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| Buy the Book Now |
| At the Strategy Learning
Center, we help organizations and individuals reach their aspirations and
lead their peers by making and executing powerful decisions. Through a series of seminars, workshops, and consultations, our clients master a powerful set of tools for building strategy and become more effective and creative strategists. Our approach is rooted in the book "The Art of the Advantage: 36 Strategies for Seizing the Competitive Edge" (TEXERE 2002) by Kaihan Krippendorff. We welcome the opportunity to discuss how we can work together to strengthen your organization’s strategic capability. Best Regards, The Strategy Learning Center Team
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| COMPANY PROFILE: Overview |
To empower organizations and individuals to
reach their aspirations and lead their peers by making and executing
powerful decisions.
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| COMPANY PROFILE: Our Team |
| Brad Hoover Brad's background includes a career in management consulting with McKinsey & Co., where he collected experience in growth, market entry, innovation, and sales strategy for Fortune 500 clients. At the former Arthur Andersen, Brad led the development of an intranet application used by Goldman Sachs and others to execute corporate mergers and acquisitions. Brad also started an architectural services firm during his undergraduate tenure at Cornell University, where he graduated with a B.S. in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering. In his limited spare time, Brad enjoys activities including cycling, downhill skiing, and aviation. |
| Kaihan Krippendorff Kaihan is the author the The Art of the Advantage – 36 Strategies to Seize the Competitive Edge. He spent three years as a consultant and manager at McKinsey & Company, helping leading corporations craft winning strategies. Prior to McKinsey, Kaihan held various senior management positions in the banking, retail, consulting, and non-profit sectors. He earned his MBA from Columbia Business School and London Business School, his BSE in Finance from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and his BSE in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering. He lives in Miami, Florida where he writes, teaches, consults, and leads a non-profit program. He speaks English, Spanish, and conversational German. |
| AnaMaria Rivera AnaMaria is a strategic management consultant with over 15 years of management and consulting experience. She has held top management positions in companies across several industries in the U.S. and Latin America. She was a consultant with McKinsey & Co. where she focused on helping companies solve strategic and organizational problems. She is an International Professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, teaching at the Specialization in Finance and Specialization in Marketing Programs. AnaMaria earned a BS in Industrial Engineering from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She is fluent is English and Spanish. |
| COMPANY PROFILE: In the News |
| Hermes Magazine Columbia Business School Alumni Magazine Spring 2003 In his first book, The Art of the
Advantage — 36 Strategies to Secure the Competitive Edge (Texere, 2003),
Kaihan Krippendorff ’99 comes up with a fresh method for devising a
corporate game plan by drawing inspiration from a 2,000-year-old Chinese
treatise. After receiving his MBA, Krippendorff spent three years at
McKinsey crafting corporate strategies before accepting a position — in
part, to have more time to write — as executive director of Take Stock in
Children. With offers for speaking engagements rolling in, he envisions a
parallel career presenting seminars on his book at academic and financial
institutions. |
| Back to top |
| SERVICES |
| We designed the Art of the
Advantage seminar and workshop to unleash creativity, reveal new strategic
options, and enhance the competitiveness of companies and individuals. By
adding an ancient tool to their strategic arsenals (The 36 Stratagems),
participants discover an enhanced ability to create nimble, unpredictable
strategies. They gain an ability to see new competitive options with which
they can outthink and outflank their opponents. The workshop is a customized 1 to 3-day training during which your management team works intensively to solve an important strategic problem your company faces today. The outcome of this workshop is two fold. First, the team typically identifies 2-3 high-potential, creative options they either did not see or did not see as feasible before the workshop. They leave with a game plan for analyzing these options further. Second, the team begins to masters a fundamentally different approach to creating strategies, a “pattern-based” approach, and thereby become more creative and effective strategists. The seminar is designed for an audience of top managers and takes place over three half-day sessions. Participants work through case studies to begin mastering the “pattern-based” approach to building strategies. They leave more creative and effective strategists and take away a toolkit which they can apply within their own organizations to solve important strategic problems. We have conducted both the seminar and workshop for several companies and groups including DHL and Grupo Financiero (the leading credit card issuer in Central America). Some of their comments: “Krippendorff’s pattern-based methodology effectively complements traditional option-generating approaches. The workshop left us with a powerful new tool to look at business problems through a new lens.” “The stratagems helped us unlock creative new strategies to challenging business problems that we face in today’s increasingly competitive environment.” “Generating imaginative strategies becomes second-nature with the use of the stratagems.” “As someone who has never attended business school and started my company on my own and learned business through the school of hard knocks, your theories and concepts were easy to understand and can be a very valuable asset to my business when applied.” |
| SERVICES: The Art of the Advantage Seminar |
| The Art of the Advantage Seminar is designed
for an audience of top executives and takes place over three half-day
sessions. Participants use case studies to master the “pattern-based”
approach to building strategies. They leave more creative and effective
strategists and take away a strategic toolkit to apply in their own
organizations. Objectives: The Art of the Advantage seminar is designed to enhance your competitive positioning by unleashing creativity to reveal new strategic options. Specifically, through facilitated problem solving and training the workshop will:
Structure:
Clients: The Art of the Advantage workshop has been conducted for groups of mangers from several corporations including:
Fees: Fees depend on seminar date and location but are typically $1,000
per participant for the full three, half-day series. If interested,
please contact The Strategy Learning Center (contact information below)
to discuss next steps. |
| SERVICES: The Art of the Advantage Workshop |
|
Objectives: The Art of the Advantage workshop is designed to unleash creativity, reveal new strategic options, and enhance your team’s competitiveness. Through facilitated problem solving focused on the management team’s most critical strategic problem, the workshop will:
Structure:
Clients:
Fees: Fees are tied to workshop length and group size. The typical required
investment is $6,000 per day per facilitator, with one facilitator per 10
participants. For more information please contact us to discuss next
steps. |
| SERVICES: Other |
| The Strategy Learning Center offers strategy learning services, including seminars and training, to help our client’s management team members become more effective and creative strategists. In addition we provide coaching services to help executives master the pattern-based approach of strategy development and to broaden their strategic versatility. |
| THE BOOK Buy the Book Now |
| Business as warfare—while the
comparison is time-honored, today's competitive terrain calls for fresh
tactics. Now, Kaihan Krippendorff, a former strategist with McKinsey &
Company, mines new inspiration from an ancient source—The 36 Stratagems, a
2,500-year-old treatise born during China's Warring States period. While
less famous in the West than I Ching, Sun Tzu's The Art of War and the Tao
Te Ching by Lao Tzu, The 36 Stratagems is no less relevant than those works
to the business strategist of today. Krippendorff demonstrates how to outflank the competition by adapting Chinese warfare philosophy to create nimble, unpredictable corporate strategies. He argues that we should add a fundamentally different approach to our strategic toolkit, one based on strategic patterns. He shows that by using The 36 Stratagems to build strategy, managers and modern-day strategists can become more effective and creative strategists. By viewing competition through the lens of stratagems, the complexities of power – the moves and counter-moves that determine success or failure in war, politics, and business – come into focus. We begin to more clearly understand competition. By using the stratagems to build strategies, we can create more innovative strategies – ones that our competition does not see as options and that therefore catch our markets off-guard. Each stratagem reveals new avenues of action that our current perspective does not allow us to see. |
| THE BOOK: Author Bio Buy the Book Now |
| Kaihan Krippendorff Kaihan spent three years as a consultant and manager at McKinsey & Company, helping leading corporations craft winning strategies. Prior to McKinsey, Kaihan held various senior management positions in the banking, retail, consulting, and non-profit sectors. He earned his MBA from Columbia Business School and London Business School, his BSE in Finance from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and his BSE in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering. He lives in Miami, Florida where he writes, teaches, consults, and leads a non-profit program. Back to top |
| THE BOOK: Recent Press Buy the Book Now |
| Hermes Magazine Columbia Business School Alumni Magazine Spring 2003 In his first book, The Art of the Advantage — 36 Strategies to Secure the Competitive Edge (Texere, 2003), Kaihan Krippendorff ’99 comes up with a fresh method for devising a corporate game plan by drawing inspiration from a 2,000-year-old Chinese treatise. As the manuscript evolved, Krippendorff received guidance from professors and classmates. Kathryn Harrigan, the Henry R. Kravis Professor of Business Leadership, was the first to suggest that his independent-study project could form the basis of a book while “pointing out where his book fit on the academic landscape.” Others lending insight were Professor Robert Bontempo, Christina Zhu ’99 and Jeff Kvaal ’99. After receiving his MBA, Krippendorff spent three years at McKinsey crafting corporate strategies before accepting a position — in part, to have more time to write — as executive director of Take Stock in Children. With offers for speaking engagements rolling in, he envisions a parallel career presenting seminars on his book at academic and financial institutions. Back to top |
| THE BOOK: Endorsements Buy the Book Now |
| "Kaihan Krippendorff's book,
Art of the Advantage, provides an unusual perspective on business strategy
by using case examples to apply ancient Taoist laws and Chinese military
stratagems to present day business issues. Viewing business strategy through
this innovative lens can lead a strategist to conceive of competitive
options that might not have been otherwise considered." -- David Wenner, retired McKinsey Director "Kaihan Krippendorff's book, Art of the Advantage, provides an unusual perspective on business strategy by using case examples to apply ancient Taoist laws and Chinese military stratagems to present day business issues. “In “The Art of the Advantage”, Kaihan Krippendorf has written a remarkable book which revives ancient Chinese principles as a method for strategic thinking. This refreshing approach is easy to learn, has proven successful for thousands of years and will profoundly inspire your competitive advantage. It will become your strategic compass.” -- Colleen Brown, EVP Business Development, Belo Corp. “Kaihan Krippendorff has built a footbridge between Eastern wisdom and Western business. The Art of the Advantage offers 36 timeless lenses to bring fresh perspective to familiar situations. It is a treasure for the true strategist.” -- Jacques Antebi, Partner, McKinsey & Company “Kaihan has artfully blended the lessons of the 36 Strategems in an exciting way that makes an ancient eastern treasure approachable to western audiences. The stratagems that Krippendorff illustrates are a re-discovered treasury that offers insights into their unfamiliar philosophy. Leading western firms have already incorporated the stratagems into their competitive arsenals. Familiarity with the art of the moving target – outmaneuvering via a sequence of temporary advantages – is required knowledge in the new game that many firms are now forced to play. Consulting firms will be mastering this philosophy to recognize feints and bluffs in arenas where effort and resources cannot be wasted. This is a masterful work that cannot be ignored.” -- Kathryn Rudie Harrigan -- Henry R. Kravis Professor of Business Leadership Columbia Business School “Art of the Advantage provides the thoughtful analysis demanded by an increasingly globalized world. Krippendorff’s efforts to synthesize ancient Chinese war stratagems and modern-day business conundrums will be interesting not only to students of Chinese thought but to managers looking to broaden their strategic perspective.” -- Ming-Jer Chen, E. Thayer Bigelow Research Professor, Darden Business School, University of Virginia, and author of Inside Chinese Business. “Krippendorff distills the wisdom accumulated through 2,000 years of warfare in China and shows how powerful a framework it can be for developing modern business strategies. Unlike other business books that purport to provide a recipe for success but are really peddling a fad, The Art of the Advantage offers a timeless strategic playbook from which the reader can pick and choose. “For anyone who must compete with one of the Goliaths of modern business like Wal-Mart or Microsoft, The Art of the Advantage offers not only hope but proven strategies for surviving and thriving." -- Paul Winslow, Director of Strategy, Toys “R” Us Back to top |
| CALENDAR Buy the Book Now |
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| LINKS |
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Links
to the 36 Stratagems: Links to the Art of War: Taoist links:
Links to ancient Chinese stories:
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| CONTACT US |
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Mailing Address: The Strategy Learning Center 1111 Brickell Avenue Suite 1100 Miami, FL 33131 Telephone: (305) 913-7146 Fax: (305) 402-7922 Email for General Information: |