Are you still considering the Emerging Markets as emerging? Then read the nice article from the FT Insight: Emerging market label is obsolete

Then read the Economist Up, up and Huawei and China rich list topped by BYD founder by FT.

Strategy is really a safari, I am convinced of that after reading the excellent book of Henry Mintzberg et al. Strategy Safari: The Complete Guide Through the Wilds of Strategic Management

Mintzberg divides the strategy process as conceived by different schools:

The first three schools are prescriptive in nature – more concerned with how strategy should be formulated than with how they necessarily do form.

Is strategy created  or emergent? The answer is both and every strategy process has to combine various aspects of the different schools. Strategy Safari is a great book and it should be read several times to really understand its profound implications on the meaning of business strategy.

Digital convergence makes clear that the boundaries are not well defined and players from different domains are aiming at the same objectives. Vodafone revamps mobile internet service is a nice FT article in which is described the current scenario of Telco operators and Internet companies working on mobile Internet services and social networking.

And, Nokia is to acquire Dopplr, a social networking Internet service connecting people that travel around.

Google has partnered with the Wharton School to launch Fast.Forward, a site with videos on marketing as we know it today, from leading industry experts.

Check the videos at Fast.Forward

Innovation: What’s your score? is the title of a recent article published in the McKinsey What Matters. The article proposes ways to assess and measure innovation in a company.

Another article, from What Matters, tackels  innovation in Silicon Valley, see  Nurturing the innovation reef.

In Strategy Safari Mintzberg reports a nice table from a book by Spyros Makridakis Forecasting, Planning and Strategy for the 21st Century.

The table summarizes nicely the scientific literature on how biases influence decision making. These biases have obvious consequences for strategy making.

Search for supportive evidence: Willingness to gather facts which lead toward certain conclusions and to disregard other facts which threaten them

Inconsistency: Inability to apply the same decision criteria in similar situations

Conservatism: Failure to change ( or changing slowly) one’s own mind in light of new information evidence

Recency: The most recent events dominate those in the less recent past, which are downgraded or ignored

Availability: Reliance upon specific events easily recalled from memory, to the exclusion of other pertinent information

Anchoring: Predictions are unduly influenced by initial information which is given more weight in the forecasting process

Illusory correlations: Belief that patterns are evident and/or two variables are casually related when they are not

Selective perception: People tend to see problems in terms of their own background and experience

Regression effect: Persistent increases [in some phenomenon] might be due to random reasons which, if true, would [raise] the chance of [subsequent] decrease. Alternatively, persistent decreases might [raise] the chances of [subsequent] increases

Attribution of success and failure: Success is attributed to one’s skills while failures to bad luck, or someone else’ s error. This inhibits learning as it does not allow recognition of one’s mistakes

Optimism, wishful thinking: People’s preferences for future outcomes affect their forecasts of such outcomes

Underestimating uncertainty: Excessive optimism, illusory correlation, and the need to reduce anxiety result in underestimating future uncertainty