Your Growth Strategy Depends on Your Starting Point
There are three truths about revenue growth. It’s imperative. It’s perilous. And it’s possible regardless of your industry or starting point. Our latest research on growth confirms these truths. Ultimately, getting growth right entails making smart choices and investing time and money in them. We unearthed insights from successful growers that can help others choose their optimal growth path. Crucially, our analysis revealed that the … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Asin Tavakoli, Holger Harreis, Kayvaun Rowshankish, Michael Bogobowicz | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Strategy
The more things change: Value creation, value capture, and the Internet of Things
Some changes enabled by the Internet of Things will be incremental, while others will be transformative. Yet the need to capture value remains as acute as ever. The established principles of strategic differentiation, process flow, and network economics will go a long way toward revealing a path to long-term success.
Content: Article | Author: Mark Cotteleer | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Strategy
6 Strategic Concepts That Set High-Performing Companies Apart
Strategic concepts come in and out of fashion as the needs and dynamics of the marketplace change. Research and analysis of today’s landscape identifies six key strategic concepts that set outperforming companies apart: Borrow someone’s road, partner with a third party, reveal your strategy, be good, let the competition go, and adopt small scale attacks.
Content: Article | Author: Kaihan Krippendorff | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy
Graham Kenny
The primary focus of a strategic plan is competitiveness. It is designed to respond to change and future opportunities in a way to find advantage. The primary focus of an operational plan is efficiency. Operational plans are designed to roll out strategy via internal department programs developed by, for instance, HR, IT, marketing, and manufacturing.
Content: Quotation | Author: Graham Kenny | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Operations, Strategy
Graham Kenny
Strategy is about positioning an organization, whether it’s a business, a government, or a not-for-profit entity, relative to its competitors.
Content: Quotation | Author: Graham Kenny | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy
Annual Planning Sucks — A CPO, CRO, CFO, and COO Share Advice on How to Make it Better
Four top execs reveal their annual planning secrets from Notion, Stripe, Vanta, Linear, Linktree and more. From addressing AI to adjusting org charts, this COO, CFO, CPO & CRO share insights so startups at any stage can build effective, realistic plans.
Content: Article | Authors: Cristina Cordova, Jiaona Zhang, Rama Katkar, Stevie Case | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Planning, Strategy
To Accelerate Growth, Analyze Your Company Like an Investor
Private equity (PE) firms have a proven approach to identify areas for revenue growth, value creation, and cost reduction: due diligence. But companies rarely use this same approach in the execution of their own growth strategy. This is a missed opportunity. The same due diligence skills and tools can be found in most large companies, but they are usually siloed in the corporate development team … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Hoyoung Pak, Jason McDannold, Yale Kwon | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Strategy
Ten questions for a winning climate-transition business strategy
The move to a low-carbon economy will create opportunities for innovation and growth. To make the most of them, leaders must understand the challenges they could face along the way.
Content: Article | Author: George Serafeim | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Social Responsibility (ESG), Strategy
George Stalk, Jr., Philip Evans, Lawrence E. Shulman
Competing on capabilities provides a way for companies to gain the benefits of both focus and diversification. Put another way, a company that focuses on its strategic capabilities can compete in a remarkable diversity of regions, products, and businesses and do it far more coherently than the typical conglomerate can. Such a company is a “capabilities predator”—able to come out of nowhere and move rapidly … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Authors: George Stalk Jr., Lawrence Shulman, Philip Evans | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy
3 Ways to Clearly Communicate Your Company’s Strategy
For all the communication around strategy, we know that leaders at many companies don’t provide the necessary context for employees to understand what the words and sentences in a strategy statement actually mean. What can leaders do to help employees understand enough context to understand a strategy? In this article, the authors offer three ideas.
Content: Article | Authors: Andrew MacLennan, Constantinos C. Markides | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Communication, Organizational Behavior, Strategy
From stagnation to innovation: Make business model reinvention real
A practical guide for reimagining how your company creates, delivers, and captures value.
Content: Article | Authors: Matthew Duffey, Venky Jayaraman, Veronique Roos-Emonds | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Business Model, Strategy
Five paths to TSR outperformance
It’s hard for companies to significantly beat long-term market TSR, harder still for the largest corporations, and hardest of all in the face of low growth. But industry endowment needn’t be destiny.
Content: Article | Authors: Pedro Catarino, Rosen Kotsev, Tim Koller, Zane Williams | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Strategy
Richard Rumelt
The big dysfunction that happens on boards is we say, “Let’s bring in outsiders, people with different backgrounds and representing different social, political, and economic interests.” That’s great, except now you have a roomful of people who don’t understand the business. The language these people have in common is financial accounting, so that’s what they concentrate on. As long as things are going great that’s … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Richard Rumelt | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Strategy
Richard Rumelt
Some people say, “Strategy is important, but it’s really about execution.” That’s silly. That’s like saying, “We have a military strategy, but our soldiers are too fat to walk.” Execution is part of strategy, of course. Strategy is about what is important and the challenges you face. If one of these challenges is that the organization is dysfunctional, then that’s strategic. If your managers are … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Richard Rumelt | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Execution, Management, Strategy
Richard Rumelt
[Strategy] has to do with a focus of strength against weakness. In business, it’s a focus of strength against opportunities or problems. That focus of strength is essential. If you focus resources on a weak point, even if it’s a great opportunity, you are not acting strategically.
Content: Quotation | Author: Richard Rumelt | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy
Richard Rumelt
This gap between action and ambition is where most bad strategies come from. Bad strategy is almost a literary form that uses PowerPoint slides to say, “Here is how we will look as a company in a year or in three years.” That’s interesting, but it’s not a strategy.
Content: Quotation | Author: Richard Rumelt | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy
Richard Rumelt
Many companies treat strategy as a way of presenting to the board and to the investing public their ambitions for performance, and they confuse that with having a strategy. Some of it is the victory of finance as the language of business because we talk about shareholder return as the ultimate measure of success. Executives end up saying, “Our strategy is to achieve these results,” … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Richard Rumelt | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy
Adam Bryant, Kevin Sharer
The strategy, purpose, and values discussions—what Kevin Sharer, the former CEO of Amgen, calls a company’s “social architecture”—have often felt like separate exercises, but they now need to work in concert. “If you don’t have a social architecture that’s solid, well-accepted, and can be operationalized against the most important decisions you make, that’s leadership’s fault,” said Sharer.
Content: Quotation | Authors: Adam Bryant, Kevin Sharer | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Goals, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy, Values
Your Strategy Needs a Story
Business strategy is usually born of a highly rational process, grounded in facts and analysis. Storytelling, often associated with fiction and entertainment, may seem like the antithesis of strategy. But the two are not incompatible. A clever strategy on paper is only the starting point for engaging those who will implement it. Strategies must also be communicated and understood — and they must motivate action. … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Madeleine Michael, Martin Reeves, Roeland van Straten, Tim Nolan | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Storytelling, Strategy
The portfolio management imperative and its M&A implications
Several trends are creating a new imperative for strong portfolio management of businesses. Companies need six capabilities to build and manage a winning portfolio, using M&A strategically.
Content: Article | Author: Marc Augustin | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Mergers & Acquisitions, Strategy