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The A to Z of management consulting

- By: John P Sykes
Posted in: Blog, Future, Management, Media, Mineral Economics, Mining, Publications, Strategy

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Last November, to assist with the MBA course at UWA we were teaching on ‘Strategic Analysis and Consulting’ we prepared an A to Z of ‘must-know’ subjects in the area of strategy and management in the minerals sector. How many do you know?

  • Analysis, Alliances and Adhocracy;
  • Behavioural economics, Biases and heuristics, the Boston Box (or the growth-share matrix), Big strategy, Big exploration, Best practice, and Benchmarking;
  • Capabilities, Cashflows, Commodity prices, Costs and cost curves, Complexity, Convex and Concave minerals, Collective leadership, Culture, Creativity, and Counter-cyclicity;
  • Disruptive technologies, Differentiated business models, ‘Degrees of Strategic Freedom’, and Design thinking;
  • Externalities, Environmentalism, Engineering, and the Edge;
  • Focus, Frameworks, Frontline engagement, Fact-based analysis, Fact-packs, ‘Factors of production’, Porter’s ‘Five Forces‘, Futures, and Foresight;
  • Grades, Geoscience, Geometallurgy, Game Theory (especially ‘Getting paid to play’), and Porter’s ‘Generic Strategies‘;
  • ‘Horizons of growth’;
  • Innovation, Increasing returns economics, Indirect strategy, Issue trees, Investment appraisal, Inclusion, and Institutionalism;
  • ‘Joint Ventures’;
  • ‘Key Performance Indicators‘;
  • Leadership, or maybe ‘Leaderless teams‘ instead, ‘Low-cost‘, Learning, ‘Law of Unintended Consequences’, Leverage, Lean thinking, and the ‘Long-run‘;
  • ‘Management-By-Objectives’ (MBO), ‘Management-by-Walking-About‘ (MBWA), Myers-Briggs, Maslow, Meredith Belbin, Macro and microeconomics, Mergers and Acquisitions, Marketing, Market sizing and segmentation, Market structure, ‘Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive‘ (MECE), and Mission;
  • ‘No Overlaps, No Gaps‘ (NONG), and Networks;
  • Operations, Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), Oblique strategy, Organisational learning, Open innovation, and Open strategy;
  • Personal or self-mastery, the ‘Pyramid Principle’, Process mapping (and the related ‘Business Process Re-engineering‘), Portfolio management (the aim of the ‘Boston Box’), Perception management, People, Psychology, Probability, and Plausibility;
  • Quantity and Quality;
  • Risk and Real options;
  • Shared values, Systems thinking, Structured problem-solving, Scenario planning, Scientific management, SWOT analysis, Strategy, Sustainability, Stakeholders, Social Licence to Operate, Shareholders, Storytelling, Sensemaking, and Simplicity;
  • Team learning, ‘Total Quality Management‘ (TQM), the ‘Toyota Way’, the ‘Theory of Constraints‘, and the ‘Triple Bottom Line‘;
  • Uncertainty;
  • Value, ‘Value-in-use‘, ‘Value-at-risk‘, Vision, Values, and Volatility;
  • Waste and Weaknesses;

X, Y and Z are a bit more difficult. Zero-tolerance, Zero-emissions, and Zero-harm maybe? If there’s any use for a strategic ‘Xylophone’ or else a management ‘Yunluo’ please let us know.

So, what have we missed?

The full (slightly more detailed) article is available to subscribers on MiningNews.net entitled “Strictly Strategy – The A to Z of management consulting” or contact me.

For keen followers of the Strictly Boardroom column, our book “Strictly (Mining) Boardroom Volume II: A Practitioners Guide for Next Generation Directors” was published last year and is available as a paperback or e-book from Major Street Publishing or Amazon. We’re pleased to say that the book received a very positive review in the AusIMM Bulletin and in Geoscientist magazine – the member’s publication of the Geological Society of London.