Today’s good to great: Next-generation operational excellence

Is tech accelerating your business operations—or getting in the way? To get lasting value from their tech investments, business leaders need a renewed understanding of operational excellence.

The smart moves your supply chain needs now

To navigate global supply shocks, companies must build resiliency while repositioning for growth.

Time—The Next Source of Competitive Advantage

The ways leading companies manage time—in production, in new product development and introduction, in sales and distribution—represent the most powerful new sources of competitive advantage.

Editor’s Note: This is a classic HBR article that was assigned reading when I was a student. It has held up pretty well 35 years on.

A better way to drive your business

Integrated business planning is a well-known process, particularly among supply chain leaders. But in most companies, P&L owners are missing out.

Designing Omni-Channel Retailing to Align Financial Performance with Strategy

Sunil Chopra describes how looking at combinations of product and channel through the lens of return on invested capital (ROIC) allows retailers to design omni-channel portfolios that align their products, service offerings, and pricing. By using each channel to improve invested capital turns or broaden profit margin, these portfolios increase the company’s value. 

How to Win Against Counterfeiters

Online fakers are coming after everybody—but even the small and scrappy can fight back.

Building an R&D Strategy for Modern Times

The age of the insular R&D organization is over. To serve as a company’s innovation engine, R&D strategy needs to be equipped for today’s fast-moving world.

An End-to-End Perspective on Field Service Optimization

Optimizing service after the sale in the world of physical goods can have a significant impact on reducing field service costs.

Make vs. Buy Revisited

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.

Making Supplier Relationships Work

Kearney offers nine ways to interact with suppliers, identifying formulas that characterize true supplier relationship management.

5 Steps to Get a Handle on Operations in Times of Crisis

Jaume Ribera breaks down the life cycle of a crisis into five stages and explores the challenges and opportunities each stage presents.

Technology + Operations: A Flywheel for Performance Improvement

New automation techniques can provide the first step toward continuous, tech-enabled redesign of critical operations—forming an intuitive ops-to-tech cycle in which tech improves ops, and vice versa.

Performance Management: Why Keeping Score Is So Important, and So Hard

The elements of a good performance-management system are simple, but integrating them into a business’s fundamental operating system is more difficult than it seems.

Seven Rules for Spinning Analytics Straw into Golden Results

While IoT-enabled advanced analytics could be worth trillions to manufacturers, turning insights into outcomes requires more than just the right technology.

Ops 4.0: Fueling the Next 20 Percent Productivity Rise with Digital Analytics

Business needs to raise productivity more than ever. Thanks to innovations in digitization and analytics, four new methodologies can yield the productivity breakthroughs organizations need.

More from Less: Making Resources More Productive

For industrial manufacturers, resources remain a huge financial and managerial cost. A change in perspective can lead to real breakthroughs in reducing resource consumption.

Weak Links in the Chain

Flexible, adaptive supply chain management is an overlooked but vital component of a company’s overall innovation strategy.

What Really Happens When Companies Nix Performance Ratings

An ever-growing number of companies continue to discover that de-emphasizing ratings in favor of ongoing quality conversations that support employee development is showing itself to be a viable option. At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we’ve conducted in-depth research with 33 of these 52 companies to find out what really happens when companies remove performance ratings. Here are some of our high-level findings.