There are a number of excellent books on corporate strategy that merit your attention and that will provide value for your time and for a twenty. There are, of course, others not so excellent, books that at my most generous I would consider hollow in content, penned by pop authors contemptuous of their readers. Unfortunately, in business books as in so much else, popularity is not necessarily reflective of value.

There are times, however, when strategy junkies need a quicker fix than can be provided by books, good or bad. These cravings can be satisfied by reading various business magazines and blogs. Not all are of these are of equal value either and some blogs, especially, are thinly-disguised platforms for selling services and are unabashedly self-serving.

All this is to introduce a business magazine I discovered quite by accident in a store that offers for sale obscure magazines, toy soldiers and Marvel comic memorabilia. The discovery was the Spring ’08 issue of Strategy + Business. Published by Booz Allen Hamilton, the huge strategic management and technology consulting firm, Strategy + Business is - to their credit and my relief – neatly disguised and only mildly self-serving.

Interestingly, it wasn’t the feature articles that most captured my attention but the front section columns. A number of these should get you thinking :

Upturn Thinking in Downturn Years

In market downturns, the companies that emerge strongest are those that, while retrenching, push ahead with long-term strategic planning. One example of a company that did just that is Lucent; even while the telecom hardware business was in decline, CEO Patricia Russo pushed ahead with an initiative to identify new growth areas that would make use of Lucent’s core capabilities and provide stable revenue and income streams going forward.

New Metrics for Media Campaigns

The reach and frequency metrics used in assessing traditional media campaigns are losing relevance in this age of the web, social networking platforms, cell phones, PDAs, podcasts and video games. Marketers are looking to deliver “contextually relevant messages” to specific, i.e., targeted concentrations of potential customers. They are seeking more precise information on how this digital activity correlates to actual sales. As this information becomes available, they will increasingly embrace the pay-for-performance advertising model.

Undiscovered Riches in IP

In an age of commoditization and globalization, you might imagine companies would dig deep to find and exploit assets that yield sustainable differentiation. Among those assets, Intellectual Property may well be the next frontier. Companies are getting wise to the significant revenues that can be gained through patent and technology licensing. IP is moving out of the legal counsel’s office and into the corporate development arena. In fact, in the past 15 years, licensing revenues have burgeoned from $15 billion to $110 billion. To take it to the next level, companies will have to make their intellectual property both serve the business and be a business in its own right.

New Life for Tired Brands

Ford is attempting to revive the Taurus brand out of the ashes of the Five Hundred, and Proctor & Gamble is using Red Zone antiperspirants and deodorants to reposition Old Spice among teen males. Should and can old brands be revitalized? Have the attributes which once made the brands successful been eroded or been made irrelevant by competing brands? Are the products suffering from the poor opinion of its original customer base or poor awareness from new, potential customers? A proposed four-step Brand Vitality Assessment (which, no doubt, Uno Who could conduct) would provide the answers.

All in all, I rate this magazine a lucky find, one for which you might keep an eye out. You might also want to scour the back issues. Go to www.strategy-business.com. Of course, with Booz Allen Hamilton being a mega consultant, you should not expect a free lunch. Not while they’re trying to build the brand at any rate.

You can be pretty much assured that, regardless of the industry you are in, there will be overcapacity in the product - and services - you sell. Sure there will be short term spikes in demand and short-lived openings for newly-minted niche products, but do yourself a favor and give short shrift to the quick profits that accrue to these; take a long-term view of your business. All products become commoditized and all markets democratized in time. It is one of the ineluctable, inescapable, immutable laws of nature: in a free market economy, there WILL be overcapacity.

Sooner or later, overcapacity will plunge your company into the maelstrom, the on-going, off-putting madness of a hyper-competitive market. If it is to survive, the organization must continuously rethink its business model and continually update its offerings.

I am reminded of Jack Welch’s parting advice to Jeffrey Immelt when the latter ascended to the GE throne in September, 2001. The man some anointed as one of the greatest CEOs of all time, the hard-nosed head of arguably the most successful company on the planet at the time, told his successor to “blow it up”!

And he did. The GE that we had grown to know, if not necessarily love (unless, of course you owned shares), the GE buoyed by boundarylessness and buttressed by Six Sigma, began to change. The famed management machine moved from the primacy of its promote-from-within policy to looking for the best people – and if that meant going outside, so be it. A tightly-managed organization saw the black belt disciples of Six Sigma and continuous improvement embrace the creative imperative of Imagination Breakthrough. Cash cows in decline were jettisoned in favor of hot prospect biosciences, wind power and entertainment. How is it going? For all the right reasons, GE makes everybody’s list of Most Admired Companies.

In the homogenized, globalized world of overcapacity, even the swiftest corporate leopard must change its strategic spots. It isn’t easy. I know. My previous employer responded to an influx of cheaper imports by moving from a strategy of diversification to one of focus. I was part of the decision making process (which was interesting) and some of the resultant dislocations (which were not).

In the end, though, our willingness to face the issue of capacity head on will enhance our capacity to deal with it.