Strategic Thinking & Strategic Action

Fostering strategic thinking and strategic action by organizational leaders since 2007.

Rise of the poker pros: 10 lessons for great success
Decision making Lee Crumbaugh Decision making Lee Crumbaugh

Rise of the poker pros: 10 lessons for great success

Is life a poker game? Or, perhaps better stated, to what extent does playing poker teach us about living the best life?

If you have read recent books by Nate Silver (The Art of Risking Everything), Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win), and Annie Duke (Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away), all one-time professional poker players, you likely will be convinced that poker is a useful simulation of real life, albeit under controlled conditions (that is, a set of rules). The cool thing about Silver, Konnikova , and Duke is that they are much more that poker pros.

Read More
Business model question: Produce or provide?
Strategic thinking Lee Crumbaugh Strategic thinking Lee Crumbaugh

Business model question: Produce or provide?

When designing (or redesigning) how the organization works, consider the question of production versus provision. The organization’s underlying business model is designed to deliver products or services to customers, to create and capture value. But there is no reason that the starting assumption should be that the organization is the entity that creates the services that it delivers.

Read More
We are biased by the bell curve
Bell curve bias Lee Crumbaugh Bell curve bias Lee Crumbaugh

We are biased by the bell curve

We are biased by the bell curve in many domains of our decision making. For example: In investing, we discount the possibility of rare and unpredictable large deviations in stock prices. In marketing, we want to believe that “there is a meaningful ‘average consumer’ that can be used to scale products and operations around.” We are asked to rate Uber drivers, Airbnbs and Yelp establishments on a 1-5 bell curve scale, and yet the ratings cluster above 4. Any person or place rated lower, in essence, fails.  The implication of our tendency to assume that things are distributed normally is that we have a huge flaw in how we interpret what we see and how we make decisions. Better to step back and see what things look like without imposing the bell curve from the get-go.

Read More
Remember, history is written by the survivors
Decision biases cases Lee Crumbaugh Decision biases cases Lee Crumbaugh

Remember, history is written by the survivors

We are urged to learn from history. But what if the history is biased? Here’s a case showing how slanted history can lead to bad decisions. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. advisors were mislead by the fallacy of silent evidence, that is, not seeing the full story when looking at history, just seeing the rosier parts of the process reported by the “winners.” U.S. policy was tragically misguided because of survivorship bias, that is, concentrating on and giving undue credit to the people, things or interpretations that "survived" the process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn't because of their invisibility.

Read More
Beliefs about a group matter
Decision biases cases Lee Crumbaugh Decision biases cases Lee Crumbaugh

Beliefs about a group matter

Here’s a story about what can go wrong when we hold beliefs about a group and attribute these beliefs to the members of the group. The Battle of Little Bighorn, also called Custer's Last Stand, took place in Montana Territory on June 25-26, 1876, between the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the U.S. Army. The Battle of the Little Bighorn was a stunning victory for the Native Americans. The 7th Cavalry, casualties numbered 268 dead, including Custer, and 55 wounded. How Custer viewed the Indians opposing him led him astray.

Read More
Not knowing we don’t know
Decision biases cases Lee Crumbaugh Decision biases cases Lee Crumbaugh

Not knowing we don’t know

To lack relevant knowledge without realizing it can have disastrous consequences. Consider, for example, the underestimation of the risk of a nuclear accident when constructing the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant power plant in Japan. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster offers a stark example of what can go wrong when we rely on a small and biased sample of data.

Read More
“The instant of decision is madness”
Decision making Lee Crumbaugh Decision making Lee Crumbaugh

“The instant of decision is madness”

We are faced with “undecidability” and yet have to make a leap of faith and decide. Furthermore, we are overconfident in what we think we know and we can never know enough, We are fooling ourselves if we believe there are clear decision options and justifications ahead of the actual decision. We must act and then we will see what comes next and our next decision and action.

Read More
22 principles I have learned from being an athlete
Success Lee Crumbaugh Success Lee Crumbaugh

22 principles I have learned from being an athlete

This post speaks to what I see as the strategies,habits and actions taken over time that lead to improvement and success. In essence, I believe that what it takes for long-term success in sport applies equally well to success in business and other walks of life. Over 57 years of athletics - running, triathlon, biking, swimming, spin classes, abs workouts, speed skating, golf, tennis and even some sailing - wisdom accrues. As a strategy consultant and business coach, I constantly find myself applying what I have learned from being an athlete to my work improving organizations and coaching decision makers. Here are 22 principles that have stuck with me as a result of decades of training, competing and coaching.

Read More
The worst accident: “We’re going!”
Decision making Lee Crumbaugh Decision making Lee Crumbaugh

The worst accident: “We’re going!”

On March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747 passenger jets, KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736, collided on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport on the Spanish island of Tenerife. Of the 644 people aboard the two 747s, 583 were killed and only 61 survived. This was the worst accident in aviation history. The massive investigation of and subsequent reports on the Tenerife airport disaster offer deep insight into what happened and what went wrong. As a result, aviation authorities and airlines worldwide changed procedures. But they are insufficient to explain why the KLM 747 collided with the Pan Am 747. Explaining the “why” of the disaster leads us to our great concern, bad decisions and what to do to avoid them when making a good decision is imperative for a mission-critical outcome.

Read More