Management Tools Fad-O-Meter (Midyear Refresh)

Bain & Company has released the 2011 data from their biannual Strategic Management Tools survey, so I’ve taken the opportunity to update my “meta-analysis” of these tools,  a mashup of the full 20 years of Bain data with Google Books and Google Insights trending.   The result, the Strategic Management Tools Fad-O-Meter 2011, version 1.1.   Without further ado:

Review – Business Model Toolbox (for iPad)

Several months ago I reviewed Business Model Generation, a handy book and toolbox for preliminary sketching and development of, well, business models.   I was particularly intrigued by the book as it is simple enough to help untangle “business 101’s” for my customer base of engineers, scientists, and assorted government-side bureaucrats (of which I am one).   The author of this book has recently released version 1.0 of the accompanying iPad app, so … here’s the review.

Review: Business Model Generation

Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The cartoonish packaging and presentation of this book shouldn’t dissuade prospective readers, there actually is some meat. BMG’s slug ambitiously reads, “You’re holding a handbook for visionaries, game changers and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow’s enterprises…” While this is a little of a breathless oversell, BMG contains good tools to work with.

Strategic Management Tools: Fad-o-meter 2011

Following up on Monday’s reanalysis of Bain’s management tool survey, I’ve done some mining of trend data for the listed tools, in an attempt to further discern useful trends from fads.   Bain provides actual global surveys of usage and satisfaction, but I wanted to pull in more data.

To estimate “freshness” (trending) of management tools, I have constructed a mashup of three data sources:

• Book frequency trends from the GoogleBooks ngram database, 1990-2008
• Web search frequency trends from  the Google InSights for Search database, 2004-2008
• Global business usage trends from the Bain tools survey, 1993-2008 (manual compilation)

Strategic Management Tools: Don’t Peanut Butter

A wonderful little gem of “free” management data exists in the Bain & Company biannual Management Tools and Trends survey of global corporate executives.   The Bain folks have been running this since 1993, yielding quite a nice time trend history of management tool stalwarts … and fads.

The survey assesses executive “usage of”, and “satisfaction with”, various tools.   Yes, these are squishy measures, and no substitute for bottom line performance, but I fall into the camp that believes good executives have a decent intuitive and integrative view of whether tools are helping them, or hindering them, in doing their jobs, so I see these data as valuable in their own way.

Personality type redux

I’ve always been bothered that MBTI’s 4 data vectors (introvert / extrovert, intuitive / sensate, thinking / feeling, perceiving / judging) are just a wee bit too much to keep loaded in memory.   The system needs help boiling it down to its essence for practical use.  The folks at 4-D leadership coaching may have (inadvertently) done just that.