1341 Posts Found

The vultures are circling. ‘Strategy, as we knew it, is dead,’ proclaims Walt Shill, head of Accenture’s North American consulting practice. A January 25 Wall Street Journal article quotes him explaining, ‘Corporate clients decided that increased flexibility and accelerated decision-making are much more important than simply predicting the future.’ A recent white paper from the Boston Consulting Group hung similar crepe. In its research on … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Walter Kiechel | Source: ChangeThis | Subject: Strategy

Three distinct types of agility—strategic, portfolio, and operational—help companies compete. Each of them has its own sources and dangers.

Content: Article | Author: Donald Sull | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Strategy

Competition typically focuses on one of two dimensions—either functionality, as in speed, reliability, or power; or convenience, such as ease of use or customization. Whichever is more valuable to the customer is the basis of competition in a market at that time. Dominating a market is a function of delivering more of the kinds of performance that matter to customers than your competitors can. The … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Daniel Littmann, Michael E. Raynor | Source: Optimize Magazine | Subjects: Competition, Strategy

Dave Schappell, founder and CEO of TeachStreet, talks about his company’s transition from a free to a paid service, and shares five tips that may help other startups make the leap as well.

Content: Article | Author: Dave Schappell | Source: TechCrunch | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Marketing / Sales, Strategy

Chris Kimble taught a MBA course on Information Systems and Strategy for the past few years in the Euromed Marseille School of Management, World Med MBA Program. It will no longer feature in the MBA but all of the web pages and lecture notes are still there on-line for your use.

Content: Online Resource | Author: Chris Kimble | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, MBA Related, Strategy

Moving into adjacent markets is a common step among companies that have grown as much as they can in their home markets and wish to sustain high growth rates. However, many companies underestimate the difficulties involved, and the historical record is littered with cases of otherwise successful companies failing in adjacent markets. We explore the questions that companies considering adjacent entry need to ask and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Daniel Deneffe, Gregory Venters, Julie Vandermeersch | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subject: Strategy

Plotting the structure of industries across markets and geographies reveals a startling and increasing inequality in size and performance among even the largest companies.

What emerges is a “power curve” pattern characterized by a short “head,” comprising a few companies with extremely large incomes, and quickly dropping off to a long “tail” of significantly smaller competitors.

These power curves can be a useful diagnostic tool for understanding … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michele Zanini | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

In the third of three podcasts on strategy as simple rules Donald Sull, Associate Professor of Management Practice, discusses the five common pitfalls that are likely to derail strategy as simple rules in organisations.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Donald Sull | Source: London Business School | Subject: Strategy

In the second of three podcasts on strategy as simple rules Donald Sull, Associate Professor of Management Practice in Strategic and International Management, explains what simple rules are and how managers can make them work in their organizations.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Donald Sull | Source: London Business School | Subject: Strategy

How do firms compete? How do firms earn above normal returns? What’s needed to sustain superior performance long term? An increasingly powerful answer to these fundamental questions of business strategy lies in the concept of dynamic capabilities. These are the skills, processes, routines, organizational structures, and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ, and orchestrate intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs, and which cannot … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: David J. Teece | Subject: Strategy

In the first of three podcasts on strategy as simple rules Donald Sull, Associate Professor of Management Practice in Strategic and International Management, elaborates on the three core logics of value creation.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Donald Sull | Source: London Business School | Subject: Strategy

Commoditization-a virulent form of hypercompetition-is destroying markets, disrupting industries, and shuttering long-successful firms. Conventional wisdom says the best way to combat commoditization is differentiation. But differentiation is difficult and expensive to implement, and keeps you ahead of the pack only temporarily.

In Beating the Commodity Trap, Richard D’Aveni provides a radical new framework for fighting back. Drawing on an in-depth study of more than thirty industries, … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Richard A. D’Aveni | Subject: Strategy

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com and author of Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, introduces a lesson on how to rally employees around a unified plan from Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

Content: Article | Authors: Chip Heath, Dan Heath, Tony Hsieh | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Strategy | Company: America Latina Logistica (ALL)

Companies adapt to rapid changes in competitive markets by introducing variation into their products and internal routines. They select the most promising variations through stage gates, portfolio management, pilots, or full-scale tests. And they amplify and embed their successes through resource allocation, internal or external competition, and specialization. These activities are fine-tuned through modulation—the locus of strategic intent in the process—in response to the environment, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Martin Reeves, Michael Deimler, Yves Morieux | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Strategy

In what amounts to a vigorous defense of management consultants, Kiechel explains how business became an intellectual endeavor over the last half century, maturing from commonsense practice to theory-driven discipline, and how ideas now underpin the way corporations function today. “What companies didn’t have before the strategy revolution,” he writes, “was a way of systematically putting together all the elements that determined their corporate fate.”

In … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Walter Kiechel | Subjects: Consulting / Analytical Tools, Industry Specific, Strategy | Industry: Consulting

The third in his series on strategy and its discontents, Don Sull talks about how to put the notion of a strategy loop into practice in an organization.

This podcast builds upon the first and second podcasts which rejected the linear view of strategy and then suggested an alternative view of strategy as a loop or an iterative process.

Sull explains that there are many things that … [ Read more ]

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Donald Sull | Source: London Business School | Subject: Strategy

Obsessing about your competitors, trying to match or best their offerings, spending time each day wanting to know what they are doing, and/or measuring your company against them—these activities have no great or winning outcome. Instead you are simply prohibiting your company from finding its own way to be truly meaningful to its Clients, staff and prospects. You block your company from finding its own … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Howard Mann | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Management, Strategy

As products evolve into commodities, services become more important. But companies that play this new game must understand its rules.

Content: Article | Authors: Byron G. Auguste, Eric P. Harmon, Vivek Pandit | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

A good strategy starts with a comparable knowledge of how your company is situated along three critical dimensions—costs, customers, and competition.

Content: Quotation | Author: Walter Kiechel | Source: ChangeThis | Subject: Strategy

BCG has developed an analytical framework—the Global Advantage Diamond—for assessing a company’s current market position and devising strategies to achieve global competitive advantage. The Global Advantage Diamond differs from previous global-strategy models in its focus on all four aspects of global advantage: market access to reach new markets and segments, resource access to maximize competitive advantage, local adaptation to meet the full range of needs … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Arindam Bhattacharya, Bernd Waltermann, Jim Hemerling | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: International, Strategy