1338 Posts Found

Governance design — which defines who gets to make decisions and allocate resources — is often too complicated or unclear to be effective. For a strategy to be successful, those closest to the most relevant information, budgets, and problems are the best equipped to make decisions. When leaders have proximity to an issue but no authority, authority without the needed resources, or control of the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jarrod Shappell, Ron Carucci | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Strategy

The ways leading companies manage time—in production, in new product development and introduction, in sales and distribution—represent the most powerful new sources of competitive advantage.

Editor’s Note: This is a classic HBR article that was assigned reading when I was a student. It has held up pretty well 35 years on.

Content: Article | Author: George Stalk Jr. | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Operations, Strategy

Driving sustainable, inclusive growth requires the right mindset, strategy, and capabilities. Here are some steps that could help foster successful growth.

Content: Article | Authors: Andre Gaeta, Biljana Cvetanovski, Erik Roth, Greg Kelly, Ishaan Seth, Jill Zucker, Michael Birshan, Rebecca Doherty, Tjark Freundt | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

At most companies, strategic choices are limited to three options:

1. Seeking coexistence with competitors. This choice is seldom stable, since competitors refuse to cooperate and stay put.
2. Retreating in the face of competitors. Many companies choose this course; the business press fills its pages with accounts of companies retreating by consolidating plants, focusing their operations, out-sourcing, divesting businesses, pulling out of markets, or moving upscale.
3. Attacking, either

… [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: George Stalk Jr. | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

Today’s new-generation companies compete with flexible manufacturing and rapid-response systems, expanding variety and increasing innovation. A company that builds its strategy on this cycle is a more powerful competitor than one with a traditional strategy based on low wages, scale, or focus. These older, cost-based strategies require managers to do whatever is necessary to drive down costs: move production to or source from a low-wage … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: George Stalk Jr. | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Operations, Strategy

Avoiding price competition by moving into higher margin products is called margin retreat—a common response to stepped-up competition that eventually leads to corporate suicide. As a company retreats, its costs rise as do its prices, thus “subsidizing” an aggressive competitor’s expansion into the vacated position. The retreating company’s revenue base stops growing and may eventually shrink to the point where it can no longer support … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: George Stalk Jr. | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

Today’s more uncertain environment calls for newer, more dynamic approaches to risk management and strategic planning. Successful companies foster a culture of strategic humility, anticipatory preparedness, and a willingness to act to own the future as it unfolds. And they have four critical characteristics:

• They see risk as a two-sided coin with challenge on one side and opportunity on the other.
• They explore the strategic implications of

… [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Alan Iny, Elton Parker, Jeanne Kwong Bickford, Nick D’Intino | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Risk Management, Strategy

One useful way to think about the relationship between culture and strategy is that an effective culture can provide a competitive advantage for a very long time, often much longer than any strategy. This is a particular advantage in a world in which some claim that strategy today confers only short-term competitive advantage.

Content: Quotation | Author: James L. Heskett | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

Three out of every five companies rate their organization as weak on strategy execution. When you dig into the potential barriers to implementation, there is a general lack of understanding of the various factors at play, resulting in the inevitable managerial justifications — “poor leadership,” “inadequate talent,” “lack of process excellence,” etc. This article suggests three key steps to build the right execution system: 1) … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Darko Lovric, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

Before companies can benefit from collaborations, they must be clear about their role.

Content: Article | Author: Michael G. Jacobides | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Strategy

Strategies rarely say much about specific operations. In fact, when a strategy is complete, there are usually many questions left to be answered: what do you want me to do? by when? how much will this cost? do we have the budget? do I have clearance to hire extra people? what IT changes are needed? what can be outsourced? what new skills will we need? … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Andrew Campbell, Mikel Gutierrez | Source: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subject: Strategy

An organization is nothing more than a living embodiment of a strategy. That means its “organizational hardware” (i.e., structures, processes, technologies, and governance) and its “organizational software” (i.e., values, norms, culture, leadership, and employee skills and aspirations) must be designed exclusively in the service of a specific strategy. Research suggests that only 10% of organizations are successful at aligning their strategy with their organization design. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jarrod Shappell, Ron Carucci | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Strategy

A business ecosystem is a dynamic group of largely independent economic players that create products or services that together constitute a coherent solution.

This definition implies that each ecosystem can be characterized by a specific value proposition (the desired solution) and by a clearly defined, albeit changing, group of actors with different roles (such as producer, supplier, orchestrator, complementor). The definition excludes some of the more … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Martin Reeves, Maximilian Schüssler, Ulrich Pidun | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Business Model, General, Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

Marketplace businesses can be messy, and every gain is hard earned. After all, you’re dealing with an ecosystem of participants — buyers and sellers — that’s constantly in flux, their needs and desires changing over time. Unfolding in both online transactions and offline interactions, marketplaces are organic and dynamic.

Marketplace leaders need to be experts in the dynamics of their platforms. Identify those dynamics in … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jonathan Golden | Source: Medium | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy

This essay presents the findings from a six month marketplace research project. There has been a lot written about online marketplaces and the goal was to test these theories by exploring data from a broader set of companies. The authors started by making a list of every marketplace founded, identifying 4,500 companies in total, then collected public data to classify and compare these companies

Content: Article | Author: Eli Chait | Subject: Strategy

Marketplace businesses… They always seem great on paper, but it’s so insanely hard to solve the chicken or the egg problem. Every founder I meet who’s building a marketplace business basically says the same thing: “It’s so much harder than I thought to build a two-sided marketplace.“ But of course it can be done. There are plenty of examples of success. What I’ve noticed in the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Josh Breinlinger | Source: A Crowded Space | Subjects: Business Model, Strategy

Strategic clarity requires … understanding what it will take to execute the strategy. The first step is to clearly identify the essential organizational capabilities that the new strategy will require… The second step is to know if these capabilities are something you can be expected to build.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Darko Lovric, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

Many leaders think their strategy is “right” but lament that implementation is the problem. We have yet to meet a single leader who reports that their strategy is wrong but they are excellent at execution.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Darko Lovric, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

Author and academic Richard Rumelt explains how to develop strategies that aim to solve problems rather than simply state ambitions.

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Richard Rumelt, Yuval Atsmon | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

Vijay Govindarajan, Ashish Sood, Anup Srivastava, Luminita Enache, and Barry Mishra have found that companies must focus relentlessly on building long-term competencies, even if doing so reduces immediate profits. Nonetheless, it is vital to shift focus when your product or idea becomes unexpectedly successful, so that you can milk that opportunity’s profits before it vanishes in the face of competition and technological progress.

Content: Article | Authors: Anup Srivastava, Ashish Sood, Barry Mishra, Luminita Enache, Vijay Govindarajan | Source: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subject: Strategy