have the most success are those who are able to find a real niche in the market that offers enough of a margin to meet their needs and aspirations. Successful entrepreneurs understand the importance of “failing on paper.” They carefully assess their idea to make certain that it has an adequate market and enough profit margin before they ever launch their venture. As more and more entrepreneurs are being trained worldwide, it is this one skill, this one technology that is having the biggest impact on their success. So I respectfully suggest that the most important technology is not a gadget, but a process that has become systematized and taught to more and more aspiring entrepreneurs. Gadgets are nice, but they come and go and are really only marginally responsible for business success.

“The entrepreneurial mind,” Jeff Cornwall, 19 July, 2005 http://forum.belmont.edu/cornwall/

Leadership deficit

There is no doubt that Lance Armstrong’s seventh straight victory in the Tour de France, which has prompted sportswriters to rename the whole race the Tour de Lance, makes him one of the greatest US athletes of all time. What I find most impressive about Armstrong, besides his sheer willpower to triumph over cancer, is the strategic focus he brings to his work, from his prerace training regimen to the meticulous way he and his cycling team plot out every leg of the race. It is a sight to behold. I have been thinking about them lately because their abilities to meld strength and strategy – to thoughtfully plan ahead and to sacrifice today for a big gain tomorrow – seem to be such fading virtues in American life.

Sadly, those are the virtues we now associate with China, Chinese athletes and Chinese leaders. Talk to US business executives and they’ll often comment on how many of China’s leaders are engineers, people who can talk to you about numbers, long-term problem solving and the national interest – not a bunch of lawyers looking for a sound bite to get through the evening news. America’s most serious deficit today is a deficit of such leaders in politics and business.

“Learning from Lance,” Thomas Friedman, The New York Times, 27 July, 2005.

What do smart companies want?

Modern American politics is dominated by the doctrine that government is the problem, not the solution. In practice, this doctrine translates into policies that make low taxes on the rich the highest priority, even if lack of revenue undermines basic public services. You don’t have to be a liberal to realize that this is wrong-headed. Corporate leaders understand quite well that good public services are also good for business. But the political environment is so polarized these days that top executives are often afraid to speak up against conservative dogma. Instead, they vote with their feet. Which brings us to the story of Toyota’s choice.

There has been fierce competition among states hoping to attract a new Toyota assembly plant. Several Southern states reportedly offered financial incentives worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But last month Toyota decided to put the new plant, which will produce RAV4 mini-SUV’s, in Ontario. Explaining why it passed up financial incentives to choose a US location, the company cited the quality of Ontario’s work force.

“Toyota, moving northward,” Paul Krugman, The New York Times, 25 July, 2005.

What HR should know

When HR professionals were asked about the worth of various academic courses toward a “successful career in HR,” 83 percent said that classes in interpersonal communications skills had “extremely high value.” Employment law and business ethics followed, at 71 percent and 66 percent, respectively. Where was change management? At 35 percent. Strategic management? 32 percent. Finance? Um, that was just 2 percent.

The truth? Most human-resources managers aren’t particularly interested in, or equipped for, doing business. And in a business, that’s sort of a problem. As guardians of a company’s talent, HR has to understand how people serve corporate objectives. Instead, “business acumen is the single biggest factor that HR professionals in the US lack today,” says Anthony J. Rucci, executive vice president at Cardinal Health Inc., a big health-care supply distributor.

Rucci is consistently mentioned by academics, consultants, and other HR leaders as an executive who actually does know business. At Baxter International, he ran both HR and corporate strategy. Before that, at Sears, he led a study of results at 800 stores over five years to assess the connection between employee commitment, customer loyalty, and profitability.

As far as Rucci is concerned, there are three questions that any decent HR person in the world should be able to answer. First, who is your company’s core customer? “Have you talked to one lately? Do you know what challenges they face?” Second, who is the competition? “What do they do well and not well?” And most important, who are we? “What is a realistic assessment of what we do well and not so well vis-à-vis the customer and the competition?”

Does your HR pro know the answers?

“Why we hate HR,” Keith H. Hammonds, Fast Company, August, 2005.

When reputation and history are not enough

With its brand and products under attack, teaming up with Samsung is a sign that Sony, once fiercely independent, must rely more and more on others to compete effectively. “Now that we’ve entered the digital network age, it is not like you can do everything yourself,” said Yoshihide Nakamura, an executive vice president in the intellectual property division at Sony. “We felt we had to have some kind of relationship with Samsung or we would face some serious consequences.” For Samsung, the deals are an acknowledgment of its emergence as a global player with the manufacturing muscle, financial influence and popular products to overtake its more prestigious rival in some significant areas. After all, Samsung’s market capitalization is now more than twice as large as Sony’s, and it earned more than ten times as much in profits last year. By teaming up with Sony, Samsung hopes to learn from Sony’s powerful design and marketing expertise. “Sony is really one of the very few electronics companies whose brands are recognized as iconic,” Woo-Sik Chu, the head of investor relations at Samsung, said in a phone interview. “There’s a lot to learn from Sony. But at the same token, increasingly in the digital era, everything starts on an equal footing. They also want to see why our brand is rising.”

“Samsung and Sony, the clashing Titans, try teamwork,” Ken Belson, The New York Times, 25 July, 2005.

The right metrics to track brand health

With the profile of equity elements in hand, managers then need a system of metrics to track the brand’s vital signs. Just as established tools and guidelines track debt, working capital, and other components of a firm’s financial health, there is a developing science of brand metrics that offers powerful diagnostic tools for measuring and monitoring changes in brand health. These tools go beyond the traditional measures of awareness, consideration, and preference to include data on brand premiums, brand as a percentage of shareholder value, brand extendability, and employee commitment scores. Well-designed metrics allow managers to measure the value of a brand, the return on marketing investments, and the elements of the customer experience that build or dilute equity in the brand. Thus, they can help managers take corrective measures or reallocate investments for the greatest positive impact on the customer experience. For example, the Microsoft brand is widely respected in the software arena, including business-to-business markets. But certain metrics tracking perceived trust and perceived corporate intentions have revealed the danger lurking in one component of the brand’s value. Executives from some other companies have publicly voiced their opinions characterizing Microsoft as a rapacious competitor and a dangerous ally. This reputation makes it harder for Microsoft to develop the partnerships it will need to succeed in new arenas such as entertainment. As one possible move, Microsoft might invest more in its relationship with an important constituency, and it could potentially benefit from improving its brand metrics system and developing a range of responses to the early warnings that the system raises.

“Brand investment traps,” by Andrew Pierce and Adrian Slywotzky, Mercer Management Journal, 19, www.mercermc.com/mmj

When consumers become producers

No web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences – and they knew a lot – confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment. Everyone knew writing and reading were dead; music was too much trouble to make when you could sit back and listen; video production was simply out of reach of amateurs. Blogs and other participant media would never happen, or if they happened they would not draw an audience, or if they drew an audience they would not matter. What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds. There – another new blog! One more person doing what AOL and ABC – and almost everyone else – expected only AOL and ABC to be doing. These user-created channels make no sense economically. Where are the time, energy, and resources coming from?

The audience … .

The electricity of participation nudges ordinary folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging the votes in the Senate. More and more of the web runs in this mode. One study found that only 40 percent of the web is commercial. The rest runs on duty or passion … .

This impulse for participation has upended the economy and is steadily turning the sphere of social networking – smart mobs, hive minds, and collaborative action – into the main event.

When a company opens its databases to users, as Amazon, Google, and eBay have done with their web services, it is encouraging participation at new levels. The corporation’s data becomes part of the commons and an invitation to participate. People who take advantage of these capabilities are no longer customers; they’re the company’s developers, vendors, skunk works, and fan base.

“We are the web”, Kevin Kelly, Wired, August, 2005.

Strategy and execution

From Vivendi to Webvan, the shortcomings of a bad strategy are usually painfully obvious – at least in retrospect. But good strategies fail too, and when that happens, it’s often harder to pinpoint the reasons. Yet despite the obvious importance of good planning and execution, relatively few management thinkers have focused on what kinds of processes and leadership are best for turning a strategy into results.

As a result, says Wharton management professor Lawrence G. Hrebiniak, MBA-trained managers know a lot about how to decide a plan and very little about how to carry it out. “Most of our MBAs receive great training in planning but far less in execution,” notes Hrebiniak, author of Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change (Wharton School Publishing). “Even though they are good managers, over time they really have to learn through the school of hard knocks, through experience, which means they make a lot of mistakes.”

This lack of expertise in execution can have serious consequences. In a recent survey of senior executives at 197 companies conducted by management consulting firm Marakon Associates and the Economist Intelligence Unit, respondents said their firms achieved only 63 percent of the expected results of their strategic plans. Michael Mankins, a managing partner in Marakon’s San Francisco office, says he believes much of that gap between expectation and performance is a failure to execute the company’s strategy effectively.

“Three reasons why good strategies fail: execution, execution … ” Knowledge@Wharton, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewArticle&id=1252

The real opportunity for innovation: services

In terms of growth, GM’s On-Star service has grown to 3.3 million subscribers that pay an average of $300 per year for it. Although On-Star had a slow start, it’s now in ramp-up mode due to the decision to make it standard equipment on all GM vehicles – that would be over 8 million per year. If just half of these drivers decide to keep the service, On-Star’s revenue moves into the range of $2 billion, with profit margins that most certainly beat the industry average for automobiles.

And so it goes. For almost every leading big corporation – and, paradoxically, especially those that make products – growth in services holds the most promise for successful differentiation and sustained profitability for the future.

With this palpable shift to services in our economy, one would think that service providers would be looking to every tool available to drive better, faster, and cheaper innovation. Yet … service innovation as a discipline is still in its infancy. Here’s why: first of all, there just isn’t a lot of information or rigor around the topic. While reams of books and articles abound on the topic of product innovation and product development, very few focus specifically on services and the distinctions therein.

And you would be hard pressed to find a course on service development or innovation on any B-school campus, reflecting the dearth of academic concentration in the area. Today, few universities even teach service management, and if they do, the emphasis falls to quality management and the operational excellence associated with existing service environments, never the invention and nurture of new service concepts. Further, there are few public forums where professionals involved in service innovation can learn from exemplars.

“The value of inventive services,” Jeneanne Rae, Business Week, 29 July, 2005.

Retailing discovers customer satisfaction

It started out as an academic puzzle of sorts. The researchers already knew that in the airline industry, customers and employees revere Southwest Airlines. With computers, Dell stands out as superior in customer satisfaction. And Toyota remains the company to emulate in the automobile industry. But when it comes to the retail industry, what company sets the standards for customer and employee satisfaction?

“In pretty much any other industry segment, you can say, ‘Here is a company that is the best at something,’” says Serguei Netessine, Wharton professor of operations and information management. “But in retailing, there is no clear company to follow. There is no Toyota in retailing.”

Netessine, Marshall Fisher, Jayanth Krishnan and Daniel Corsten have begun two closely-related projects to find out what drives success in the disparate world of retailing as measured by profitability and long-term growth. Fisher is co-director of Wharton’s Fishman-Davidson Center for Service and Operations Management. Krishnan is a Wharton doctoral student and Corsten is vice director, Kuehne-Institute for Logistics, at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland.

Their preliminary conclusions as to what drives success reflect a maxim long held in the service industry but only recently thought to pertain to the retail sector – namely, customer satisfaction. While this finding alone is not a surprise, some unexpected results surfaced when the four operations experts decided to try and pinpoint exactly what promotes customer satisfaction and helps shoppers differentiate one retailer from another, a process that they feel has until now received little academic review.

“Delving into the mystery of customer satisfaction: a Toyota for the retail market?”, Knowledge@Wharton, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewArticle&id=1255

Innovative experiment in training

Art lovers flock to the Frick to pay homage to one of the world’s finest displays of Western European art. Masterpieces by Rembrandt, Titian and Renoir adorn the walls of the Fifth Avenue mansion, once the home of industrial magnate Henry Clay Frick, an avid collector of art from the Renaissance period to the end of the nineteenth century. The beaux-arts setting is hushed and formal. Children under ten years of age aren’t allowed inside.

It’s not your usual urban crime scene. But now, in an unusual effort to improve observational and analytical skills, the New York Police Department is bringing newly-promoted officers, including sergeants, captains and uniformed executives, to the Frick to examine paintings.

“In New York, the extraordinary is so ordinary to us, so in training we’re always looking to become even more aware as observers,” says Diana Pizzuti, deputy chief and commanding officer of New York City’s police academy.

“Tell me the who, what, where, why and when of each piece,” Amy Herman, head of education at the Frick, instructs each class before they descend the mansion’s grand staircase and enter the public galleries. She limits the time her students have in front of each painting. “Just like when they arrive at a crime scene, they have to make observations and judgments quickly,” she says.

The NYPD course began last year, inspired by similar classes the 38-year-old Ms Herman teaches for New York medical students. Those classes are intended to develop diagnostic abilities through better observation of patients.

“To master the art of solving crimes, cops study Vermeer,” by Ellen Byron, The Wall Street Journal, 27 July, 2005.

Craig HenryStrategy & Leadership’s intrepid media adventurer collected these sightings of strategic management in action around the world. Craig Henry is a marketing and strategy consultant based in Carlisle, Pennsylvania (Craighenry@aol.com). He welcomes your contributions and suggestions.