1341 Posts Found

The need to focus on soft issues has forced managers to take their eye off the ball and lose sight of the fact that strategy matters more than ever. But these same managers must not only realize that strategy matters, they must develop and deploy tough strategies that will defeat the competition. Today, managers must play to win.

Content: Article | Author: George Stalk Jr. | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Strategy

While the job to be done may look different in every individual company, one basic truth will always be present: every product and every activity of a business begins to obsolesce as soon as it is started. Every product, every operation, and every activity in a business should, therefore, be put on trial for its life every two or three years. Each should be considered … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Although the central challenge facing most business leaders today is the need for change, one-time change isn’t good enough for today’s fast-paced global business environment. High levels of uncertainty and complexity, disruptive technologies, and a premium on speed, choice and innovation all demand a new type of leadership. Business leaders must learn to create an organization with the built-in ability to sense and rapidly adapt … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: William G. Pietersen | Source: Columbia Business School | Subjects: Management, Strategy

In the era of CRM and customer-centric business models, Porter’s approaches do not serve the company adequately, because they do not talk to the issue of competitive advantage that comes from one-to-one relationships.

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Customer Related, Strategy

Strategy must be understood and executed by everyone. The organization must be aligned around its strategy, and performance management systems help create that alignment. Herein lies one of the major causes of poor strategic management. Most performance management systems are designed around the annual budget and operating plan. They promote short-term, incremental, tactical behavior. While this is a necessary part of management, it is not … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Management, Strategy

The forces of globalization, technology, and economic liberalization are combining to make life harder than ever for established companies.

Content: Article | Authors: Bill Huyett, Patrick Viguerie | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: International, Strategy

Many organizations suffer a disconnect between strategy formulation and its execution. The answer? HBS professor Robert S. Kaplan and colleague Andrew Pateman argue for the creation of a new corporate office.

Content: Article | Author: Martha Lagace | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Strategy

Strategically, intrinsic value is not maximized solely by the maximization of Current Operations Value (COV), but by the simultaneous maximization of the sum of its two components–COV and Future Growth Value (FGV), including the value of real options. Ultimately, this requires business leaders to address, in the context of value-based strategy, both the renewal of future growth value through investments in intangibles and the future, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Finance, Strategy

A conscious simplification of Michael Porter’s classic Competitive Strategy, this book treats only one of Porter’s five forces, “potential entrants.” According to the authors (Value Investing), avoiding competition is the only way to escape “a level playing field in which anyone can join… [and] only the best… survive and prosper.” Most of the book discusses ways to gain protected positions from which businesses can be … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: Bruce C. Greenwald, Judd Kahn | Subject: Strategy

Strategy Bites Back is a friendly collection of essays and observations on some of the elements of strategy that intimidate people the most. Even readers who fail to appreciate all of the humor will undoubtedly enjoy paging through the book as a refreshing antidote to the footnote-laden tomes that usually make up the field.

The three authors have done a fine job of pulling together and … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: Bruce Ahlstrand, Henry Mintzberg, Joseph Lampel | Subject: Strategy

Conventional wisdom dictates that businesses invest in their best performing units, and sell, shutter, or siphon off resources from their worst performers. But what if the conventional thinking is wrong? Leading behavioral economists now believe that investing in your “dogs,” or poor performing units, could bring far better returns than investing in your “stars,” or best performing units. It’s a counterintuitive strategy that could lead … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Harry Quarls, Kasturi Rangan, Thomas Pernsteiner | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Finance, Strategy | Industry: Investing

This paper reinterprets the work of Mintzberg and Whittington to characterize the field of strategy as an orthodoxy under sustained challenge. In this analysis, the orthodoxy is underpinned by two related assumptions; the first about the nature of knowledge, which supports the second, about the nature of organizations. Both assumptions are contested, not only in other parts of the strategy literature, but also in their … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jeremy Rose, Stan Elphick | Source: Manchester Metropolitan University | Subject: Strategy

Moral purpose is especially powerful when it prompts leaders to take radical steps that others would not take, and thus change the basis of competition in their industries. That is why moral purpose is a critical, if often unseen, element of strategic breakthroughs. A moral purpose can give a company the collective courage and persistence to strike out from the pack.

A moral purpose’s effectiveness depends … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Nikos Mourkogiannis | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Strategy

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Alliances have become an increasingly important part of corporate strategy. They can be extremely useful in situations of high uncertainty and for growth opportunities that a company either cannot or does not want to pursue on its own. But the advantages of shared risk are often offset by unclear governance and lack of genuine commitment. This report distills lessons about alliance strategy and management drawn … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Alexander Roos, Kees Cools | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Strategy

In the book, Big Winners and Big Losers, Alfred Marcus argues that business books are either agility-based or discipline/focus-based. In Appendix A of the book, Marcus offers a summary of various strategy books in relation to these two camps. 800-CEO-READ has posted the appendix online – very interesting…

Content: Article | Author: Todd Sattersten | Source: 800-CEO-READ (8CR) | Subject: Strategy

Strategy formulation and implementation are critical elements of the small firm’s process of adapting to a changing world. The CEO who hopes to adapt his/her small firm to a changing environment must focus on strategy formulation and implementation. This paper presents theories, concepts, and models that can be used to improve the process of formulating strategies, to determine the content of specific strategies and, to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: John G. Maurer | Source: Wayne State University | Subjects: Small Business, Strategy

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Because design solutions are always matters of invented choice, rather than discovered truth, the judgment of designers is always open to question by the broader public.

…this notion of the inevitable need to justify to others the ‘rightness’ of the design choices made – is perhaps the most significant implication for the design of strategy processes in business organizations. Because strategic choices can never be … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Design, Strategy

Strategic thinking is hypothesis-driven. In an environment of ever-increasing information availability and decreasing time to think, the ability to develop good hypotheses and test them effectively is critical. Strategic thinking is both creative and critical in nature, and figuring out how to accomplish both types of thinking simultaneously has long troubled cognitive psychologists, since it is necessary to suspend critical judgment in order to think … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subject: Strategy