When the barbarians are attacking your gates reducing the size of your army is not the best strategy.  You need more and better weapons and tactics immediately.   Theories of warfare and stories of other people’s struggles are not helpful because they are about the past in another battle on a different battle field.

As your general’s intelligence staff they need you to provide information to your captains and colonels on how to redeploy their support troops to build defenses and attack more effectively today and tomorrow.  You have to survive today before you can fight tomorrow.

In a business this translates into better production, sales and service.  The winning strategy is to reverse the normal process and focus on services first.  To insure that there will be customers to buy in the future you need to improve customer service and retention now.  Next you need to produce better products at competitive prices quickly.  Finally, you need to shorten the sales cycle and maintain reasonable margins.

To do this you optimize your processes to make them more cost effective.  You integrate and synchronize your service delivery and you shift from lagging performance measures to leading indicators of engagement, leadership and commitment.

Dr. Jac