363 Posts Found

The influence of the best IT functions is being felt throughout their organizations—serving customers better, integrating with business strategy, empowering employees and using data to deliver insights and measure business impact. In the process, they are changing the rules of how to run a successful digital enterprise.

Editor’s Note: topic material, but useful for the issues considered…

Content: Article | Author: Paul Daugherty | Source: Accenture | Subjects: Best Practices, IT / Technology / E-Business

The three rules that provided the title for Raynor and Ahmed’s recent book on exceptional performance are based on the large-scale and detailed study of American corporations. But do these findings mean anything outside of the American context? Do they need to be adapted? Are they even relevant?

Content: Article | Authors: Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed, Rob Del Vicario | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Best Practices, International

Creating value in today’s economic environment isn’t easy. Every company has to chart its own course. The companies that succeed are those that understand the opportunities and priorities embedded in their starting position, as defined by the economics of the business and its current valuation in the equity markets.

Content: Article | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Best Practices, Strategy

Bank of America’s stringent onboarding process for new execs ensures they understand role expectations, quickly develop networks, and learn from other leaders what it takes to succeed. From the new book by Dorothy Leonard and colleagues, Critical Knowledge Transfer.

Content: Article | Author: Dorothy Leonard | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Best Practices, Human Resources, Knowledge Management, Management

Maybe it’s time to have a look behind the generally accepted rules for successful, sustained performance. As readers will learn, and as these authors write, the rules that really drive companies to superior performance are quite different than what many of us have been led to believe.

Editor’s Note: an especially good read for the authors’ critical look at the flaws of most popular business … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

Our curiosity can usefully be seen as inquiries into two sorts of questions: Why/how did that happen? and, What will happen next? The former captures our desire to explain events; the latter addresses our need to predict them. Where does management science fall in this explanation/prediction space? I’m increasingly of a mind that providers of theories of management are often unwittingly in the explanation game … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

Identifying the drivers of superior long-term performance is a sufficiently fundamental question to have spawned a genre of business books. These “success studies” seek to uncover the causes of success by studying companies that have succeeded.

What do we have to show for the collective efforts of the researchers in this space? Rather less than one might hope, I fear. The reason lies not in the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

Canadian business has the potential to lead the industrial world in winning strategies. But first, as this author writes, it must fix its growing productivity problem. In this article, he proposes and describes how a proper focus on benchmarks will allow firms to asses their performance against global competitors, and determine the viability of those firms that assure job growth and wealth creation.

Content: Article | Author: Charles McMillan | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

To get the best results from this powerful performance improvement tool, you need a clear understanding of what it can do for you and a well-structured process for your initiatives.

Content: Article | Author: Brad Wood | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Best Practices, Competitive Intelligence

Chuck Wise, senior principal, finance and performance management, Accenture speaks with Business Finance about the importance of benchmarking and how it can improve the performance of key corporate functions.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Chuck Wise | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: Best Practices

New evidence shows how a strong customer culture drives future business performance and supports market strategies. Our research, based on a quantitative study across more than 150 businesses, spanning various industries and functions, identifies seven cultural factors that drive customer satisfaction, revenue and profit growth, innovation, and new product success. They can be measured and benchmarked for any organization.

Content: Article | Author: Linden R. Brown | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Customer Related, Organizational Behavior

It’s no surprise that most companies routinely try to lower their costs. But few succeed in driving costs out and making the savings stick. Yet some companies succeed not only in significantly lowering their costs but also in maintaining those reductions over time. What do the successful companies know that the others don’t? To find out, we dug deep into our data and conducted a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Emilia Fallas, Hernan Saenz, Peter Guarraia | Source: Bain & Company | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

To pull away from the pack one needs to break performance tradeoffs by getting better in several ways at once. The struggle for greatness, however, is far more complex and subtle. Prevailing over capable adversaries requires accepting and exploiting tradeoffs and very often seeking an advantage in only a very small number of very carefully identified ways, while frequently accepting a performance disadvantage along other … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Finance, Management, Strategy

How can a company sustain profitable growth?

It’s no easy feat. As a benchmark, consider an annual growth rate in revenue and earnings of 5.5%. Most companies say they expect to attain that level or better— at least that’s what their strategic plans call for. But a Bain & Company study of more than 2,000 companies indicates that only about one in 10 actually … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Chris Zook, James Allen | Source: Bain & Company | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

Case-based analysis suggests that although each of three types of strategic change—Position, Market and Competency—can succeed, changing Position brings with it the greatest risks, while changing Markets and Competencies are typically more successful paths to enduring performance. These observations can help managers see more clearly both the risks and rewards of the different types of strategic change available to them, and to assess their options … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Strategy

Three years ago, Deloitte Consulting LLP launched The Persistence Project to identify the management practices that contribute most to sustained, superior corporate performance. Preliminary results have been published in the Harvard Business Review and the Annals of Applied Statistics. This article is the fourth in a series, providing a preview of the project’s findings.

Editor’s Note: This particular “best practices” research project is especially interesting in … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jeff Schulz , Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed, Ragu Gurumurthy, Rajiv Vaidyanathan | Source: Deloitte Review | Subject: Best Practices

Exceptional companies all have the same recipe (better before cheaper, revenue before cost) but use different ingredients. In addition to creating superior levels of performance, exceptional companies deliver superior levels of performance for longer than anyone has a right to expect. It seems worth exploring, then, if and how exceptional companies adapt. Is exceptional performance a function of deep moats and thick ramparts, or does … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed | Source: Deloitte Review | Subject: Best Practices

Advice on how to compete successfully is subject to an irony that borders on paradox. If the advice is right, then it will be universally adopted; if it is universally adopted, it does not improve your relative performance; if it does not improve your relative performance, it is wrong. In other words, if the advice is right, then the advice is wrong.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed | Source: Deloitte Review | Subject: Best Practices

Finally, an answer to the ultimate business question: How do some companies achieve exceptional performance over the long term?

In every sector, there’s an outlier. How do these exceptional companies deliver superior perfor­mance over the long run despite facing the same constraints as competitors? What are they doing differently? What can we learn from them?

Michael E. Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed have analyzed data on more than … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed | Subject: Best Practices

A Booz & Company study reveals that only 17 percent of companies are poised for a profitable future.

Content: Article | Authors: Aswath Damodaran, Vinay Couto | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Strategy