About Strategy Dynamics

I developed the Strategy Dynamics method many years ago while teaching at London Business School. I am Kim Warren, and the courses I offer here are based on many years of experience and research, applying that method across thousands of cases.

A strategy role in corporate transformation.

After an engineering degree from Imperial College, London, and MBA from London Business School, I had several commercial roles before becoming retail strategy Director at brewing company Whitbread PLC. There I had the chance to be part of a very rare phenomenon - a true corporate transformation.

Back then, I was just figuring out strategy from first principles, using basic reasoning to recommend what the team should do, and importantly what not to do. Thankfully, my guidance was mostly accepted, except for the time they decided to take on MacDonald's, and got killed!

From corporate to education

I moved to my alma mater, London Business School, to teach strategic management, using the formal methods known at the time. Those methods focused on how to "position" a business relative to its customers' needs and what competitors offered.

But I knew there must be more to strategy than this. Successful businesses do not change their chosen position, even over decades. They don't keep changing their minds about what they are! 

The standard strategy tools were just too limited.

So the big need I saw was how to figure out what exactly to do, how much, when, across all parts of the business, to deliver the promise of that strategic position. Not just right now, but continually over time, as external conditions and the business itself changed.

Strategy Dynamics is the answer to that need.

Rigorous principles, tested in real-world settings formed the extensive development that followed. The method first appeared in the prize-winning book Competitive Strategy Dynamics published in 2002 by Wiley. Since then, many other books and published papers have refined and extended the approach.

It's all about performance over time.

The core idea behind Strategy Dynamics is simple. Whether your concern is about sales growth, customer service, staff development, or the progress of the entire business—performance changes over time. And traditional strategy tools have nothing to say about this.

And Excel spreadsheets can't help you figure that out either. Rows and columns of numbers simply can’t portray the many interactions that make the whole system work.

But Strategy Dynamics does show you, with crystal clarity, how the system works. And how that system develops and why its performance changes as it does.

Widespread collaborations

Collaboration and consulting relationships have been at the core of my work. They helped prove and extend the power of strategy dynamics to numerous, diverse settings and challenges. Examples include McKinsey & Co, Microsoft Inc, Visa International, BT plc, Barclays Bank, Schneider Electric, PWC, and the British Standards Institution. And work with the UK's Dept for International Development, and other public sector and voluntary organisations pushed the method's scope beyond the corporate world.

Ready to start your journey?

Using something new is both exciting and challenging. One part of you wants to just go on making decisions the old way. But there's the other side that wants to get better.

Learning Strategy Dynamics is not something you can do in thirty minutes. But if you are ready to invest some time learning a robust approach to making strategic plans, tackling big challenges, and making joined-up decisions, I have something for you. Click here to get started if you want to learn a framework for better planning and decision-making.

Start making better, evidence-based decisions with Strategy Dynamics. Starting today.

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