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Leaders at all levels of the company need to institute a simple but effective routine for collecting the information needed to take strategic action. This article explains how to make that process pervasive and suggests some specific tools to help it work effectively in your organization. There are three basic steps to strategic decision‐making: getting the right information, making a good decision and then implementing that decision. Success in the information stage translates into knowing the types of information needed to make the decision, finding it, and transmitting it quickly to the decision‐makers. The information required falls in three categories: knowledge about the competition, knowledge about your own company, and knowledge about your marketplace. It is not enough to merely gather the information; an infrastructure must be in place to ensure that market information is getting back to the decision‐makers. Get the decision‐makers together regularly to close on important issues. Critical to making better decisions is to identify alternative courses of action rather than simply one proposal. In addition to basic strategic planning there are two ways to experience making decisions under simulated conditions: wargaming and scenario planning. Regularly tracking the successful implementation of decisions made is a key method of ensuring action.

When operations are consolidated to simplify product lines and to gain efficiencies in practices and marketing, can the brand identities also be consolidated? This was the question that IBM PC Division marketers faced. This article explores their approach to answering it. Key factors addressed by the team tasked with this project, included: value is moving beyond just providing products to providing value that improves the customer’s business; branding and business strategy are inextricably linked; and look for opportunity out of adversity. This was the chance to meld several disparate brands into a family. Strategically this reenergized IBM in the personal computer space and enabled them to send a new message to the marketplace. Tactically this improved marketing communications efficiency because the investment supported a single message and family of offerings.

Business Insights is a $500 expert system for strategic analysis that won the respect of the managers who tested it for us. By combining both qualitative and quantitative strategic analysis, it offers managers—especially those who lack a strategic planning background—a useful tool for considering and managing future outcomes.

We all could make a list of what's wrong with most meetings. What's said doesn't reflect what people are thinking. People with good ideas don't get heard. Contradicting your boss is bad politics. Precious time is lost in endless debates. What if you could just press a button to put an end to the wrangling? What if everyone's ideas were automatically added to the agenda? Welcome to the brave new world of Electronic Meeting Systems.

Consider, judge, believe, exercise the mind to make a decision, focus attention, and be capable of conscious thought. All good, solid, reliable words or phrases which any business organization would want in its lexicon, whether to encourage employees to be conscious of their responsibilities or to persuade customers that they will be dealing with a company who cares for quality. And they’re all a definition of the word “think”. What a pity, it must have crossed some entrepreneur’s mind, that you have to share this useful word with the entire English‐speaking world and you can’t patent it for your own exclusive use. Of course you can use it in a brand name, or a slogan, or an advertising strategy and maybe make a common and humble five‐letter word a multi‐million dollar asset.

Group problem solving drives many initiatives that support innovative strategic management. Tools or methodologies that improve group processes—such as Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) or Electronic Meeting Systems (EMS)—deserve close inspection. However, companies considering installing EMS/GDSS should be aware that such facilities can be expensive, their benefits are not always clear, and as the following case shows, they can even have highly undesirable effects.