1338 Posts Found

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.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: James Allen | Source: Bain & Company | Subject: Strategy

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.

Content: Article | Authors: Gillis Jonk, Johan Aurik, Martin Fabel | Source: Kearney | Subject: Strategy

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 ]

Content: Book | Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Subjects: Management, Strategy

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

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Robert I. Sutton | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

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 ]

Content: Book | Authors: A.G. Lafley, Roger L. Martin | Subject: Strategy

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 ]

Content: Book | Author: Rita Gunther McGrath | Subject: Strategy

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

Content: Article | Authors: Bala Iyer, Dan Vesset, Salvatore Parise | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Management, Strategy

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 ]

Content: Book | Author: John P. Kotter | Subject: Strategy

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 ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Outlook Journal (Accenture) | Subjects: Management, Negotiation, Strategy

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

Content: Article | Authors: Eileen Kelly Rinaudo, John Chao, Robert Uhlaner | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Strategy

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 ]

Content: Book | Authors: Mohanbir Sawhney, Sanjay Khosla | Subject: Strategy

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 ]

Content: Article | Author: Oded Shenkar | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Strategy

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 ]

Content: Quotation | Source: European Business Forum (EBF) | Subjects: Corporate Governance, International, Strategy

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 ]

Content: Book | Author: J.-C. Spender | Subject: Strategy

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.

Content: Article | Authors: Donald Sull, Sarah Cliffe | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

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.

Content: Article | Authors: Eric Ries, Martin Zwilling | Source: Forbes | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Strategy

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

Content: Article | Author: Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez | Source: London Business School | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

In 1993, when IBM was in trouble and Lou Gerstner stepped in to steer the company, he famously said, “The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.” Twenty years earlier, in a 1973 McKinsey Quarterly article, Gerstner brought this same pragmatic insight to the topic of strategic planning, urging executives to avoid the false comfort of vague forecasts and instead execute well-grounded strategic … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Louis V. Gerstner | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Strategy

The pressure to grow the top line is so intense that most companies pay too much attention to expansion and not enough to building differentiated capabilities. A few companies start from the opposite direction: they figure out what they’re really good at, then develop those capabilities (three to six at most) until they’re best-in-class and interlocking. For them, strategy becomes a matter of aligning what … [ Read more ]

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

Business leaders are trained to focus on big, attractive markets, yet some of the most compelling sources of growth come from markets that start out as tiny footholds. Penetrating such foothold markets requires an entirely different approach than the one used for big, established markets. Readers of this article will learn which strategies and tactics work best.

Content: Article | Author: Stephen Wunker | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Strategy