Welcome to These Are the Rules



The goal of “These Are the Rules” is to help companies thrive by showing business executives the “do’s and don’ts” for effectively approaching important challenges. This monthly column aspires to be interesting and useful to a wide range of business readers: middle managers through CEOs of both Civic Progress giants and very small companies.

The columns will focus on areas with the greatest breakthrough potential:

  • Business functions from human resources and organization development through operations, IT, finance, marketing and sales, and top management.
  • Functional processes for product development, supply chain management, and customer relationship management.
  • Top management processes for driving change, creating a high performance culture, and strategy development and implementation.

Perhaps most importantly, an occasional column will address the nature and importance of rules: Achieving major breakthroughs by knowing how and when to change the rules, or areas where rules are needed or have recently changed.

The success of such an ambitious agenda requires involving experts on each topic. We encourage readers of the column to …

  • Look at possible Future Column Topics and let me know the companies, executives, professional service providers, and academics to contact,
  • Send me your thoughts for “The Rules” for Columns in process, and
  • Get others you respect and admire involved in the column.



Bill Finnie

In addition to writing the monthly “These Are the Rules” column in the Sunday St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Bill is a business strategy consultant and an adjunct professor at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis.

Bill went through Kirkwood schools. He got a summer job at Anheuser-Busch after his junior year at Washington University and continued working on A-B projects while getting a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton).

During his 26 year career with A-B, Bill conducted most of their more complex marketing analysis projects. He also directed market research as they entered the segmentation & positioning era, issues management in government affairs, and strategic planning in corporate planning.

Bill has been an adjunct professor at Washington University since 1978. His areas of expertise include business strategy and marketing strategy.

Bill left A-B in 1991 “to take his approach to strategy beyond MBAs and beer.” Since then, Bill has facilitated 89 strategy programs for organizations of all types and sizes and has made over 100 keynote presentations on strategy.

Bill gets great satisfaction from helping senior management teams accelerate their sales and profits and create high performance organizations. Hands-On Strategy (2nd ed., 2000) presents his step by step approach for strategy development and implementation.