selamat tahun baru MASEHI 2010 ( Thank You ALLAH & Strategy through turbulence ).

Golongan Yang Menjadi Ahli Syurga
Hadis :
Rasulullah s.a.w. bersabda yang bermaksud: “Ahli syurga itu ada tiga golongan iaitu orang yang memerintah yang bersifat adil dan dikurniakan taufiq, orang yang berperasaan kasih sayang serta berhati lembut kepada setiap kaum karabat dan sesama Islam, orang yang tidak suka meminta-minta dan berusaha mengelak daripada meminta-minta sedangkan ia mempunyai keluarga yang ramai”.
Riwayat Muslim

Huraian :

Tiga golongan yang menjadi ahli syurga ialah:

1. Pemerintah yang berlaku adil di dalam pemerintahannya.

2. Orang yang mempunyai sifat kasih sayang serta berlemah lembut khususnya kepada ahli keluarga dan umumnya kepada sesama Islam.

3. Seseorang yang tabah dan cekal menghadapi kesusahan hidup tanpa mengharapkan pertolongan orang lain.

sumber : http://dakwah2u.blogspot.com/

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Strategy through turbulence: An interview with Don Sull
London Business School’s Don Sull discusses how to find the upside in volatile times.

The recent financial crisis didn’t cause a turbulent business climate—it was merely a symptom of underlying turbulence that has been building globally for decades. So says Don Sull, a professor of strategy at the London Business School, whose research indicates that this turbulence won’t lessen any time soon. In this video interview, Sull shares lessons from his new book, The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunity in an Uncertain World, including how to understand this volatility and how to create a company that’s at once grounded enough to weather it and agile enough to benefit from it. He spoke with Rik Kirkland, McKinsey’s director of publishing, in New York.

Strategy through turbulence:
An interview with Don Sull

The Quarterly:

So let’s start with the title and the concept of the book. Turbulence
makes one usually think of the world a year ago after Lehman failed and the market was
plummeting. I know that does describe some of what you’re talking about, but it’s bigger
than that, isn’t it? It was going on before.


Don Sull:

Yeah, I mean a lot of people equate the current economic crisis with turbulence.
They think, actually, the economic crisis is the cause of turbulence. It’s the exact opposite.
The current economic crisis is just the latest symptom of underlying turbulence that’s been
on the rise for at least 20 or 30 years.
Some of the measures are volatility of individual firm performance in the US, which
increased twofold; the likelihood that a firm will be knocked off of its leadership positions
increased three fold; the frequency of currency crises or economic crises has increased
four fold.

The Quarterly:

So what is driving that increase in turbulence, and do you see it
accelerating?

Don Sull:

I don’t know about accelerating, but stable for sure. I mean the drivers of
turbulence are the exact same drivers of economic growth over the past 100 years for
sure, but 30 years most prominently, which has been rapid diffusion of technology and
increased interdependence across markets.
And not just capital markets, obviously, but labor markets, commodity markets, technology
markets. We’ve had a third of the world’s population reenter the market economy. So
you’ve got a lot of change going on; everything is interconnected and leads to these
outcomes that are very difficult to predict, let alone influence and advance.

The Quarterly:

So if you’re running a company, turbulence is a way of life. It’s also
value neutral. It creates winners and losers. Let’s take the losers first. What’s the wrong
way to respond to turbulence?

3
Don Sull:

There’s a long list of wrong ways to respond to turbulence, but I’ll give you
a couple of the most common ones. One is accelerate what you’ve done in the past. So
the world is changing a lot, you see the changes coming. You’ve got the data, McKinsey
or somebody else helps you to get your arms around what’s happening. And instead of
changing what you’re doing, you just step on the gas, spin the wheels harder, and hope to
get out of the rut. Usually you end up digging yourself deeper.

The Quarterly:

You call that active inertia.

Don Sull:

Active inertia—that’s my little trademarked phrase, yes. Another thing you can
do wrong is try to plan your way out of it. There are basically three broad approaches to
dealing with turbulence, and one of them is anticipation. You think, “If I just look through
the telescope, squint hard enough, look long enough, I’ll be able to see through this foggy
future. I’ll be able to predict what’s going to happen. I’ll know what to do.” That’s just not
going to happen. The record of people’s predictions in business, or in any domain, is very,
very poor. And as turbulence increases, the effectiveness of that approach decreases.
So I think trying to plan your way or think your way out of it is a real problem. I think
another one is just doing what everybody else is doing, because a lot of firms panic when
there’s turbulence or they sink into a defensive crouch and just try to minimize damage.
And if you’re looking around at the companies that are making inappropriate responses
and then copying them, it’s unlikely that you’re going to have a better outcome than they
do.

The Quarterly:

So what’s the right way to respond? Where is the upside in turbulence,
and how do you grab it?
Don Sull: The upside is that turbulent markets are creating opportunities all the time.
They’re throwing new resources into the market. If you look at the rise of Mittal Steel,1
for instance, rapidly dwarfing a lot of the traditional steel players—they didn’t go around
avoiding turbulence, they went after the most turbulent markets in the world—Kazakhstan
and Indonesia and so forth—to see the opportunities there.
So [turbulence] throws out new resources. It shifts consumer demands. If you look now
in the current downturn, a lot of consumers have a lot less disposable income. You could
say, “That’s awful. For fast-moving consumer good companies, that’s bad news.” Well it is,
although some of the more nimble companies like Nestlé and Starbucks and McDonalds
are responding to those shifting consumer demands. McDonalds in Europe is opening its
McCafes and rolling them out quite aggressively, Starbucks has their instant coffee, and
Unilever has taken some products they’ve pioneered in emerging markets and brought
1 Now ArcelorMittal.
4
them into Europe. So [the fact that] consumer preference is shifting isn’t necessarily bad
news. It creates new customer pain and agile companies can meet those needs and create value.


The Quarterly:

So how do you make your company more agile?

Don Sull:

I just want to flag the fact there is another approach, which I call absorption—
maybe we can come back to that a little bit later, because the interaction between agility
and absorption is particularly interesting. But to stick on agility: in broad strokes there are
three different ways firms are agile. They can be agile within their operations. That’s kind
of the Toyota story or the Southwest Air story; a clearly defined industry. You’re constantly
spotting and seizing opportunities quicker than your rivals.
The second way is through portfolio agility. You can pull resources from slower declining
businesses and put them against faster growing or more promising opportunities.
A third category is what I call strategic agility, and that’s seizing the opportunities that
arise—golden opportunities that arise every so often. That might be entering the market
when the [Berlin] Wall falls or [seizing] the opportunity to buy assets on the cheap, as is
possible in many industries right now in the current downturn. It’s the ability to seize
those rare opportunities when they arise.

The Quarterly:

Innovation is a very popular word. Is it a necessary, but not necessarily
sufficient, thing to bring to this value creation?
Don Sull: I almost hate to admit that I’m an innovation skeptic in some regards. I think
this fetish for innovation over the past decade has led to some excesses that I think are
counterproductive in turbulent markets. It’s got folks focused on, “Anything that’s new is
good.” Well, no. Anything that’s new that creates economic value is good. We kind of put
novelty above value creation in a lot of cases.
I think my more fundamental issue with innovation is it’s often timing independent. So
the notion is, there are these great untapped ideas out there and, any day you wake up
and have the willpower and the creativity to think outside the box, you can create these
opportunities, you can innovate.
I’m not so sure. At least my research has suggested that a lot of the big opportunities to
create economic value emerge because of shifts in the broader environment—a window of
opportunity or two open at the same time and allow firms to create value.

5
The Quarterly:

You mentioned absorption earlier, so absorption is a necessary
correlate to agility?

Don Sull:

I don’t know if it’s a necessary correlate, but it’s a very helpful compliment. By
absorption I simply mean an organization’s ability to weather changes without responding
quickly. The way I describe it in the book is it’s kind of the George Forman approach to
turbulence. You’re big, you’re strong, you’ve got a jaw of steel, you just stand there and take
whatever it throws at you. And you’re George Forman, you can take it.
Agility is more the Muhammad Ali approach—Muhammad Ali in his prime. Absorption is
very helpful because it buys you time, right? It keeps you in the game. It allows you to wait
for those golden opportunities to arise. It gives you the wherewithal to seize those golden
opportunities. And, of course the obvious thing, it allows you to protect what you have.
A lot of times this discussion is pitted—and people use different words, resilience or
robustness instead of absorption—but it’s pitted as agility or nimbleness is good and being
big and staid is bad. It’s not that at all. I see them more as yin and yang. The trick is getting
the balance right and maintaining it over time.

Copyright © 2009 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved.

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com:443/Business_Technology/BT_Strategy/Strategy_through_turbulence_An_interview_with_Don_Sull_2491


Watch the video, or download a PDF of the transcript.

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com:443/Business_Technology/BT_Strategy/Strategy_through_turbulence_An_interview_with_Don_Sull_2491


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