Remaking Customer Markets: Unlocking Growth with Digital

Digital technologies are remaking markets; 80 percent of companies are planning to use new business models to dramatically improve business performance and meet changing customer expectations, according to Accenture research. As business leaders harness the power of digital disruption, six new markets can reshape traditional industries and unlock growth.

Best Business Books 2014

strategy+business presents their 14th annual best business books special section with picks from seven eminent reviewers.

Editor’s Note: As usual, these pieces offer more than just listings of recommended books. In particular, I recommend you read the entries on strategy and economics.

Strategic Thinking for Turbulent Times

Very soon after the crash of 2008, most of the conventional conceptual and operational frameworks for strategy formulation and strategy choice ran out of steam. Five years later, as this author notes, the search is still on for more compatible models for strategy analysis, formulation, choice and implementation. In this article he offers a model and four options for applying it that he believes is … [ Read more ]

The Five Pillars of Sustainable Growth

Many companies set high expectations for growth, but few manage to expand sustainably and profitably year after year. In this brief audio presentation, Partner James Allen explains how five business principles can help companies can turn fast growth into long-term value.

The History of Strategy and Its Future Prospects

From The Art of War to The War for Talent, strategy has been evolving for centuries. What we have learned in the past 2,500 years is highlighted here—not only where strategy began but also why it is on the verge of reclaiming its rightful place in history.

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world.

Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified … [ Read more ]

How to Scale Up Excellence in an Organization

Stanford’s Robert Sutton discusses the mind-set and strategies of companies that are most adept at building and spreading high standards.

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

Playing to Win, a noted Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestseller, outlines the strategic approach Lafley, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, used to double P&G’s sales, quadruple its profits, and increase its market value by more than $100 billion when Lafley was first CEO (he led the company from 2000 to 2009). The book shows leaders in any type of organization … [ Read more ]

The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now.

In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a … [ Read more ]

Four Strategies to Capture and Create Value from Big Data

Companies that effectively create and implement big data strategies stand to gain a competitive advantage.

Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World

It’s a familiar scene in organizations today: a new competitive threat or a big opportunity emerges. You quickly create a strategic initiative in response and appoint your best people to make change happen. And it does—but not fast enough. Or effectively enough. Real value gets lost and, ultimately, things drift back to the default status.

Why is this scenario so frequently repeated in industries and organizations … [ Read more ]

Morris Chang

Years ago I read a Fortune magazine article where [Hong Kong tycoon] Li Ka-shing was quoted as advising his sons in the following fashion: When you enter into a partnership with somebody and you expect to make a dollar and your partner expects to make a dollar, too, then when the deal is over, why don’t you just take 80 cents? And if you take … [ Read more ]

Avoiding Blind Spots in Your Next Joint Venture

Even joint ventures developed using familiar best practices can fail without cross-process discipline in planning and implementation.

Fewer, Bigger, Bolder: From Mindless Expansion to Focused Growth

In company after company that Sanjay Khosla and Mohanbir Sawhney worked for or researched, they saw businesses taking on more products, more markets, more people, more acquisitions—adding more of everything except what really mattered: sustainable and profitable growth.

And in many of these companies — large or small, from America to Europe to Asia — every quarter became a mad dash to find yet another … [ Read more ]

Just Imitate It! A Copycat Path to Strategic Agility

When a product that has been in development for one year can be copied and brought to market in days, first mover advantage has lost its…well, advantage. Once stigmatized, imitation is now acceptable. In fact, this author says that to stay in the game and not fall behind, firms must imitate. In this article, he describes why imitation is as valuable as innovation, and why … [ Read more ]

Jean-Paul Larçon, Bernard Ramamantsoa

Corporate governance is not only a European challenge but an international one, because companies ultimately compete for financial resources on the global market. And corporate governance practices, which are strongly linked to local legal and regulatory environments, have a strong influence on strategic management style, as well as on decision-making at board, CEO and middle management levels. Thus, if organization follows strategy, strategy follows governance. … [ Read more ]

Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise

What is strategy? For many it is the application of a theory, model or framework. In this book Spender develops a different creative approach. Emphasizing that firms face uncertainties and unknowns (knowledge gaps) he argues that the core of strategic thinking and processes rests on the organization’s leaders developing newly imagined solutions to the opportunities that these uncertainties open up.

Drawing on a wide range of … [ Read more ]

Is It Better to Be Strategic or Opportunistic?

Sarah Cliffe spoke with contributor Don Sull, who teaches strategy at MIT and the London Business School, about the tension between scholars who put sustainable competitive advantage at the center of strategy and those who argue that some industries are changing too quickly to allow for sustained performance. Here’s the edited conversation.

Top 10 Ways Entrepreneurs Pivot a Lean Startup

In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries discusses the importance of making required course corrections (pivots) to dramatically improve the odds for success. These pivots come in many different flavors, each designed to test the viability of a different hypothesis about the product, business model, and engine of growth. Here is a summary of the top ten types of pivots to consider.

Organisational Ambidexterity

Understanding an ambidextrous organisation is one thing, making it a reality is another. Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez provides an execution roadmap.