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The authors of “The Digital Fallacy” are interviewed by veteran strategist David Rader. They envision digital implementation as a learning journey rather than a time-boxed program. They name the journey “Digital Maturity.”

Explains how Digital Maturity is a way of applying digital technology – at first to promote efficiency and ultimately in creative ways to innovate new business models – an operation that continues to grow and evolve.

Digitally mature companies are more likely to be agile, experimental, risk tolerant, collaborative and learning organizations.

Getting started can begin with identifying leaders within the organization with characteristics exhibited by digitally mature organizations and tasking them and a team with an effort that allows them to test fast, learn fast and scale fast.

Companies often start by focusing on efficiency gains, then move to better use of data for decision making and then lastly to employ technology to transform their offerings and business models. The final stage is where the greatest value from digital maturity is achieved.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the Association for Strategic Planning Conference.

The paper provides a conference report for the 2012 Association for Strategic Planning Conference, held in Lincolnshire, Illinois, USA from May 30‐June 2, 2012.

The paper reveals presentations of practitioners and veteran consultants who share what is working in their practice of strategic management.

The paper provides reviews of papers presented at the 2012 Association for Strategic Planning Conference provided by practitioners and veteran consultants who share what is working in their practice of strategic management.

This paper aims to explain how cloud computing – conducting business functions on shared, off‐premises computing systems – introduces strategic options and business‐control challenges for executives. For example, cloud computing offers ubiquitous access to applications for interacting with all parts of a firm's value chain and it connects an organization with the rich learning opportunities percolating in communities formed by the users of the service.

The paper introduces a capabilities‐comparison‐matrix approach that executives can use to uncover, evaluate and rank opportunities for employing cloud computing to advance a challenger enterprise's growth strategy.

For a firm hoping to grow, but with fewer resources than its rivals, cloud computing offers the potential to do more with less, thus benefiting an agile, strategic adopter of its rapidly evolving technology and service.

Using cloud‐based services, a challenger enterprise can identify, qualify, engage and manage a global network of capabilities to match the captive, in‐house activities of a bigger, better‐established competitor.

The practical question for adopting any new technology is, “What is the value of what can we do (with the technology) that we could not do before?” To clarify choices, a capabilities‐comparison matrix helps decision makers focus on which business activities should go into the “do” and “don't” classifications.

“The Persistence Project” – an ambitious new research project led by two Deloitte Consulting veterans, consultant Mumtaz Ahmed and noted author Michael Raynor – seeks to advance the art of “success study.”. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

Starting in 2007, Mumtaz Ahmed and Michael Raynor worked on developing a rigorous statistical method for identifying exceptional performers with Professor Andrew D. Henderson of the University of Texas at Austin. The paper looks at the method by way of an interview.

The paper finds that their preliminary efforts so far have revealed that the benchmarks for greatness are much higher than generally perceived.

There are a number of critical elements of research design that set this study apart. First, the authors have taken a unique approach to identifying companies that have achieved exceptional results. Typically, research of this type sets benchmarks – e.g., 3× the market for 15 years – and claims that firms that exceed such a mark are good enough to merit closer study. This study first characterizes the nature of the larger system within which all firms operate, controls for key confounding variables such as year and industry effects, and then assesses which firms, conditional on their life spans, have actually delivered results so unlikely that firm specific effects, such as uniquely skilled management, are plausible contributors to their performance. It is this aspect of the work that won a Best Paper award at the Academy of Management this year, and will also be published in the Annals of Applied Statistics.

The authors have built into their study design the opportunity to predict outcomes, and so depending on the results of those predictions, their theories will be validated, or not.

The research is attempting to gain useful insight into the causes of sustained, truly superior corporate performance.