SAS Dares to Win Battle for the Airways

How many times have you heard someone say, “you must listen to your customers in order to succeed?” Scandinavian Airline SAS piloted a scheme that has shown how observing and listening to customers really can lead to successful product development and relationship building.

Life Themes (a.k.a. Sophisticated Selection)

Fast Company offers a 5-part look at the “Life Themes” approach to candidate selection and hiring decisions.
1. How to Hire by wire – [ Read more ]

Inside Job

Want to find one area where Internet technology is delivering more than expected? Look within. Intranets are boosting efficiency and creativity, and changing work patterns. Here are seven steps to the ultimate intranet.

Can This Off-Site Be Saved?

Skip the PowerPoint. Forget the whiteboards and butcher paper. If you want to organize an off-site that is energetic and memorable — an event that actually makes a difference — then follow our seven-point guide.

Digital Matters – Issue 50

First, focus groups were cool. Then they became the loser’s club. Now, thanks to the Web, they’ve become obsolete.

All Shook Up

Why does an entrepreneur reshuffle his entire management team at the peak of his company’s success?

Where is HR When You Need Them?

A look at yet another one of the interesting best practices of the US Marine Corps – this time their practive use of HR.

Automate or Die

Until it attains godlike profitability, reduces costs to zero, and hears the pathetic mewling of its last, defeated competitor, Dell Computer won’t stop remaking its business. Its three-part strategy for ultimate victory? Web, Web, and Web.

Return of the Titans: Traditional Companies Storm the Web

This transcript of a presentation by Denis Nayden of GE Capital discusses how that organization approaches e-business. Offers some interesting insight into large businesses or “titans” and the e-world.

Conditions for Change Assessment

Considering a major change? Identify potential problem areas first with this quick assessment.

10X Value: The Engine Powering Long-term Shareholder Returns

What does it take to grow shareholder value at world-class rates? For many years companies have successfully focused their efforts on cost reduction through increased labor and asset productivity and have achieved short-term increases in shareholder value as a reward. Today, with their businesses re-engineered and running efficiently, these companies have refocused their energies into developing long-term growth strategies. Aggressive revenue-oriented strategies are the most … [ Read more ]

Check Out The Gap

Use this quick quiz to check out your perceptions and intentions vs those of those who report to you. Compare the perceptions; talk about the differences; identify the opportunities; and close the important gaps.

Downsizing: Who Is The Real Loser?

Studies reflect fewer than 30 percent of downsizing efforts have achieved anticipated profitability. This statistic suggests the real downsizing losers are organizations and stockholders.

Steal This Strategy

A 25-employee company, fittingly called Best Practices, routinely plunders big-company ideas and prunes them for its own use. Its methods for doing so are yours for the taking, too

Finding, Examining Lead Users Push 3M to Leading Edge of Innovation

3M has taken the whole “innovation company” thing one step farther. It has found an innovative way to be innovative, applying the Lead User process (developed by Eric von Hippel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management).

Dynamic Competitive Simulation: Wargaming as a Strategic Tool

Drawing on military wargames to simulate battlefield conditions, commercial wargaming simulates a set of business conditions and challenges executives to design successful strategies that are able to evolve with the changing nature of the environment. In a corporate war game, senior managers play their own company, a select group of their competitors and the marketplace. A control team plays all other entities that affect the … [ Read more ]

Process improvement by poka-yoke

Shigeo Shingo is credited with creating the concept of zero defects and the techniques of poka-yoke (Japanese for mistake-proofing). The approach seeks to remove the causes of defects, or, where this is impossible, to inspect each item simply and inexpensively to determine that it passes the quality threshold – with no defects.

Managing the Knowledge Manager

What can be done to ensure that the CKO unlocks a company’s latent potential? To find out, we asked CKOs at various companies for their views about the make-or-break factors. Although the CKOs had different experiences, all concurred that success depends on two things: first, on the ability of senior management to agree about what it hopes to gain from managing knowledge explicitly and from … [ Read more ]

Customer Service: EMC Corp.

Under the leadership of Mike Ruettgers, EMC bounced back from a near-death experience to become one of the “four horsemen of the Internet.” At the heart of EMC’s rise has been its fanatical devotion to customer service. The company has benefited from this critical insight: If you want service to pay off, don’t treat it as a profit center.