1320 Posts Found

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[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

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

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

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

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

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

The most ancient and still crucial element of strategy is focus. In military terms, it is the concentration of force on an opponent’s weakness. More generally, it is the coordinated application of resources and effort to an important yet addressable challenge. Strategic focus means bringing sources of power to bear on a selected target. If the power is weak, nothing happens. If it is strong … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Richard Rumelt | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

To execute strategy well, one must consider the logic of challenges instead of wished-for end states. At a moment in time, a properly configured strategy is a mixture of policy and action designed to surmount a high-stakes challenge. (Were the challenge not high stakes, it would not be called strategic.) It is not a financial goal, or a plan for hitting a financial goal, or … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Richard Rumelt | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

As part of the strategic planning process, you’re making choices. It’s important to document those concrete choices — not just that we’ve chosen to do A, but also to explicitly reinforce that we’re not going to do B.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ravi Mehta | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

For the past three decades, the business mantra has been “customer first.” Yet focusing on retaining and expanding an existing customer base often results in finer segmentation and the greater tailoring of offerings to better meet customer preferences, which will likely lead companies into too-small target markets of an existing industry.

The blue ocean strategist’s mantra is “noncustomers first.” By looking to noncustomers and building on … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Mi Ji, Renée Mauborgne, W. Chan Kim | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales, Strategy

New ventures often fail—but digital capabilities change the odds. By following a business-building playbook based on your company’s strategic assets, you can accelerate growth dramatically.

Content: Article | Authors: Austin Gispanski, Beth Viner, David Tang-Quan, James Tucker, Jürgen Eckel, Ketil Gjerstad, Sylvain Duranton, Yoichiro Hirai | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Strategy

Experts behind the rules of value-creating growth discuss how leaders can apply these insights to their growth strategies.

Content: Article | Authors: Chris Bradley, Rebecca Doherty | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Strategy

Ten rules should guide how companies select pathways to profitable growth, but each rule’s impact on performance varies considerably.

Content: Article | Authors: Chris Bradley, Jill Zucker, Rebecca Doherty, Tido Röder | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Strategy