The SABRE Blog​

Volume 21 Newsletter 2 When the former USA president took a Sharpie marker and redrew a hurricane forecast map to cover up a mistake he’d made, my family were more than amused.  Turns out my distaste for admitting a mistake is a favourite joke in our family.  Rather than forcing me to admit that I [...]

Read More... from Look Left … Before Thinking You’re Right

This month’s newsletter (video here) is about Coke trimming their portfolio.   The leader of Coke Asia – Shakir Moin kicked off more than a few of our SABRE Coke Asia programs in Shanghai.  He moved to Atlanta to head up Coke’s Portfolio management team – this story is a direct outcome of Shakir’s work.  It’s [...]

Read More... from Trim the Portfolio

Consider these facts: In the last 100 years there have been 17 recessions  Each of those recessions lasted approximately 12 months  Of the firms in the top quartile in their industry 20% drop to the bottom quartile 17% of firms go bankrupt  The most common reaction to a recession is to cut marketing spending  The [...]

Read More... from Mike on Strategy

Volume 20 Newsletter 9 Dear Stephen Thanks for sharing the strategic plan presentation.  Here are my initial impressions and some early suggestions. Focus on outcomes.  The presentation tells me a lot about what you do, but after reading it I’m really struggling to find out what you’re going to do for me?   (Not me, but [...]

Read More... from Dear Stephen…

Volume 20 Newsletter 8 Anyone remember the Mars Orbiter disaster back in 1999?    A 125 million dollar space shot to Mars disintegrated on impact because two project teams didn’t speak the same language even though they both lived in the same country.   As it turned out the Jet Propulsion team based in California were speaking [...]

Read More... from Lost in translation

Volume 20 Newsletter 6 The more successful a company becomes the more resistant it becomes to change.  But when change comes that could destroy your business model it’s wise to pay attention early and get ahead of the curve.   Hoping for the best is never a good strategy. In the 1991 three killer whales performing [...]

Read More... from Social issues … Business traps

Volume 20 Newsletter 5 We’re all watching TV these days and it has become a major battle for your eye balls.  Networks like HBO, Disney, Crave, Netflix (‘Net fix’ in our household) Amazon, Hulu and others are trying to outdo the other in creative content.  But where did this craze all start? Television in the [...]

Read More... from HBO Sopranos

Are the resources of your business aligned with the opportunities in this ‘new’ market?  In times of crisis you have to go back to the basics.  Find a simple path forward and follow it. Coach Vince Lombardi exemplified this strategy when he took over the Green Bay Packers football team on February 2, 1959.  At [...]

Read More... from Packer Sweep

Back in the early 1980’s I started my consulting career teaching small business finance.  Ronald Reagan was president, interest rates soared to over 20% and unemployment was approaching 35% in the small city in which I was living.   Two men who owned an appliance store signed up for my course.   Both had worked at the [...]

Read More... from Finding Hope

“When the going gets tough …the tough get going”.  The well known sports maxim is still very applicable to business people today.   For anyone at home waiting out the Coronavirus hoping that business will return to normal, history tells us that now is the not the time to wait and see how it all pans [...]

Read More... from Back to the future

Boil it down to its core and the goal of a market driven business strategy is to ensure the resources of your firm (people’s time and money) are aligned with your best market opportunities.    Anything less and your firm is burning resources.   However, aligning resources with opportunities is only half the battle.  The other equally important half [...]

Read More... from The Italian Job

Kodak vs. Netflix: A study in Disruptive Technologies A Strategy Newsletter by SABRE Sim creator and Principal, Cam Tipping. Early in my career we conducted a program for Kodak.   This was when Kodak was still selling chemical film, along with disposable cameras and making buckets of money.  It was also a time when the first [...]

Read More... from Disruptive technologies

The British Columbia Institute of Technology ran a SABRE Simulation competition at their annual Marketing Association conference in January, 2020. As the SABRE Competition started, the conference went from the standard conference mode of ‘passive’, in which participants absorb content, to a heated and highly engaged competitive environment, with 6 student teams vying for first [...]

Read More... from BCIT Runs Annual SABRE Competition

We live in a commercially-driven world that prizes the extrovert. The ‘culture of personality’, in which the individual must take responsibility for creating – and selling – their personality, took root in North America in around 1910, around the time Dale Carnegie emerged (actually, Dales’ name was spelled ‘Carnagey’. He later changed the spelling of [...]

Read More... from 3 Unorthodox Ways to Engage Introverted Students