POWERFUL ONLINE COURSES FOR SENIOR LEADERS & ANALYSTS/ACCOUNTANTS/CONSULTANTS
"Digital twin" business models transform performance
"Strategy" is about much more than the business plan - here's the wide range of issues that strategic management needs to deal with ...
Leaders need reliable models to plan, test and continually manage these issues ... and the analysts, accountants and consultants who support them need to build those models.
The value of our courses
For Leaders: the true nature of the factors that make up your business system - how those factors depend on each other to develop and drive results - how "digital twin" visual models can bring that system to life.
For analysts: how "digital twin" models can mimic any business plan, issue or initiative - how a rigorous, practical process ensures reliable models - how the models' visual clarity makes it possible to build models with teams in real time.
For Leaders
Mini-courses for all
For analysts
... accountants, consultants
Popular topics include:
Planning and managing performance improvement programs
Dynamic models for strategic management accounting
Understanding how competition really works
Dynamic business models are made possible by the powerful, visually intuitive online silico software
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Trusted by senior leaders worldwide
Make confident decisions in an uncertain world
Find the big levers in your business that dominate how results turn out
- Corporate crisis turn-rounds
- New venture planning and financing
- Technological disruption
- Defeating competitive threats
- Business improvement programs
- Net-zero carbon emissions strategies
- Entering new markets
- Corporate acquisitions
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Leaders: take control, with the truly joined-up view you always wanted
Your business is an interconnected system of moving parts. Decisions and external events ripple through that system, changing all the elements that work together to drive how that system develops and performs.
So you need a visual quantified model of how the business system actually works. You and your team will see your business like never before. So you can build robust plans, bench-test those plans before committing effort and cash, and manage those plans continually, as the future unfolds.
That's what Strategy Dynamics can do for you!
Analysts, accountants, consultants: learn a great new skill to support the business
You know that spreadsheets are hard to build and understand - hopelessly inadequate for capturing how business plans, issues and initiatives actually play out.
That's why you need a rigorous but practical method that is fast to use and resistant to errors. And you need a visually intuitive tool that everyone can "get" immediately ... so you can build powerful "digital twin" working models with teams in real time.
SILICO SOFTWARE
Make stronger, confident plans.
Tackle complex challenges.
We need to make proactive, evidence-based plans and decisions. But a spreadsheet's rows and columns can't capture the connectedness of a real business system. So how to understand the future impacts of today's decisions?
By using the Silico app. Because Silico captures how your business works and simulates the outcomes of your plans and decisions with forward-looking data.
Full-scale corporate solutions
Fast, reliable modeling for plans and challenges - large or small
The easiest - free - software to learn dynamic modeling (user-guide)
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WE GENERATED THE BEST RESULT IN OUR HISTORY!
"We used Kim’s courses to map everything we did in marketing. Our mapped departments included market research, customer acquisition, and customer relationship management. Euler Hermes gained the best new business inquiry rates and conversion from marketing the company had ever seen! All this when the world was struck by a pandemic."
JON SWABY
Former Head of Market Management, Euler Hermes
(now managing Director, Salus Restaurants Ltd.)
Using these models in both Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, the results speak for themselves. It is a key tool for senior managers.
John Kapson
Now: Sr. Director, Analytics & Data Science, Toyota Motors N America
This class fundamentally changed how I think about our company’s future, so I will use what I have learned for the challenges we face.
Mark Holman
Manager Regional Coordination, PJM Interconnection
These business models provided just what we need to explore scenarios for competition in the global tax-technology sector and test our strategies.
Kevin Boettcher
Director, Emerging Business; Vertex, Inc
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ORIGINS OF THESE POWERFUL FRAMEWORKS AND MODELS
"I still recall sitting in the Boston hotel lobby with that piece of paper"
I first built my strategy expertise with Whitbread PLC - today, a dominant corporation in the hospitality industry.
Whitbread started out, back in 1742, brewing beer! For 250 years, the company grew to be one of the UK’s top brewing companies.
But in the 1980s, the company faced existential challenges. International beer brands were taking over. And competition authorities would soon force the decoupling of beer production from distribution and retailing. Whitbread was in trouble. Their business model was about to get broken.
Creating a new future.
However, people in the UK were increasingly eating out, away from home. And Whitbread had the real estate and cash to open up that opportunity – and to exploit it.
It was the mid-1980s when I joined Whitbread as director of Retail Strategy. So what was my job? To design the strategy for creating a powerful new corporation - a very rare example of true "strategic transformation".
My job was to build a strong strategy.
And we certainly made that future happen! Over the next decade, we developed ten powerful restaurant and hotel chains, creating new markets and pushing competitors aside as we went. One of those successes came from acquiring the tiny Costa Coffee store chain - later sold to Coca-Cola for over $3 billion.
Taking that experience, I moved on to teach strategy at London Business School. But everything I knew about strategy was about to change.
From static strategy to dynamics.
The strategy tools I started teaching at LBS were OK, but they fell short of what the team and I at Whitbread had actually done. We didn’t just say, “That’s the place in the market we want” – we had comprehensive, joined-up plans, continually updated, to turn that aspiration into reality.
Luckily, my LBS colleague John Morecroft showed me what “system dynamics” could do. A straightforward method developed at MIT in the 1960s that captures how the real world works (... and not just for business but for any economic, social or environmental field).
It’s all about “resources.”
At the time, Strategy academics were interested in how “resources” enabled a business to perform. However, they misunderstood what those resources are, and how they work together, like a machine, to drive sales and profits.
But that was precisely what system dynamics could do! All I needed was to specify those resources correctly and figure out how they were connected, then build the system model and kick it into life.
That key piece of paper.
I can still recall sitting in that Boston hotel lobby, trying to figure it out. An hour later, I had this picture - a visual structure for how any business works.
The logic of this structure is simple, but unavoidable ...
Customers drive sales and revenue
Products, marketing and price win and retain customers
Staff and capacity provide the means to satisfy customers' needs
Staff, capacity and marketing drive costs
Take those costs from revenue to get profit, which grows our cash
Some cash we re-invest; some pays tax and interest; the rest goes to the owners
Certain cases need small adaptations, such as for cost-of-goods and gross margin, or for intermediaries like retailers. But this is essentially the “strategic architecture” of any business, and indeed many non-business organisations.
Bring strategy to life.
Add the numbers to everything on that picture and how those numbers depend on each other. Suddenly, your business model is not some stone statue, but a living entity - a "digital twin" that matches the real business. So I realised that we can simulate our plans against any range of scenarios with real-world data, helping to make bullet-proof, joined-up decisions.
Any issue, initiative or challenge
The next thing I realised was that the principles that can get us to a whole-business plan also work for any part of the business. And that means we can tackle any issue, initiative or challenge - in any function or team, of any scale. From fixing a local service quality issue up to planning and implementing a major product launch or improvement program.
(Looking back, I might have expected to crack the 'parts' problem first, before putting the parts together - but no, this is how it happened).
Beyond the spreadsheet - way beyond!
It was all very well having a rigorous and comprehensive view of how a business system works. But how to actually model that system, with numbers, to mimic the system's quantified behaviour?
Right from getting those first insights, it was never likely that this could be done with spreadsheets - you can't get your head around the arithmetical relationships around a system of multiple, interdependent factors by peering at rows and columns of numbers. Visual modeling software was already available, but was clunky and technically hard to use. So I had the 'Silico' app developed (or at least it's great-grandma), to work in the best way possible for business purposes.
This changes the way you make plans and decisions.
Seeing your business through these digital-twin business models transforms how you develop plans, tackle challenges, and make decisions. Because instead of looking at isolated, static numbers, you will look at how the whole system works. You can see the few key levers and how to use them to steer that system.
Ever since I drew this picture, I've taught this method at business schools worldwide. Written books. Built models to solve business challenges. Developed simulation-based learning games. Created courses for leaders and analysts.
Embraced by leaders
Senior leaders and analysts across diverse industries have used the method. From banking to software. Consumer brands to transport.
Leaders and analysts use this framework to make strong plans and big decisions. From optimising marketing impact to averting business collapse; fixing service quality to raising finance for new ventures.
Today, I would like to share this with you.
Your planning and decision-making are about to get a whole lot better.
These courses from Strategy Dynamics are fantastic. They are so good that we are looking to hire people with these skills. Thanks!
Bob Lamb
Founder and CEO, Foundation for Inclusion
The approach exceeded my expectations. The material is very powerful and provides rich and deep concepts and insights for the future.
Ahmad Waleed
Strategy Director, ELM Saudi Arabia
You lay out the material so well that we can easily internalize the approach. The model almost had a mind of its own, totally changing my understanding of our challenge.
Stephen Green
Director, Continental Mills
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