1338 Posts Found

Many organizations have spent decades understanding how to make trade-offs in their businesses, where the profit pools are, and the structure of their value chains. Digital changes all that. First, on an overarching level, digital currently destroys more economic value for incumbents than it creates. There are two main drivers. The first one is that digital creates transparency that allows a much higher percentage of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Laura LaBerge | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Strategy, Trends / Analysis

Resilient founders don’t ask “Which competitor are we scared of?” Instead, it’s “What fully-formed company would be an existential threat to us, whether it exists or not? And if it doesn’t exist, why aren’t we building it?”

Content: Quotation | Author: Bob Moore | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Strategy

I don’t worry about competition, I worry about my own vision being wrong, which creates an opportunity for competition to succeed. If anything, I think we spent too much energy thinking about the noise everyone else was making and not enough thinking about our own place in the real market.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bob Moore | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Competitive Intelligence, Entrepreneurship, Management, Strategy

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Content: Quotation | Author: Buckminister Fuller | Subjects: Change Management, Innovation, Strategy

Dan Lovallo is a professor who works in applying psychology on biases to management topics. A simple test he did at an investment bank showed that if you applied the CEO’s risk tolerance to all the investment decisions made at lower levels rather than the more junior decision makers’ risk tolerance, the decisions would have had a 32 percent better outcome. So, there is this … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Chris Bradley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Risk Management, Strategy

If you want to really drive strategic change in your company, you should be its chief liquidity officer. You can’t move resources that aren’t liquid. In other words, you cannot reallocate if you don’t also de-allocate.

Content: Quotation | Author: Chris Bradley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Often, we think the hard part of strategy is that we have to guess the future. I think the hard part of strategy is busting your own myths. The most important question a strategist can ask is, why do we make the money?

Content: Quotation | Author: Chris Bradley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

The harsh reality of the way we do strategic planning now is, there is a pot of money and we all compete for it. But when we did our research on companies that rose up the power curve, we found that it usually was not the whole company improving but one or two out of ten business units that disproportionately went up. It’s just a … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Chris Bradley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Strategy

It’s extraordinarily important to know what is going to happen next month, what resources need to move, and what initiatives you have to launch. The problem is, that’s a different mode of thinking from strategy. As soon as you put strategy and planning together, planning will always win.

Content: Quotation | Author: Chris Bradley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Planning, Strategy

In The Ends Game, professors Marco Bertini and Oded Koenigsberg explain how companies can help their customers meet goals by rewriting the rules of commerce.

Content: Article | Author: David Lancefield | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Business Model, Marketing / Sales, Strategy

The first big test of strategy is: Does your strategy beat the market? And by that, what we really mean is, did you generate economic profit, which is the evidence that you overcame perfect markets? Because—and perhaps this is a scary flashback to your economics textbooks—in perfect markets there is no economic profit. The residual of market imperfections, or what we call competitive advantages, is … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Chris Bradley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Economics, Strategy

Make or buy? To answer this classic manufacturing question, leading companies avoid the temptation to “feed the beast.” Instead, they focus on their core competencies and keep their long-term strategies in mind.

Content: Article | Authors: Fidel Tamayo, Patrick Van den Bossche | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Operations, Strategy

The seller’s focus on three key interrelated activities—defining, marketing, and disentangling—can help expedite the transfer of divested assets and increase total deal value.

Content: Article | Authors: Anthony Luu, Jamie Koenig, Steve Miller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Nearly every organization is grappling with huge strategic challenges, often with a need to reimagine its very purpose, identity, strategy, business model, and structure. Most of these efforts to transform will fail. And, in most cases, they will miss the mark not because the new strategy is flawed, but because the organization can’t carry it out.

My experience in working and studying corporate transformations points to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael Beer | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

Two worldviews — market positioning and the resource-based view — have dominated how we think about competitive advantage for 40 years.

But the rapid growth of business ecosystems in recent years challenges this thinking. Most of these ecosystem orchestrators, like Google, Alibaba, and Uber, don’t make the things they sell; they exist to link others together, and this makes the old positioning-based logic less relevant. And, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Julian Birkinshaw | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

Improve the odds of a successful business transformation by going “all in” to kick-start performance and remake your portfolio.

Content: Article | Authors: Chris Bradley, Marc de Jong, Wesley Walden | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Strategy

Every kind of for-profit and/or not-for-profit enterprise falls into one of four categories determined by (and named after) their customer promise: the predictable and dependable enterprise delivering consistent, reliable, and dependable products or services; the best-in-class enterprise delivering one-of-a-kind and distinctive products or services; the customized enterprise delivering a unique solution to each customer; or the enrichment enterprise promising fulfillment and the realization of higher-level … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: William E. Schneider | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Management, Strategy

“What time frame should we have for our strategy” is the wrong question. The better question is, “What changes does our strategy need, and how much time do we need to implement them?” In other words, leaders have a five-year strategy if the changes they want to make to their strategy will take five years to implement.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ken Favaro | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Strategy

In a difficult environment, leaders need to resist the impulse to adopt a defensive pose. They must instead take actions that will position their organization for success.

Content: Article | Authors: Heather Swanston, Mohamed Kande, Will Jackson-Moore | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Strategy

What does it take to make a true performance leap? The authors of Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick explain the key strategic levers their analysis has revealed, and how strongly you have to pull them.

Content: Article | Authors: Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, Sean Brown, Sven Smit | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Strategy