Cynthia Montgomery

I’m trying to get people excited about being strategists and to see why it’s a distinctive way that they as leaders can add value to their businesses. I’m also trying to help them understand that strategy is far more than an idea. There’s a conundrum you sometimes hear in business school: “Would you rather have a brilliant, fully worked-out strategy and poor execution, or a … [ Read more ]

Managing the Unthinkable: Scenario-Based Enterprise Performance Management

The more unpredictable business becomes, the more companies could use a dependable way to identify opportunities, formulate scenarios and avoid pitfalls without relying disproportionately on hindsight. Scenario-based enterprise performance management, a forward-looking, analytics-based capability, is designed to help organizations build strategies, forecasts, plans and budgets.

Your Strategy Needs a Strategy

Companies operating in dissimilar environments should be developing their strategies in markedly different ways. But all too often, they are not. Research featured in Harvard Business Review shows how companies can gain an edge by matching their strategic style to the conditions of their industry, business function, or geographic market.

David Teece

Unless you have truly fundamental inventions that no one else can copy, you need both [intellectual property rights and dynamic capabilities]. Strong intellectual property protection, in itself, will only help you on the first round of innovation. During that time, you can rent other people’s complementary capabilities. But sooner or later, you’re going to get copied, so you’ve got to move quickly to build the … [ Read more ]

Beating the Odds in Market Entry

How to avoid the cognitive biases that undermine market entry decisions.

Seven Ways to Make Your Strategic Planning Relevant

Planning and performance management systems can be designed to reinforce your most distinctive capabilities—not undermine them.

Thomas Kratzert, Michael Broquist

An effective strategy framework must include the level of industry predictability as a main dimension.

Ira Gaberman and Marieke Witjes

Getting the right mix of strategy and culture creates a formula for business success. Pursuing a strategy of innovation in a dynamic market can only succeed within an inquisitive culture where the workforce pushes boundaries and management encourages new ideas and constructive risk-taking. Similarly, pursuing a strategy of high-volume, low-cost processes can only succeed within a disciplined culture where the workforce operates in an efficient, … [ Read more ]

Hugo Sarrazin and Johnson Sikes

Success in the software industry has long been influenced, and often driven, by the ecosystem of developers, plug-ins, software-development kits and application-programming interfaces (APIs), and add-ons that drive added value and increase stickiness for products. Similarly, companies in other industries need to think expansively and include upstream suppliers as well as downstream vendors or consumers, and focus on how each part of the value chain … [ Read more ]

How Strategists Lead

A Harvard Business School professor reflects on what she has learned from senior executives about the unique value that strategic leaders can bring to their companies.

Michael E. Raynor, Heather A. Gray

Strategy is defined by the trade-offs you exploit, while innovation is defined by the trade-offs you break.

Hyundai’s Capabilities Play

The Korean automaker’s explosive growth in the last few years—achieved through better quality, stylish design, and clever marketing—has made it a dynamic player in the U.S. auto industry.

Michael Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed

Changes in absolute performance can be misleading: Declines might not signal that anything needs fixing, just as increases might not mean you’re doing anything right. Instead, the key to long-term survival seems to lie in knowing when material change is required in order to preserve one’s relative performance position.

Henry Chesbrough

Professor Michael Porter’s work was very powerful and influential in the ‘80s and the ‘90s about strategy. It was really a model, you could say, of closed innovation where you figure out what your key strategic assets were and you either went low cost or went for differentiation or you found a niche. You were constantly looking for ways to compete against the other guy. … [ Read more ]

How Ready Are You for Growth?

A Booz & Company study reveals that only 17 percent of companies are poised for a profitable future.

Choosing Between Acquisition or Joint Venture

Both international joint ventures (IJVs) and acquisitions facilitate the entry of companies into new markets and business domains. They also expose firms to significant risk. How do executives weigh decisions about which governance approach is best, particularly in emerging markets like China where information may be limited? A team of professors led a study to better understand how to make these strategic decisions.