1338 Posts Found

This content is restricted to site members. Please log in or register

Fixed costs turn growth into profit. But they can also turn declines into big losses. Variabilization—transforming your fixed costs into variable ones—offers an attractive alternative. A variabilized cost structure is responsive, adapting rapidly to both increases and decreases in demand. Many companies are doing more than variabilize their own costs, they are developing and offering “variabilization solutions” to their customers. This trend suggests that the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Nicolas Kachaner | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Finance, Management, Operations, Strategy

In highly effective companies there is a commitment to aligning stated beliefs with actual choices. In this article we’ll consider a company’s strategic planning process to look at how the gap works in many ways to weaken capability. We’ll diagnose problems in the traditional planning process. Finally, we’ll recommend a positive approach that leaders can take to reduce the gap.st

Content: Article | Author: Daniel D. Elash, Ph.D. | Subject: Strategy

This BCG Report summarizes our recent research into how leading companies are adapting their strategy development processes to today’s increasingly unpredictable competitive environment. Based on 100 executive interviews, we found that they are stretching their time horizons to give the short, medium, and long term each its due. Stretching their thinking with new techniques to boost creativity and insight. And stretching their engagement models to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Camille Saussois, Michael S. Deimler, Nicolas Kachaner | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Strategy

The traditional approach to strategy requires precise predictions and thus often leads executives to underestimate uncertainty. This can be downright dangerous. A four-level framework can help.

Content: Article | Authors: Hugh Courtney, Jane Kirkland, Patrick Viguerie | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

When developing business strategies, it is wise to think about “frictions,” the forces that make it difficult for buyers and sellers to connect. Those elements — location, convenience or lack of information — help explain how different firms, such as a small local retailer and a national store, can coexist in the marketplace, according to research by Wharton management professor Olivier Chatain and an INSEAD … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Olivier Chatain, Peter Zemsky | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Strategy

When large companies are organized in the traditional division structure, strategic decisions too often fall to managers under pressure to meet budgetary demands. Success in one unit masks underperformance in others, while ventures that promise strong future growth go underfunded because they don’t contribute to short-term bottom-line numbers.

One way to shake things up is to review the strategy and performance-management processes and to make decisions … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Felix Wenger, Massimo Giordano | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

For niche companies, years of growth can quickly turn into losses when facing industry consolidation, and a wobbly economy is only increasing the peril. As Fritz Kroeger, Andrej Vizjak and Mike Moriarty write in this adaptation of their recent book, Beating the Global Consolidation Endgame: Nine Strategies for Winning in Niches (McGraw-Hill, 2008), long-term success is reserved for niche companies that truly understand the playing … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Andrej Vizjak, Fritz Kroeger, Mike Moriarty | Source: Kearney | Subject: Strategy

In this interactive presentation—one in a series of multimedia frameworks—McKinsey alumnus Kevin Coyne describes how companies can use the business system to evaluate their choices at each stage in the process of creating and delivering products. Aligning conduct at every step with the company’s value proposition creates a truly integrated business strategy.

Content: Article | Author: Kevin Coyne | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Strategy

In one of a series of interactive presentations, McKinsey director emeritus John Stuckey comments on SCP, a framework that illustrates the influence of an industry’s structure on the conduct and performance of industry players, and the effects of external shocks on all three.

Content: Article | Author: John Stuckey | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

Why do so many global strategies fail – despite companies’ powerful brands and other border-crossing advantages? Seduced by market size, the illusion of a borderless, “flat” world, and the allure of similarities, firms launch one-size-fits-all strategies. But cross-border differences are larger than we often assume, explains Pankaj Ghemawat in “Redefining Global Strategy”. Most economic activity – including direct investment, tourism, and communication – happens locally, … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Pankaj Ghemawat | Subjects: International, Strategy

In the first in a series of interactive presentations, McKinsey examines 7-S, a framework introduced to address the critical role of coordination, rather than structure, in organizational effectiveness.

Content: Article | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

The term “new business model” has an enticing ring to it, as it refers to a new and supposedly better way of making money. Ryanair, McDonald’s, IKEA and Amazon are examples that come to mind immediately. Admirable as these may be, they are also so extraordinary that they provide little guidance to executives on how to establish new ways of making money within their own … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Henri de Bodinat, Herman Vantrappen, Michael Ungerath | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subjects: Management, Strategy

In one of a series of interactive presentations, McKinsey director Rob Latoff offers insight into the industry cost curve, a business school classic for understanding pricing. By bringing discipline and a practical set of definitions to bear, this framework can be applied to real-world, competitive markets.

Content: Article | Author: Rob Latoff | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Economics, Pricing, Strategy

Existing strategy frameworks are designed for bigger firms with plentiful resources. They should not be liberally borrowed and advanced as solutions for SMEs, who face resource constraint. This very lack of resources impacts the competitive strategies that are feasible to SMEs. What’s more, the current literature in SME strategy fails to take into consideration potential competitive reactions from market incumbents in prescribing competitive strategies for … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Lee Khai Sheang, Lim Guan Hua, Tan Soo Jiuan | Subjects: Small Business, Strategy

There’s a scene in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass in which the Red Queen, having just led a chase with Alice in which neither seems to have moved from the spot where they began, explains to the perplexed girl: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Evolutionary biologists have used this scene to illustrate the evolutionary arms … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: William P. Barnett | Subject: Strategy

Creating sustainable improvements to a company’s cost structure requires three elements: choosing the right business model, determining how decisions will be made and putting the decisions into action. When improving their cost structure, many companies jump directly to action; however, the results are generally disappointing and, even if they are acceptable, usually hard to sustain.

Deloitte Consulting LLP’s three-part series, Three Steps to Sustainable and Scalable … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jean-Emmanuel Biondi, Omar Aguilar | Source: Deloitte | Subject: Strategy

An estimated 20,000 corporate alliances have been formed worldwide over the past two years. Such strategic alliances can provide business owners with long-term security, new revenue channels, and, often, the anchor needed to maintain stability in otherwise turbulent waters.

A successful joint venture can open the door to a world of future partnership opportunities, says renowned entrepreneur Robert Wallace. In Strategic Partnerships: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Robert L. Wallace | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Strategy

Scenario planning aims to prepare you for your next crisis, whatever it may be.

Content: Article | Author: Constance Gustke | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Achieving competitive success through people involves fundamentally altering how we think about the workforce and the employment relationship. It means achieving success by working with people, not by replacing them or limiting the scope of their activities. It entails seeing the workforce as a source of strategic advantage, not just as a cost to be minimized or avoided. Firms that take this different perspective are … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jeffrey Pfeffer | Source: Academy of Management Executive | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Strategy