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Interview with Paul Bracken on Midlife Crisis
February 2009 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary
Paul Bracken Prof. Paul Bracken, leading expert in global competition and the strategic application of technology in business and defense. 
My new book on strategic foresight is
about problem framing. It uses scenarios
as a counterweight to case
studies. Case studies are about the
past, where we know what happened.
Scenarios are about the future,
which is where business profits
lie. The book is an integrated summary
of best practices in problem
framing. It describes themethods that
companies, consulting firms, government,
and academia have found to be
most useful in thinking about where
they’re going.I don’t know of any
other composite collection of best
practices for dealing with the future.
It doesn’t push any single method
and say “it’s the best one.” The world
is too complicated for any one
method to work across the board.
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Sun Tzu's The Art of War had
often been a most-suggested (rather
mandatory) reading for strategists and
you have written and consulted extensively
on war gaming and military power. Most of the management lexicon
consists of war-related terminology
(price wars, marketing warfare,
guerilla marketing, competition, competitive
disequilibrium, game theory,
etc.). What according to you is the
relationship between war and strategy?
War and strategy are closely connected.
There are differences, of
course. But I agreewith Peter Drucker
that the similarities are profound.
Strategy is the calculated relationship
of large ends to means. That works
for the military, and also for business.
There’s a need to focus on every factor
in this definition: means, ends, and
the calculated relationship. Leaving
anyone out is dangerous. -
One of your consulting areas is
with private equity funds. And private
equity funds have come under
scathing attack in recent times for being
too aggressive. Recent
BusinessWeek (December 8, 2008)
carried a report on how private equity
firms stripped department-store
chainMervyns of its assets and threw
18,000 people out of work. The report
also highlights many other retailers
which have been distressed because
of private equity firms’ aggressive
ROI mindset? What is your assessment
of this?
I agree with most of the criticisms.
What has passed for a great deal of
high end PE are really LBOs. I have
found the greatest failing to be reducing
PE deals to short term sheets,
which are usually based on some Excel
spreadsheet. The deal makers
rarely visited the plants, distributions
systems, etc. And they were really
doing what in scenarios would be
called naïve extrapolation, i.e., extending
immediate trends into future.
However, PE has a great future as all
of these dysfunctional companies
need restructuring. My hero here is
Ronald Cohen, the founder of Apax
in the UK. I make his book, The Second
Bounce of the Ball, Turning Risk into Opportunity (Orion, 2008) required
reading for my Yale students.
It’s all about scenarios for where
things are headed, and why naïve extension
of trends – the first bounce of
the ball – is so dangerous. Right now, companies across the
globe are facing unprecedented times
requiring them to fight many battles –
excess employees, inventory piling
up, growth conundrums, exchange
rate setbacks, impatient capital markets,
horrendous decrease in market
capitalization and share prices, pressures
on profitability, etc. It seems
that any solution to one problem
leads to another problem. How
should companies plan to come out
of this vicious cycle? What according
to you should be their priorities and
how should they address them?
Leaders reframe problems. More than
in normal times, crises change organizations
and those who embrace new
opportunities will do very well. A lot
of junk in the attic is being cleaned
out in this recession. It will make
capitalism stronger. Those who conceive
of risk as opportunity are going
to have a field day. There’s a fundamental
lesson taught to US Army officers
in their education: when the
situation is confused, go on the offensive.
So, contrary to the gloom and
doom, it’s time to look for opportunities,
not problems. What is Midlife Crisis? What are
the unique behavioral characteristics
of a person going through midlife crisis?
I am not a psychologist. But I do see
many friends and colleagues get
burned out. I know many people
who have been in the same professional
ghetto for so long that they’re
tired. They want a career shift, but
often their companies won’t let them
leave the silo that they are in.
1.
Crisis Management Case Study
2. ICMR
Case Collection
3.
Case Study Volumes
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