Exploring Alternatives to Downsizing

Major changes such as mergers, reengineering, enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), and restructuring often result in downsizing. It doesn’t have to be that way. Here are proven alternatives that can help you cut costs while ensuring the commitment of valued employees.

Peter Drucker

No more than 10 or 15 percent of innovations move up to that founder’s wishes. Another 15, 20, or 30 percent are not disastrous, but not successes either. Five years later they’ll say that this is a nice specialty. You know what that means, don’t you? It means you have to wrap it in a five-dollar bill to give it away. Sixty percent are footnotes … [ Read more ]

Rip the Band-Aid Off Quickly

Too often, management teams that face the daunting challenge of corporate transformation don’t move far enough, fast enough, or broadly enough to truly reposition their businesses. Instead, they implement half-cures that can be worse than the disease: round after round of restructuring, strategic redirection, or layoffs, none of them sufficient to heal the wounds. Author Stan Pace uses powerful examples to show that the companies … [ Read more ]

Design of the Times

Even though the easy-money days for ‘dot-coms’ are gone, here are five ways to still win.

The House that Branson Built: Virgin’s Entry Into the New Millennium

Anyone can make music, but when the orchestral baton rests in the hands of someone like Richard Branson (entrepreneur of the Virgin Group), the resulting sound is more than musical – it’s magical. INSEAD Professor Manfred Kets de Vries examines the inner-workings of this successful entrepreneur and the evolution of Virgin – from one leader to more “systematic” management.

Peter Keen

What I’ve noticed about the really good companies is that the leadership narrows the business model down so that people can see it and make use of it. They can get a sense of direction. They’re all on the same page . . . What we’re seeing in the Speed Economy is the death of the consensus approach to strategy – the approach of the … [ Read more ]

How To Be an Angel Investor

Authors take a look at the basic requirements to succeed in early-stage investing, specifically illustrating the Harvard Framework (called FIT Analysis when I was getting my MBA)

Is Your Company In Synch?

How do you build broad customer relationships when your company is partitioned by product lines, business units, and geography? This Harvard Business Review excerpt urges you to take a tip from your Palm PDA and synchronize.

The Myth of Excellence: Why Great Companies Never Try to Be the Best at Everything

Crawford and Mathews, marketing consultants with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (CGEY) and FirstMatter, respectively, break down marketing into five attributes: access, experience, price, product, and service. They argue that successful businesses are those that excel in one of these areas, are good in another, and are at least average in the rest. Wal-Mart, they say, is dominant on price and maintains a good selection … [ Read more ]

In Pursuit of Growth and Profits

To grow and consistently exceed profit expectations businesses need to understand and apply the eight business basics of profitable growth.

Why Knowledge Programs Fail: A C.E.O.’s Guide to Managing Learning

Senior executives at many of the largest corporations around the world have embraced knowledge or learning as part of their long-term vision. A focus on knowledge and learning makes sense: knowledge is increasingly an important source of competitive advantage. However, the business impact of most knowledge management or learning organization programs is modest at best. We estimate that about one-sixth of these programs … [ Read more ]

Escalation Dominance

This article takes a look at managing growth in military terms, specifically focusing on sales strategy. It offers the following interlocking elements to planning and execution:
1. Identify Objectives (Strategy)
2. Target Acquisition (Intelligence)
3. Mission Planning (Logistics and Support)
4. Mission Preparation (Training)
5. Deployment (Attack)
6. After-Action Reports and Assessment … [ Read more ]

The Competitive e-Vantage

“There are three major buckets into which CEOs can dump their IT resources. The first bucket is external initiatives, which cover creating programs for, or integrating with, trading partners. Next are internal initiatives, which involve creating programs for internal resources or integrating disparate internal systems. The third bucket is reengineering the organization by realigning skill sets and processes that better position you to do business … [ Read more ]

Harvard Management Update – Fending Off a Giant

Burning Questions 2001 brought together 21 of the top thinkers and practitioners in the field of management to address the most critical challenges businesses face right now. At the conference, this panel of experts offered recommendations about how to respond to the entrance of a large competitor into your market space. We’ve compiled and edited their responses for you to download with our compliments. This … [ Read more ]