Kim Warren, a teaching fellow at London Business School, has extensive experience in strategic planning, ultimately as Strategy Director for the restaurant and hotel business of Whitbread plc, now Europe's leading operator in the sector.The inaugural SPS Strategy Club at Strathclyde Business School attracted a capacity audience of students and alumni for an insightful talk from leading strategist Kim Warren on 'Where was Strategy in the Crisis?' (February 7).
Kim Warren, a teaching fellow at London Business School, has extensive experience in strategic planning, ultimately as Strategy Director for the restaurant and hotel business of Whitbread plc, now Europe's leading operator in the sector.
He is a Fellow of the International Strategic Management Society, Fellow of the Strategic Planning Society, and will be 2013 President of the International Systems Dynamics Society, a community specialising in the modelling and strategic management of complex social systems, such as the modern corporation.
His most recent textbook, Strategic Management Dynamics (Wiley, 2008) lays out in detail how to design strategic models of organisation.
In his talk, Kim showed that Strategy's declining influence over the past two decades is down to fundamental short-comings in what the discipline has had to offer, failing, first of all, to answer the key questions that concern CEOs and investors, then compounding that error by seeking answers in the wrong place, using methods that were unsuited to the task. He argued that fixing these answers is possible, but requires a fundamental revision of what Strategy seeks to do, and how.
SPS - the Strategic Planning Society - has joined up with Strathclyde Business School to offer this, the first of a series of talks addressing strategy. The next talk in the series will feature Mark Anderson on April 24.
Mark Anderson is President, Global Strategy & Business Development, Pearson International. Since October 2007 he has also been President, Pearson Language Tests. He first worked for Pearson in the period 1984-1997 in the UK and Hong Kong, latterly running a regional professional publishing & information business. For ten years he worked in consumer goods and technology businesses, before re-joining Pearson in April 2007. He was educated at Cambridge University and received an MBA from Ashridge Business School. He is the author of The Leadership Book (2010).
Further information on this event will appear soon on our events page.