Mark Chussil

Wednesday, March 31, 6:00 – 7:30 pm. 519 SW Third Avenue, Suite 500 (the Dekum Building), Portland, OR.

This is a free, 1½ hour, interactive and enjoyable workshop on strategic thinking offered byMark Chussil, MBA '79F exclusively to the HBSAO. It contains highlights from a full-day program developed by Mark and offered by Advanced Competitive Strategies.

Click here to RSVP!!!

Program Premise

Why do strategists still make strategy mistakes? After all, we’re educated, motivated, experienced, groomed, and equipped with tools and supplied with data more than any previous strategists in history.

No one wants to make strategy mistakes, yet strategy mistakes still get made. People trigger crises and price wars; people buy high and then can’t sell low; people due-diligence strategies only to watch a competitor swoop in from left field. Glorious companies suffer, shrivel, and die. Surely that’s not what their strategies called for.

We’ll discuss how human biases and flawed tools lead conscientious strategists to make strategy mistakes. We’ll see how conventional, often-unchallenged paradigms of strategic thinking cause problems, and why companies can get better results by upgrading their thinking than by changing their personnel.

Takeaways

• Strategy analysis: threat or menace? See how conventional analysis can cause, rather than cure, bad strategy decisions.
• Garbage-out does not result only from garbage-in. See how precision-in can do the same thing.
• Why can upstarts beat incumbents? Are there generally accepted strategy principles? How well do we predict competitors? What does paper-folding have to do with groupthink?
• Don’t wait, there’s more! See how these ideas, concepts, and tools have helped Fortune 500 companies make or save billions of dollars.

The Workshop:  an opportunity to preview and provide useful feedback

As Founder of Advanced Competitive Strategies, I’ve conducted business war games and developed strategy simulations for many years, and spouted off at numerous conferences on those and related subjects. I’ve written quite a bit about what I’ve learned — book chapters, articles, essays, etc. — and I’m looking for a publisher on a related book, currently titled Marvelous Techniques: Essays on Going Beyond Strategy As We’ve Known It. The program premise above is from the back cover of the manuscript.

The intersection and perhaps culmination of those efforts is a one-day workshop I’ve put together on strategic thinking. I’ve run it with a couple of local organizations and gotten great reviews. I’d like to take it up a notch and test it out on a tougher stage, to wit, with my fellow HBS alumni. Not the whole-day program; that’s asking way too much. Rather, a 1½-hour subset. I’m looking for feedback, constructive criticism, and marketing advice.