The messy withdrawal of US combat forces from Afghanistan heightens our attention to the milestone that is this month’s 20th anniversary of Al Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington. September 11th, 2001 is a classic inflection point. The tectonics… Read more »
This deceptively simple question enjoys special standing in the catechism of corporate strategy. Harvard’s Theodore Levitt used it in a 1960 article to underscore what the Harvard Business Review regarded in 2004 as “the most influential marketing idea of the… Read more »
The pandemic has accustomed us to living in virtual worlds and hearing speculation about the ways in which our actual lives may never resume as before. Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently said that he believes “over 50 percent of business… Read more »
The mighty consolidation wave that swept over the aerospace and defense industry after the end of the Cold War is taking another turn. The next inflection in the restructuring story is the proposed merger of United Technologies Corporation (UTC) and… Read more »
“I’d rather have decent answers to the right question than great answers to irrelevant questions.” This pithy precept appears at the top of page 1 of The Last Warrior, an intellectual history of Andrew Marshall, the furtive, 42-year director of… Read more »
What are operational concepts and is there a spin-on to the defense establishment from the commercial sphere that can infuse defense strategy with innovative answers to that question? Last November, I wrote about the report of the National Defense Strategy Commission…. Read more »
Writing in the Up Front column of Aviation Week & Space Technology, Steve Grundman renders a critical assessment of the report to Congress of the National Defense Strategy Commission, concluding that “if strategy is the stuff of making choices about… Read more »
Earlier this spring at the Atlantic Council, I hosted a panel discussion among the chief executives of AM General, Cubic Corporation, and Siemens Government Technologies (SGT). While these three companies—prime contractors predominantly for automotive vehicles, training and transit technologies, and… Read more »
Each fall, I am privileged to speak at the SpeedNews AerospaceDefenseChain conference on a panel with three distinguished industry observers recurrently entitled “The Four Horsemen—Outlook and Trends Within the A&D Industry.” The title is a cheeky moniker which the panel’s… Read more »
In mature industries like aerospace and defense, mergers and acquisitions are primary tools of corporate strategy. As the bases of competition for product and service offerings become ever more firmly established, the race for competitive advantage increasingly relies on initiatives… Read more »