Tag: Business Strategy

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Deciding the Undecidable: Why Strategy Needs “Urteilskraft”

tl;dr: Under deep uncertainty, strategy confronts questions no method can settle. Urteilskraft is that capacity: it frames what can be calculated and judges what can be justified.

This essay expands on a talk I gave at the Wissenschaftsfestival Stuttgart 2026, held at ISM Campus Stuttgart under the title “Zukunft, Zweifel, Zuversicht – Future Skills in Zeiten des Umbruchs.”

If there is one place in Europe where nobody needs “times of upheaval” explained to them, it is the Stuttgart region.… Read more

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The Business Model of Enough

tl;dr: Using social-practice theory to construct a generic business model for sufficiency

We live in an era of unsustainability. Our political-economic systems are producing massive economic wealth on the back of large-scale ecological degradation. Businesses and their business models are important economic value creators and drivers of innovation in any political-economic framework. The challenge to transform society, and thus our political economy, towards sustainability cannot be sufficiently conceptualized without charting the transformation potentials, possibilities and barriers of businesses and their business models.… Read more

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Next Growth: Re-Imagining Growth

tl;dr: Moving beyond growth as a paradigm is vital to unlock a new economy of prosperity, creativity and sustainability – and business has a large role to play 

Successful business = economic growth. This equation appears to be a natural law of economics, despite the many downsides of growth (exploitation, inequalities, ecological degradation) and the economic limitations of growth (secular stagnation, lagging productivity, global demographic change, low to negative interest rates). In fact, in can be argued that we already see the first signs of a postgrowth age, with decelerating global growth rates and possible contractions in many countries in the years and decades ahead.… Read more

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What’s NEXT? Wirtschaften jenseits des Wachstums

Unsere heutige Art des Wirtschaftens basiert auf der Unterstellung fundamentaler Knappheiten: Zeit, Geld, Aufmerksamkeit – das alles ist knapp und Unternehmen versuchen, mit diesen Knappheiten umzugehen, indem neue Produkte entwickelt, neue Märkte erobert und neue Kunden gewonnen werden. Diese NOW ECONOMY ist eine Wirtschaft der Expansion, der permanenten Flucht aus der Knappheit, die aber nie richtig zurückgelassen werden kann – sonst hörte ja auch die Flucht auf. Das Ergebnis ist ein historisch bis vor kurzem nicht gekanntes Wirtschaftswachstum gepaart mit einem ebenso historisch einmaligen Energieverbrauch und CO2- Ausstoß.

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Ecological Allowance – Accounting for the Triple Bottom Line

When John Elkington popularized the triple bottom line concept for accounting companies’ performance more holistically, the notion of people, planet and profit – or the ecological, economic and social dimensions of sustainability – immediately caught the attention of business people, consultants and researchers. The only problem was: there is no tripple bottom line. With a bottom line you draw the net value of a balance sheet of whatever kind. You add and subtract the ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ and arrive at a bottom line value that tells you if there is more ‘good’ than ‘bad’ in your balance.… Read more