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Richard Harris is a former Board member and senior officer at the Boston-based Forum Corporation, a global work-place learning company. He is currently a consultant in private practice, advising companies which include Analog Devices, Glaxco, New York Times Company, Royal Dutch shell and United Technologies. Kate Cowie is Founder and Director of The Chaos Game Ltd., a UK-based consultancy practice which specializes in helping organizational leaders implement strategic change solutions in response to rapidly shifting and increasingly chaotic conditions.

Michael E. Porter believes that managers get into trouble when they attempt to compete head-on with other companies. No one wins that kind of struggle, he said. Instead, managers need to develop a clear strategy around their company's unique place in the market. Porter's core field is competition and company strategy. He is generally recognized as the father of the modern strategy field, and his ideas are taught in virtually every business school in the world.

Maurice Schweitzer is an Associate Professor of Operations and Information Management at Wharton Business School. Schweitzer's recent article, Goals Gone Wild, in the journal Academy of Management Perspectives, has drawn attention to his warning that setting performance targets can backfire from the systematic side effects of too much goal-setting. Far from being the assured boon it is widely considered to be, goal-setting can do severe harm to companies.

No industry is stable over time. Industries will always experience changes as they progress, some with shorter time frames, others with longer time frames, but eventually change will affect every industry. At the turn of this century a great majority of the incumbents competing in telecommunications equipment experienced a major downturn in sales, while Nokia and Samsung kept growing and emerged as the leaders in a newly defined industry. Discover why in this article.

Contingency planning might actually be the most critical aspect of your overall strategic plan. Why? Just think about all the drivers of your organization’s internal and external environments that affect your organization. They are all changing at an accelerated pace. So what can leaders do to adapt to, or at least mitigate, the consequences of change that have negatively impacted well-known and previously successful organizations that fail to understand changes in competition and lifestyles?