The ACS Strategy and War-Gaming Bibliography
Mark Chussil
High-powered innovations in competitive strategy: ForesightSims™ simulations, business war games, workshops on strategic thinking, teacher, prolific author including 13 HBR articles, nonprofit board member.
(This bibliography was updated on July 4, 2024)
Mark Twain said: If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.
Mark Chussil says: If you learn things with war games and simulation you don't have to learn them the hard way.
I'm Mark Chussil, Founder of Advanced Competitive Strategies, Inc., and a 48-year veteran of competitive strategy.
I have conducted many business war games around the world, in industries from airlines to vaccines. Some of those war games have helped real companies make or save billions of real dollars. Others, in management-development programs, have taught thousands of strategists -- including me -- to become better strategists.
This bibliography introduces articles I've written on business war games, strategy simulation, and strategic thinking. It provides links to full text online.
Unless noted otherwise, I wrote the articles listed here.
If you’re short on time, start here
Here is a description of ACS business war games, including stories from actual war games. Here are links to ACS "strategy stories", 10-minute presentations about competitive strategy.
Why Business War Games Work: You Ask Better Questions, You Get Better Answers, Competitive Intelligence Magazine, October/December 2012
Business war games, in my experience, provide outstanding insights that greatly impact bottom lines. But why? What is it about business war games that produces insights that evidently elude other approaches?
“Rally the Troops” and Other Business Metaphors You Can Do Without, Harvard Business Review, November 24, 2016
Perhaps it's the language we businesspeople use. Capture market share. Steal customers. Defend position. Rally the troops. Establish a beachhead. Counterattack. Alas, the war metaphor even invades the business war games I conduct. I tried calling them "strategy games" but people looked at me as though I were a draft dodger.
A strategy "tournament" about computer-based war gaming
The ACS Top Pricer Tournament™ is a game, a war game, a strategy simulator, and a breakthrough in competitive strategy. Over 2,200 people around the world have entered the Tournament, and many of my HBR articles come from insights gained through billions of simulations from the Tournament.
You can enter the Tournament! It's fun, thought-provoking, confidential, non-commercial, and free for individuals. It is also a powerful exercise for corporate and educational use. Contact me.
Podcasts
Top Pricer Tournament: Simulating Winning Pricing Strategies, Impact Pricing® by Mark Stiving, Ph.D., November 21, 2023
"Discover the essence of the Top Pricer Tournament. Enhance your pricing strategy by utilizing simulation techniques to mitigate potential risks and minimize losses. Find out fascinating insights and findings from the ‘Top Pricer Tournament’ and learn what to expect when participating in this exciting event."
The Tournament is the source of seven of my Harvard Business Review articles (and others listed below). You and your colleagues can enter the Tournament. Contact TopPricer@DecisionTournaments.com for details.
Make Strategy Your Superpower, Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs, October 5, 2021
In this episode our host, Denise Silber, is joined by Mark Chussil, Founder of Advanced Competitive Strategies Inc., and business wargaming expert. They discuss the worrisome fact that the vast majority of entrepreneurs still execute on untested strategies, only to discover that the market did not react as predicted. Mark then shares some of his most impactful experiences with companies across a range of industries who now identify major strategic blindspots through testing and simulation.
So how can testing your strategy add billions to your bottom line? And how can you find blindspots in your plan before your competitors do? Mark Chussil recommends that you combine humans and computers and make strategy your business’s superpower. And he even invites you to try out his pricing tournament simulation game.
Big Data vs. Big Games: A New Approach to Competitive Strategy, Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP), March 2022
Organizations are investing enormous sums in technology and skills to get value from Big Data. However, Big Data alone won’t help strategy development. Like anything, we have to be careful to separate the hype from the reality.
In today’s episode of SCIP IntelliCast, we talk with Mark Chussil about:
“Smart people do their best to make good decisions. But too often, we can't tell the difference between a good strategy and a bad strategy.”
Articles about strategy and business war-gaming
Harvard Business Review articles (see details further below)
All articles
62%* Raisin Bran, The ACS Blog, September 2014
The asterisk isn’t a theory of deceiving. The company didn’t set out to deceive; it set out to compete. And yet it’s clear that no customer would prefer the slightly sneaky 100% claim over full disclosure or 100%-in-the-box. It’s a theory of competing in which slight sneakiness is somehow justified.
A Tournament Pits Strategists Against Each Other to See What Works, Harvard Business Review, June 8, 2015
It’d be helpful to run experiments. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a double-blind randomized controlled trial in business. What placebo would businesses take? What businesses would sign up to take it?
I’ve been working on a different approach. If we can’t experiment on real-life strategists running real-life businesses, how about if we experiment on real-life strategists running simulated businesses? We can find out how strategically people think and how well they perform.
(Note: The Tournament now has over 2,200 entrants. You can enter your strategies too.)
Business War Games, SCIP.Online, November 2002
Business war games can be hugely and dramatically effective, and yet few managers know how to design or select a business war game, or how and when a business war game can add value. This article presents key concepts and options for any company interested in business war games.
Did You Win or Did They Lose? Thought Leadership Through Thinking, Vistage Research & Insights, August 23, 2013
One reason the incumbents lost was because they didn’t respond in time. The incumbents were thinking, but what were they thinking? They weren’t stupid; they didn’t say hey, everyone, let’s not respond in time. Tellingly, the stock price of at least one of the incumbents (Blockbuster) improved for years after its upstart (Netflix) took them on! It can be tough to argue against “look at the numbers, everything is fine” or “we don’t want to cannibalize our own products.”
Don't Eat Your Broccoli, The Strategy Maverick, May 31, 2022
I watched one person after another scamper up the pole like squirrels on espresso. I knew it was impossible, but they seemed to have fun. Then it was my turn.
Don’t Let Your Mistakes Go to Waste, Harvard Business Review, March 1, 2016
We all know that our gotcha culture demands perfection. We all also know that mistakes are inevitable even as risk-taking is necessary. The solution is not to tolerate mistakes or avoid risk. The solution is to assume less and challenge more. That means we need more than opportunities to make cheap mistakes; we need to understand why we made the mistakes.
Don't Spend Your Life Making Up Your Mind, Harvard Business Review, May 15, 2017
In our culture, “What are you worth?” is a question about your finances and utility, not your character. To be a “success” means you have more at the end than you did at the start. We say “you can’t take it with you” but we behave and judge as though you can.
Eat Your Broccoli, The Strategy Maverick, February 27, 2024
Are you inside your comfort zone? Tsk, tsk, say comfort-zone provocateurs, do something you don’t like. The further you get outside your comfort zone, well, the further you get outside your comfort zone.
Experience: Threat or Menace, Competitive Intelligence Magazine, October/December 2010 (updated July 5, 2023, for LinkedIn)
It doesn’t sound good for experience. No one wants to give up a point or two of return on assets. Still, we’re not ready yet to reach for conclusions, let alone accept the implication that a company should not hire as CEO anyone who has previously been a CEO.
For Investors, Blind Optimism Is Risky Business, Vistage Research & Insights, March 31, 2016
To make due diligence do its full job, we must take it beyond the business equivalent of a spell check. We should not merely verify that the gold shimmering on the horizon isn’t a mirage; we should also look out for cliffs on the way to the gold.
Getting Smart and Not Predicting the Future, Competitive Intelligence Magazine, January 2020
We don’t know as much as we think we do. The sad proof is all around us. Think, for example, about the big-name companies that have slipped, slumped, and sunk.
Here’s one thing they have in common: None of them wanted to slip, slump, or sink. Here’s another: All of them were led by smart, motivated, data-rich people who wanted to soar. Like businesspeople around the world, they were well aware of the usual dangers — short-term focus, excessive cost-cutting, inattention to customers, and the dreaded “D” word — and they thought they knew what to do. And yet.
Gross Galactic Product: Growth Rates, Stock Prices, and Thinking Differently in a Crisis, The ACS Blog, October 2008
How big would Google be if its recent growth weren’t “as bad as some had feared”? We know growth doesn’t go on forever, but our quest for bigger and better every year leads to trouble. How can executives know when they cross the line from building up to propping up to puffing up?
Honey, We Shrunk the Industry: An Automotive War Game, Competitive Intelligence Magazine, July/August 2009
A business war game. Five automotive teams: Ford, GM, Hyundai, Toyota, Volkswagen. One set of customer judges, one set of investor judges. Three market segments. Fascinating, unexpected results.
The teams were smart and they wanted to win. Yet collectively their decisions subtracted value from the industry: four out of five would have been better off if they’d done nothing at all and repeated last year’s moves for two more years. The fifth team had problems of its own, appearing to be successful but leaving many billions of dollars on the table.
Honey, We Shrunk the Industry Again: Another War Game About Automobiles, The ACS Blog, October 2009
We’ve run it again: a business war game on the automobile industry. It was to demonstrate war-gaming, not to solve the industry’s problems. That said, it revealed a lot about what goes right and what goes wrong when people develop competitive strategies.
House, MBA: What Strategists Can Learn from TV’s Nastiest Doctor, LinkedIn, October 2019
What can we learn about business diagnosis from TV’s nastiest doctor? Quite a bit. We take a look at Safeway's and Supervalu's pricing on our rounds.
How the Very Best Strategists Decide, Harvard Business Review, October 24, 2016
How did the plan get so far? The company didn’t have a death wish, and its strategists weren’t deficient. The problem was that their strategy development and internal reviews, like those in many companies, didn’t account for competitive dynamics.
How to Play the Pricing Game, The Journal of Professional Pricing, Second Quarter 2023
Why do people disagree on what prices to charge? Yes, yes, different markets, businesses, products, and competitors. But why do we disagree about what a specific business, in a specific market, should do?
Because pricing is a game, in the game-theory sense, and by definition a game cannot be solved. But we're not helpless.
I Didn’t Know You Could Do That: Disaster in Simulations Leads to Progress in Real Life, The ACS Blog, August 2008
The best insights often come from surprises, and the best surprises often come from simulations. Here we’ll talk about surprises in both business and crisis simulations, and actionable insights.
Keep a List of Unethical Things You'll Never Do, Harvard Business Review, May 30, 2016
I taught a course in strategic controls at the University of Portland. In a recent class we talked about less-than-virtuous actions we’ve seen in business. Fraudulent accounting that wiped out jobs and investors. Efficient operations that inflict misery on food animals. Shortcuts and cover-ups that cost people their lives. It’s easy to create a long list and it’s hard not to be depressed by it.
I asked my students: who, among you, aspires to take such actions? They were appalled, of course. Then I mentioned that the real-life people who actually took those actions were once just like them. They were young; they were eager; they wanted to do fine things. And yet.
The room was very quiet.
Learning Faster Than the Competition: War Games Give the Advantage, The Journal of Business Strategy, January-February 2007
Business war games help managers anticipate, respond to, and even induce change. We need war games because the greater the change the more trends don’t hold, experience doesn’t fit, benchmarks don’t apply, and previous strategies don’t work. There is no universally accepted method of business war-gaming. This article discusses how to assess and implement a business war game for your company.
Marvelous Techniques: Streaks, Slumps, and Improving Your Odds, The ACS Blog, 2017
You have two questions. First, a marvelous technique has been offered to you that can raise employees' accuracy to 80%, and because it's costly you wonder if it's worth it. Second, when you test the marvelous technique you notice that Aaron and Abigail are on a streak while Barry and Bonnie are in a slump, and you want to know how (and whether) to respond.
Millions of Pricing Simulations, The ACS Blog, February 2009
Have you ever seen 36,270 what-if’s on your strategy ideas? Have you ever seen your 36,270 what-if’s compared in a universe of 5,658,120 simulations? That’s what ACS did for over 150 strategists competing in the Top Pricer Tournament. Note: the 150 and 36,270 were accurate at the time the article appeared. Today’s numbers are over 2,200 strategists and over 2.5 million what-if's per strategy.
No One Can Think Outside the Box, Harvard Business Review, June 5, 2016
Agility is much in demand. It doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, merely mean hair-trigger reflexes. Something happened! Do something, quickly!
Agility means doing something smart, quickly. Here are some get-smart-fast methods I’ve learned while war-gaming and simulating Fortune 500 companies. Each of them involves noticing and switching boxes.
Paying for Bad News, Competitive Intelligence Magazine, April-June 2012
I’m not saying the Closed Minds, Distorted Markets, and Stormy World themes are wrong. I am saying I don’t think the evidence establishes they’re right. They might be right, but they’re not right yet. Until they are right I believe it’s worth considering other perspectives.
Practice Makes Much, Much Better, Homeland Defense Journal, July 2007
Nobody ever intentionally makes bad decisions, yet bad decisions get made. Nobody ever writes a plan that they expect will fail, yet plans fail. We have a choice: We can learn from experience, or we can learn before experience. We can learn where it’s dangerous, or we can learn where it’s safe.
Putting the Lesson Before the Test: Using Simulation to Analyze and Develop Competitive Strategies, with Wharton Professor David J. Reibstein. A chapter in Wharton on Dynamic Competitive Strategy, George S. Day and David J. Reibstein (editors), John Wiley, 1997. "Putting the Lesson Before the Test" was reprinted by Competitive Intelligence Review and Marketing Research.
Simulation can play a powerful role in developing and analyzing competitive-strategy options. Using simulation, managers have developed successful strategies, anticipated events that later occurred in real life, and learned about strategy, and their own businesses, at each step of the simulation process. Simulations give managers something that athletes have always had: the ability to practice before facing actual competitors.
Recommended by LinkedIn
Question What You “Know” About Strategy, Harvard Business Review, July 30, 2016
Fortunes are made by noticing such practices and challenging the assumptions behind them. Companies are lost by hardening common practices into shackles. Fortunately, breaking rules is free. All you need is curiosity, attentiveness, and the courage to challenge conventional wisdom.
"Rally the Troops" and Other Business Metaphors You Can Do Without, Harvard Business Review, November 24, 2016
Capture market share. Steal customers. Defend position. Rally the troops. Establish a beachhead. Counterattack. Alas, the war metaphor even invades the business war games I conduct in my practice. I tried calling them “strategy games” but people looked at me as though I were a draft dodger.
Rat Beats Human, LinkedIn, February 2024 (updated)
Once upon a time, there was an experiment.
In this experiment rats could press either Bar X or Bar Y. If the rat pressed the right bar, it would receive a pellet of food; if it pressed the wrong bar, nothing. The right bar worked 60% of the time.
A similar experiment, also with a 60/40 random sequence, was run with humans. It is not known whether the humans received pellets of food or some other form of reinforcement.
Resisting Change: Overcoming Impediments to Creativity, The ACS Blog, July 2008
As human beings we are all familiar with the dig-in-our-heels sensation of resisting change. How do we know in which changes we ought to invest our time and treasure?
Slow Deciders Make Better Strategists, Harvard Business Review, July 8, 2016
There are many ways to split people into two groups. Young and old. Rich and poor. Us and them. The 98% who can do arithmetic and the 3% who cannot. Those who split people into two groups and those who don’t.
Then there’s the people who make good competitive-strategy decisions, and those who don’t.
Strategy Cyborgs and Ten Gigasims, LinkedIn, November 2019
Everyone who enters the Top Pricer Tournament thinks their strategies will work. We know that because no one says, “I’ve got a good strategy and I’ve got a bad strategy, I think I’ll use the bad strategy.” But performance in the Tournament has varied widely. (It was 10 gigasims at the time I wrote the article. Now it's 17 gigasims, wth more to come as necessary.)
Strategy Fundamentalism: Why You Shouldn't Bet on Halos and Horns, LinkedIn, October 23, 2019
Re-think the bad-business list from a good-intentions perspective. We’re not complacent; we focus on what we do best. We’re not in denial; look at our track record of success. It’s not bureaucracy; it’s prudent management. We’re not resisting; we just want data and evidence. And so on. Gee, when we put it that way, it sounds like the good-business list.
Taking the Stress Test: Not Only for Banks, The ACS Blog, May 2009
Don’t we all wish that the stress tests of banks had been done, say, a year and a half ago? Making the case for running our own stress tests on our businesses.
The Holy Grail of Competing, LinkedIn, September 2021
All extant companies were disruptive at least a little and at least once. We know that because they successfully lured customers from other people’s parties to attend the party at their houses. But that’s about as useful as remarking that all extant humans breathe air. “Disruptive” must mean more than luring and breathing.
The How-Likely Case: When the Most-Likely Scenario Isn’t Likely at All, The ACS Blog, May 2010
Strategists commonly analyze best-case, worst-case, and most-likely scenarios before making a significant strategy decision. That covers about 0.000007618% of the possibilities. I am not making up that number.
The Imagination Multiplier, LinkedIn, December 2018
The key step is to focus less on post-mortems and more on pre-mortems. There’s limited value in second-guessing “what happened” in retrospect. There’s far more value in multiplying our imagination in advance, when we can raise the quality of our decisions and the astuteness of our bets before we bet real money.
The Seven Deadly Sins of Business War Games, SCIP.Online, May 2003
Having conducted business war games for dozens of the world’s largest companies, we’ve learned a lot about what to do, and what not to do. This article (which includes a bonus deadly sin, for a total of eight) helps strategists design business war games that work.
The War (Game) Metaphor: Or, My Discomfort with What I Do, The ACS Blog, November 2010
This is something I’ve learned from all those war games: Watch out for the war metaphor in your strategic thinking, and challenge it if you see it. The challenge doesn’t cost you anything. You can always go back to the war metaphor if you really think it works.
There’s a Mental Model in Your Head, Competitive Intelligence Magazine, January 2020
This article is about the reflexive, self-evidently true mental models that you, I, and every other businessperson on Earth use to make business decisions. It is about gaining competitive advantage by recognizing, challenging, and refining our mental models and the computer models based on them.
It matters because there is always a model when we make decisions. Always. That’s one of the five rules of models. We’ll meet the other four later.
Tripling Sales: A Conflict, The ACS Blog, June 2013
Due diligence may not protect you from frenzies of advocacy. At its worst, it’s like signing an ill-advised legal document because the spell-check said it was okay. Think it doesn’t happen? Remember that no one invests in a strategy or business expecting it to fail, yet somehow smart people invest in strategies and businesses that fail.
True-Due Diligence: Or, Avoiding Failure When Due Diligence Says You’ll Succeed, The ACS Blog, November 2010
The outcome was not only to resolve the classic conflict of top-management stretch goals versus product-management practicality. It was also to preclude the equally classic conflict that comes later, the one about underperforming versus overexpecting.
Two Words to Help You Gut Check Your Career, Harvard Business Review, November 5, 2015
Then I did something else smart (twice in one day!). I wondered what I’d said. I realized that I’d spent my entire what-I’m-proud-of minute talking about my career. That’s not bad or wrong, but those two words from a 15-year-old stranger made me think: Am I living a life that makes me proud?
“We Are Fully Prepared”; Or, Why Plans Fail, Crisis Times, April 2006. Reprinted in Contingency Planning & Management – Global Assurance, March 2007.
We often ask – especially after a disaster – how we can hold people more accountable or get rid of those incompetents who failed to implement the plan. But maybe, to quote former Intel CEO Andy Grove, “That is not the right question.” Maybe the right question, therefore, is why did people believe we were prepared when we were not? And how can we do a better job of preparing for crises, or even preventing them?
What If? How to Create a Great Strategy, Competia Magazine, December 2002
What if you could answer your what-if questions before you make a key strategy decision? What if you could realistically and rigorously test your options before you committed real money? What if you could raise the odds that you’d make wise decisions and create a great strategy? As this article describes and illustrates, that’s what strategy simulation is for. So: what if you investigated strategy simulation?
What We Know That Ain’t So, Crisis Times, February 2006. Reprinted in CSOonline.com, NAMIC online, and in NAMIC’s In magazine. NAMIC is the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies.
This is the true story of how a multinational company successfully avoided a business crisis. The moral of the story applies as well to government as it does to industry.
An event that threatens a business’s survival is a crisis. Not every crisis arrives with a neon light announcing “Crisis! Crisis!” Sometimes, like a cancer, it grows slowly. Did Sears pay attention when Sam Walton opened his first store? Did General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler worry when Japanese econoboxes came to America in the 1970s? Based on results, apparently not. Today Wal-Mart is seven times the size of Sears, and GM, Ford, and Chrysler are desperately fighting for their lives.
What You Can Learn by Simulating Strategies, Strategy magazine, Issue 37
It’s a fuzzy, foggy world. Strategists want metaphorical telescopes to see their future. Alas, there is no such thing as the singular future. What strategists really need are wide-angle lenses to see many possible futures: options, alternatives, uncertainties, opportunities, and threats. That’s where strategy simulation comes in.
The key question is not whether to simulate, but rather which simulation method will work best for the issues you want to tackle. We’ll discuss three approaches: business war games, computer-based simulation, and hybrid war games.
And just for the record: Forecasting a profit and loss statement in Excel is not the same thing as simulating a strategy.
When I Was Wrong, The ACS Blog, November 2008
This essay starts with a shocking pricing tournament and proceeds to the challenges faced by President-elect Obama and the titans of industry. All of us are human and so all of us will be wrong. What’s important is when we make our mistakes.
When to Change Strategy In a Crisis, Harvard Business Review, February 3, 2021
When a crisis hits, do not assume you should change your competitive strategy only because something has changed and the knee-jerk, do-something alarm is roaring. Companies rightly seek agility and fear complacency. But consider the flip side: The more zealously you monitor the world, the more likely you will react to noise instead of signal. And this: The better your current strategy, the more likely a new strategy will be worse.
Why Being Unpredictable Is a Bad Strategy, Harvard Business Review, January 5, 2017
My clients and students assume that competitors should surprise one another with their strategies. Your competitors, they think, should have no idea what you’re going to do.
I predict many of you will say: Of course. Being unpredictable is a competitive advantage.
Not so fast.
Why You Should Approach Your Career Like a Game, Harvard Business Review, September 14, 2021
You might identify as a student, a professional, an entrepreneur, a manager, an inventor, or something else. Deep down, though, you are a gamer.
A gamer is someone who maneuvers, anticipates, adjusts, and responds to the world. Someone who thinks, plans, and acts with intention and forethought. In other words: a human being. You.
In the article I ask five questions to help you become aware of the games you play. It ends with a heart-stopping, life-changing BANG! that changed the games I play.
With All This Intelligence, Why Don't We Have Better Strategies?, The Journal of Business Strategy, January-February 2005
With all our skills, data, enthusiasm, opportunities, knowledge, motivation, and power, why do we produce strategies that fail? This article discusses the inherent shortcomings in conventional models and human thinking that make it easy for even the best strategists to fall into bad strategy decisions. It concludes with practical advice to help strategists improve creative thinking and decision-making.
Would You Play Reverse Russian Roulette with Your Money?, Vistage Research & Insights, January 26, 2016
It takes sober effort to ponder uncertainty, and startups are not sober. They are giddy with hope, enthusiasm, and adrenaline; they are motivated. People who warn against the something-else perils I mentioned earlier, cognitive biases et al., are scorned as naysayers who drown future glory in cold water. I know because I’ve tried.
I was involved in a startup...
You’ve Got the Data. Now What? A chapter in Starting a CI Function, Ken Sawka and Bonnie Hohhof (editors), The CI Foundation, 2008
Most strategy challenges cannot be solved — emphasis on solved, not merely “responded to” — with data and information alone. Instead, they must be solved by combining intelligence (knowledge) with intelligence (human decision making). This book chapter discusses hidden traps that bedevil strategy decision-making: conventional tools, overconfidence, innumeracy, monsters, and obviousness.
A book with much about strategy, business war-gaming, and careers
The NEW Employee Manual: A No-Holds-Barred Look at Corporate Life, Entrepreneur Press (2019), by Benjamin Gilad, Ph.D., and Mark Chussil, MBA.
Ben and I disagree about many things. For example, he thinks The NEW Employee Manual is a book about careers and I think it is a book about competitive strategy. Also, we both conduct business war games, but we conduct them differently. Still, we agree that business war games -- a major theme in our book -- help people develop competing as a skill.
A book with much about life and questions
Nice Start: Questions Only You Can Answer to Create the Life Only You Can Live, by Mark Chussil. Second edition (2010), available on Kindle.
"Nice Start is so much more than that. In thought-provoking exercises that invite you to trust your own instincts, Mark Chussil helps walk you into a mindset of self-discovery that might just change your life." -- Jeffrey Zaslow, The Wall Street Journal, co-author of The Last Lecture and Highest Duty.
"A treasury of mind-expanding adventures, full of wisdom and sudden insights that take the reader by surprise." -- Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael.
"Nice Start is fascinating and powerful. It will help you discover how to think deeply and differently about yourself, and help you get more of what you want in your life. You'll be very glad you read this book." -- John Gray, Ph.D., author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.
Harvard Business School had me deliver sessions at HBS reunions, based on Nice Start.
A book that's sadly gone out of print, but...
Strategy Analysis with ValueWar™, by Mark J. Chussil and Professor David J. Reibstein (The Wharton School), The Scientific Press, 1994. The book is out of print but its technology survives in ACS strategy simulators.
"Using the ValueWar process -- calibration and simulation -- was a terrific learning experience for our managers in developing and evaluating competitive strategies for target segments, one that they all agreed was time well spent." -- Lou Vargha, Director, Finance and Planning, Weyerhaeuser Paper Company.
"[ValueWar] breaks the business-as-usual traps of conventional techniques to help managers really learn about their own businesses and to conduct wide-ranging explorations of competitive-strategy alternatives. Soon no business plan will be acceptable if it hasn't been pretested in this way." -- Professor Sidney Schoeffler, Founding Director, The PIMS Program (Profit Impact of Market Strategy).
"ValueWar is a must addition to the set of weapons used by executives facing an uncertain competitive environment. It offers marketing and business executives an exciting, insightful and easy-to-use vehicle for analyzing their competitive situation and for generating and evaluating creative competitive marketing and business strategies." -- Jerry Wind, The Lauder Professor and Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; Director, SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management.
About the author
Mark Chussil is Founder of Advanced Competitive Strategies, Inc.
A highly rated and entertaining speaker who can run a billion simulations before breakfast, Mark conducts workshops about strategic thinking in corporations, at conferences, and in business-school programs. A pioneer in business war-gaming and strategy simulation, and a 45-year veteran of competitive strategy, Mark’s technologies have won a patent and a best-in-class award. He has designed strategy simulations and conducted business war games for dozens of Fortune 500 companies, in many industries, around the world.
Mark’s business war games and simulations have helped ACS clients add billions of dollars to their bottom lines. His programs on strategic thinking have helped thousands of strategists become better strategists.
Mark has co/written three books, chapters for five others, and numerous articles in the Harvard Business Review and elsewhere. He has been quoted in Fast Company, Harvard Management Update, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. His most-recent book, co-authored with Benjamin Gilad, is The NEW Employee Manual: A No-Holds-Barred Look at Corporate Life. Harvard Business School gave Mark’s book Nice Start: Questions Only You Can Answer to Create the Life Only You Can Live to alumni returning for reunions, and had Mark deliver sessions at two HBS reunions.
Mark earned his MBA at Harvard University and his BA at Yale University. He was elected a Fellow of Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) and the Council of Competitive Intelligence Fellows. He taught as an Adjunct Instructor at the University of Portland, served on the Board of Directors of Friends of the Children, and chaired the pro bono Community Partners program of the Harvard Business School Association of Oregon. Prior to ACS, Mark worked at the Strategic Planning Institute (The PIMS Program), where he became Director of the Business Strategy Research Program, and at Sequent Computer Systems, where he was Manager, Strategy Development.
Advanced Competitive Strategies, Inc.
mchussil (at) competing.com
Beaverton, Oregon USA
Founder of MAP, LLC | Strategic Design Advisor, Leader & Partner
1ySuch a wonderful compendium of smarts! Thank you for sharing this, good sir.
The Decision-Making Maverick™ Life, Leadership & Business Coach, Competition and Strategy Specialist, Author - Improving your life, decision-making and the competitiveness of your business.
4yWow, what an amazing and generous treasure trove of war gaming knowledge!
Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton
4yAwesome! Thanks for putting this together!
Award Winning Author of Win Loss Analysis, Elicitation and Competitive Intelligence Expert & Teacher
4yLove this! Thanks for sharing!
Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist | Talent Acquisition
4yMark more excellent work! Think differently or wrong for that matter and not assume that the best laid plans always go your way. A shattered ego is sometimes a good thing to view the competitive ecosystems from a different vantage point.