1338 Posts Found

It’s easier than ever to enter into, and successfully monitor, partnerships, and to outsource even core corporate functions to outside players. Intermediaries and brokers are less important. As a result, the transaction costs of doing business outside corporate walls are falling, which means that the economic case for the traditional big corporation (which exists in large part because of its ability to coordinate production with … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: James Surowiecki, Thomas Ramge, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Economics, IT / Technology / E-Business, Strategy

Good strategy is good storytelling. People tend to overcomplicate it, but it’s actually quite simple. Strategy is outlining the things you are going to do to get where you need to go. I stress a lot around telling human stories. A good strategist should be able to say in 30 seconds what we’re doing for our users.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jiaona Zhang | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Strategy

Three new kinds of capital give companies a new source of leverage and power.

Content: Article | Authors: John Sviokla, Kelly Barnes, Miles Everson | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Strategy

If you base your strategy on analyzing the past, then you are implicitly making the assumption that the future will be identical to the past. Because it’s based on rigorous analysis—and you’ve been taught in business school that rigorous analysis is correct—then you will not be ready for the future to end up looking different than the past, and you’re more likely to stick with … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

Adopting a blue ocean perspective can allow you to reach beyond your existing industry’s customers.

Content: Article | Authors: Mi Ji, Renée Mauborgne, W. Chan Kim | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Strategy

In 1998, BCG published its first Value Creators Report, which ranked the top corporations on the basis of the value they’d created over the previous five years and also attempted to draw out lessons from the winners. Since then, they have expanded their databases, refined their methodologies, and shared their perspectives annually. For the 20th report, they have now reassessed their cumulative experience and distilled … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Alexander Roos, Ed Newman, Eric Olsen, Eric Wick, Gerry Hansell, Hady Farag, Jeff Kotzen | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Strategy

Strategy is a competitive game, which always evolves in response to competition. But the magnitude of the changes in the technological, social, and natural environment are such that corporate strategy will need to be qualitatively reinvented again for new circumstances. This article discusses six factors are driving these changes: 1) dynamism, 2) uncertainty, 3) contingency, 4) connectedness, 5) contextuality, and 6) cognition.

Content: Article | Authors: Annelies O’Dea, Martin Reeves | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

Drawing on the insights gleaned from three years of ecosystem research, BCG offers a step-by-step framework for developing an incumbent company’s ecosystem strategy.

Content: Article | Authors: Balázs Zoletnik, Martin Reeves, Ulrich Pidun | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Strategy

If the best way to predict the future is to invent it, the second-best way is to finance it.

Content: Quotation | Author: John Doerr | Subjects: Innovation, Strategy

Empirical research reveals what it takes to generate value-creating growth today.

Content: Article | Authors: Chris Bradley, Nicholas Northcote, Rebecca Doherty, Tido Röder | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

A fresh take on the classic theme of generic business strategies.

Content: Article | Authors: Afonso Almeida Costa, Peter B. Zemsky | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Strategy

Competitive strategy involves positioning a business to maximize the value of the capabilities that distinguish it from its competitors. It follows that a central aspect of strategy formulation is perceptive competitor analysis.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael E. Porter | Subjects: Competitive Intelligence, Strategy

Map and understand the larger system in which you operate. Businesses operate within larger economic, social, and environmental systems, which have feedback loops in both directions — businesses’ actions affect the larger systems, and vice versa. Though predicting the exact behavior of such systems is rarely feasible, leaders can improve their understanding by explicitly mapping out the most impactful forces (accelerators or inhibitors of the system’s workings) … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Kevin Whitaker, Martin Reeves | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Business strategy has traditionally considered only a narrow set of issues (such as customer needs, operating model effectiveness, and competitive advantage), a limited range of timescales (most notably the annual planning process), and a limited number of stakeholders (customers, employees, and competitors). Such simplification may have made sense when contextual change was slow, and when the only expectation of businesses was that they would aim … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Kevin Whitaker, Martin Reeves | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Strategy

Enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects.

Content: Quotation | Author: David Kelley | Subjects: Management, Planning, Strategy

How do you know whether you have a good strategy? That’s a trick question, says Stanford Graduate School of Business professor of organizational behavior Jesper Sørensen. In his class Crafting and Leading Strategy, Sørensen teaches that strategy is constantly evolving, and that leaders can use it effectively by constantly showing how daily tasks support a strategy.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Jesper Sørensen | Source: Stanford University | Subject: Strategy

Business ecosystems are on the rise. In 2000, just three among the S&P top 100 global companies relied predominantly on ecosystem business models. In 2020 this number had grown to 22 companies, which together accounted for 40% of total market capitalization.

It is no wonder that many leaders of established companies are afraid of missing out on this trend and feel compelled to come up with … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Balázs Zoletnik, Martin Reeves, Ulrich Pidun | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Business Model, Strategy

I learned some useful things … though they were mostly about what not to do. I learned that it’s better for technology companies to be run by product people than sales people (though sales is a real skill and people who are good at it are really good at it), that it leads to bugs when code is edited by too many people, that cheap … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

It is widely acknowledged that business ecosystems offer great potential. Compared to more traditionally organized businesses, such as vertically integrated companies or hierarchical supply chains, business ecosystems are praised for their ability to foster innovation, scale quickly, and adapt to changing environments.

However, many companies that try to build their own ecosystems struggle to realize this potential. Our research has shown that less than 15% of … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Martin Reeves, Niklas Knust, Ulrich Pidun | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Business Model, Strategy

If designing a traditional business model is like planning and building a house, designing an ecosystem is more like developing a whole residential district: more complex, more players to coordinate, more layers of interaction and unintended emergent outcomes.

What makes ecosystem design distinctive is that it requires a true system perspective. It is not sufficient to design the value creation and delivery model; the design must … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Martin Reeves, Ulrich Pidun | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Business Model, Strategy