1338 Posts Found

The article introduces you to the Sean Ellis Test for assessing Product Market Fit. Further, the article explores the benefits and limitations of the Sean Ellis test, and finally discusses in detail how to properly apply the test for a positive outcome in your business.

Content: Article | Author: Martin Luenendonk | Source: Cleverism | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales, Strategy

Traditional theories and frameworks pertaining to strategic resource allocation – such as the famous BCG growth-share matrix, (or the very similar GE/McKinsey matrix) which categorizes businesses according to market share and growth potential –omit consideration of synergies. Paradoxically, these frameworks, which have been synonymous with corporate strategy, give short shrift to its most fundamental issue: corporate advantage. Thinking about investment in standalone terms may mislead … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Phanish Puranam | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Strategy

You can obviously screw up a great market — and that has been done, and not infrequently — but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market will tend to equal failure. Market matters most.

Content: Quotation | Author: Marc Andreessen | Source: LinkedIn | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Strategy

When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.
When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.
When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.

Content: Quotation | Author: Andy Rachleff | Source: LinkedIn | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Strategy

How does your organization manage the money it spends on digital? One surprising finding of my research is that most do not distinguish between different types of digital investments, treating all in a similar way. This situation exists because, believe it or not, a lot of organizations lack any mechanisms to help them actively manage the evaluation, selection, monitoring, and adjustment of digital investments to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Joe Peppard | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Management, Strategy

This project you’re working on, the new business or offering, what sort of value does it create? Here are some useful questions to help you think about that.

Content: Article | Author: Seth Godin | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, operational excellence for lunch, and everything else for dinner.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bill Aulet | Subjects: Culture, Operations, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

Digitization, which is of course happening all around us, is opening up a whole new spectrum of opportunities to create value. But how do you navigate this new horizontal world?

Content: Article | Author: John Sviokla | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Strategy

Digitally transforming an organization and capturing opportunities is often challenging as it requires C-suite executives and entrepreneurs to identify possibilities and drive change concurrently in three areas where digital technologies are can make significant differences and change the face of organizations.
1. Intelligence – Seeing digital data as a source of insight and using this data in knowledge-creation processes to create competitive advantages.
2. Integration – Leveraging … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: David Dubois | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Strategy

Amazon has shown a remarkable ability to succeed in a wide variety of different product categories. That’s a contrast to most other high-profile tech companies that are really good in one area — Google’s dominant online services or Apple’s extraordinarily profitable hardware — but struggle when the quest for growth pushes them outside their zone of core competency. Amazon has figured out how to combine … [ Read more ]

Content: Case Study | Author: Timothy B. Lee | Source: Vox | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Strategy | Industry: Retail | Company: Amazon.com Inc.

At any given moment, about 5%–7% of companies either are in free fall or are about to be. Free fall is a crisis of obsolescence and decline that can happen at any point in a company’s life cycle, but most often it affects maturing incumbents whose business model has come under competitive attack from insurgents or is no longer viable in a changing market. And … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Chris Zook | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

In over 20 years of experience in prioritizing, selecting, and managing projects, Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez has developed a simple framework that he calls the “Hierarchy of Purpose.” It is a tool that executive teams can use to help them prioritize strategic initiatives and projects.

Content: Article | Author: Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Project Management, Strategy

I think that private-equity activity tends to come at the end of the corporate cycle, when a company is already in trouble, has been mismanaged, or is an orphan in need of new leadership. So private equity is another outside agent that comes in when management has failed to do what it needs to do.

Content: Quotation | Author: Louis V. Gerstner | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Business Rules, Corporate Governance, Management, Strategy

The causes of business demise—of a failure to endure—are well documented at a general level. They include failure to address changes in market demand or competition effectively; human failings such as hubris, exhaustion, or loss of ambition; loss of operational competitiveness; and above all an inability to deal with new, often disruptive, technological innovations. And sometimes, of course, external factors outside a company’s control, such … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ian Davis | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Business Rules, Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

Companies get into trouble—or the financial markets get unduly agitated or frustrated—when there is a mismatch between natural industry cycles and investor, customer, or even employee horizons. A primary task of strategic management is to define the relevant planning cycles and to think about how to manage from one to the next.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ian Davis | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Strategy

The identity of a successful company aligns three basic elements: a value proposition (how this company distinguishes itself from others in delivering value to customers); a system of distinctive capabilities that enable the company to deliver on this value proposition; and a chosen portfolio of products and services that all make use of those capabilities.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Cesare R. Mainardi, Paul Leinwand | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Business Rules, Management, Strategy

When you can’t find a way to translate the strategic into the everyday, you have to rely on your existing functions to achieve your strategic goals. […] You risk becoming a company that perennially promises great things but never seems able to deliver.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Cesare R. Mainardi, Paul Leinwand | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Strategy

When you don’t commit to an identity, you risk becoming scattered among a variety of objectives. […] You gain a right to play in many markets, but a right to win in none.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Cesare R. Mainardi, Paul Leinwand | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Strategy

The number of priorities admitted to by an organization is revealing. It is notable that if the risk appetite of a senior executive team is very low (or if they are not able or inclined to make the tough choices), they will tend to have a generous portfolio of priorities; they don’t want to take the risk of not being compliant, missing a market opportunity, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

… the matrix organization […] gained favor in the 1970s as a solution for large organizations struggling to coordinate decision making and activities that cut across functional and business-unit lines. The theory was strong, but when Tom Peters appraised the scene, in the late 1970s, “the matrix ‘solution’ had brought with it problems at least as knotty as those it was supposed to cure.”

The quest … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Aaron De Smet, Suzanne Heywood, Wouter Aghina | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy