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Market share statistics indicate that success breeds success. To learn to take full advantage of your share, see “Do's and Don'ts,” page 34.

The thoughtful responses by McCabe and Chussil to a previously published article entitled “PIMS: Fact or Folklore?” by Lubatkin and Pitts have intensified the controversy that surrounds the PIMS program. At issue is the claim of the Strategic Planning Institute (SPI) that it has uncovered universal laws of the marketplace through a cross‐sectional analysis of over 2,000 varied businesses. We contend that the primary source of controversy surrounding the PIMS project arises from the differences between two prevailing perspectives of the marketplace. For the sake of convenience, we will refer to one as the “PIMS perspective” and the other as the “policy perspective.”

In the long run, higher quality captures a larger market share and results in higher profits. But with technology constantly changing, today's quality products may not be tomorrow's. By assessing how customers perceive quality, one can formulate sound strategies and commit to long‐term investment with greater confidence.

To describe reasons why companies make bad strategy decisions despite having the most capable, motivated, experienced, well‐equipped strategists in history. To recommend practical changes companies can implement to improve strategy decision‐making.

Why do bad strategy decisions get made when so much effort goes into making them well? After all, no one gets up in the morning intending to make bad strategy decisions. This paper draws on the author's experience in scores of business war games and strategy simulations in Fortune 500 firms around the world and on the author's observations in 30 years of designing and implementing quantitative business tools.

Helps strategists uncover sources of bad strategy decisions that might not be recognized in their companies, such as overconfidence, use of inappropriate analytical tools, and excessive emphasis on accountability. Discusses remedies and alternatives such as strategy simulation, business war games, examination of uncertainty, and competitor role‐playing. Includes

Improving the quality of strategy decision‐making can hugely affect the bottom line and be a potent source of competitive advantage.

Strategy decisions are among the highest‐leverage actions management can take. This paper offers new ideas to strategists who want to make better strategy decisions, and identifies conventional solutions to avoid.

Business war games support competitive‐strategy decisions under uncertainty. They are especially useful in combating confirmation bias, the human tendency to look for reassuring evidence that a desired future will come true. There is no generally accepted definition of what a business war game is, and there are many ways to conduct them. This paper aims to describe why, when, and how to use different types of business war games.

The author has conducted some 100 business war games for major companies around the world, and has 30 years' experience in strategy analysis. The paper draws on the author's observations of thousands of managers in those war games, on his familiarity with simulation technologies, and on research in social psychology, to categorize and recommend war‐gaming techniques for different business needs. The paper includes two illustrative case descriptions.

The paper finds that business war game objectives include: stimulating excitement around a strategy; building skill on strategic thinking; creating strategy options and anticipating threats and opportunities; and testing strategy options and making decisions. When the war‐game objective calls for quantitative models, traditional financial or trend‐line analysis can be dangerous. The objective will also influence the scope and length of the game, and its “rules of engagement.”

Few managers have participated in a business war game, and even fewer are aware of the variety of war games. This paper describes the link between war gaming and competitive advantage, and helps managers (and those who advise them) know why, when, and how to use different types of business war games.

A slowed rate of market growth, industrial over‐capacity, increased competition: these are just three “trend drivers” towards relationship marketing. Philip Kotler, one of the world’s leading marketing thinkers, has brought the philosophy of relationship marketing to bear on a key issue for marketing strategies, that of customer retention.

This paper aims to propose LARPnography as a more holistic method to probe the emergence of plausible futures, drawing on embodied embedded cognition literature and the emerging consumer practice of live-action role-playing (LARP). Current research methods for probing the future of markets and society rely mainly on expert judgment (i.e. Delphi), imagery or simulation of possible futures (i.e. scenario and simulation) and perspective taking (i.e. role-playing). The predominant focus on cognitive abstraction limits the insights researchers can extract from more embodied, sensorial and experiential approaches.

LARPnography is a qualitative method seeking to immerse participants within a plausible future to better understand the social and market dynamics that may unfold therein. Through careful planning, design, casting and fieldwork, researchers create the preconditions to let participants experience what the future may be and gather critical insights from naturalistic observations and post-event interviews.

Owing to its interactive nature and processual focus, LARPnography is best suited to investigate the adoption and diffusion of innovation, market emergence phenomena and radical societal changes, including the rise of alternative societies.

Different from previous foresight methods, LARPnography creates immersive and perceptually stimulating replicas of plausible futures that research participants can inhabit. The creation of a fictional yet socio-material world ensures that socially constructed meaning is enriched by phenomenological and visceral insights.

Strategy consultants have much to offer a top executive in terms of improving the bottom line. Yet little is known about the strategy consulting industry, because the firms and their clients are often reluctant to disclose details of their activities. This article surveys the leading strategy consulting firms and explores trends affecting the future of the industry.