To Accelerate Growth, Analyze Your Company Like an Investor

Private equity (PE) firms have a proven approach to identify areas for revenue growth, value creation, and cost reduction: due diligence. But companies rarely use this same approach in the execution of their own growth strategy. This is a missed opportunity. The same due diligence skills and tools can be found in most large companies, but they are usually siloed in the corporate development team … [ Read more ]

Ten questions for a winning climate-transition business strategy

The move to a low-carbon economy will create opportunities for innovation and growth. To make the most of them, leaders must understand the challenges they could face along the way.

3 Ways to Clearly Communicate Your Company’s Strategy

For all the communication around strategy, we know that leaders at many companies don’t provide the necessary context for employees to understand what the words and sentences in a strategy statement actually mean. What can leaders do to help employees understand enough context to understand a strategy? In this article, the authors offer three ideas.

Five paths to TSR outperformance

It’s hard for companies to significantly beat long-term market TSR, harder still for the largest corporations, and hardest of all in the face of low growth. But industry endowment needn’t be destiny.

Your Strategy Needs a Story

Business strategy is usually born of a highly rational process, grounded in facts and analysis. Storytelling, often associated with fiction and entertainment, may seem like the antithesis of strategy. But the two are not incompatible. A clever strategy on paper is only the starting point for engaging those who will implement it. Strategies must also be communicated and understood — and they must motivate action. … [ Read more ]

The portfolio management imperative and its M&A implications

Several trends are creating a new imperative for strong portfolio management of businesses. Companies need six capabilities to build and manage a winning portfolio, using M&A strategically.

How Companies Can Speed Up the Business of Business Building

New ventures often fail—but digital capabilities change the odds. By following a business-building playbook based on your company’s strategic assets, you can accelerate growth dramatically.

Cracking the growth code: The ten rules of growth explained

Experts behind the rules of value-creating growth discuss how leaders can apply these insights to their growth strategies.

Growth rules: Which matter most?

Ten rules should guide how companies select pathways to profitable growth, but each rule’s impact on performance varies considerably.

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.

Choosing to grow: The leader’s blueprint

Driving sustainable, inclusive growth requires the right mindset, strategy, and capabilities. Here are some steps that could help foster successful growth.

Uniting Strategy and Risk Management to Seize Opportunity in Uncertainty

Today’s more uncertain environment calls for newer, more dynamic approaches to risk management and strategic planning. Successful companies foster a culture of strategic humility, anticipatory preparedness, and a willingness to act to own the future as it unfolds. And they have four critical characteristics:

  • They see risk as a two-sided coin with challenge on one side and opportunity on the other.
  • They explore the strategic implications of

[ Read more ]

How to Move from Strategy to Execution

Three out of every five companies rate their organization as weak on strategy execution. When you dig into the potential barriers to implementation, there is a general lack of understanding of the various factors at play, resulting in the inevitable managerial justifications — “poor leadership,” “inadequate talent,” “lack of process excellence,” etc. This article suggests three key steps to build the right execution system: 1) … [ Read more ]

Ecosystems for the rest of us

Before companies can benefit from collaborations, they must be clear about their role.

Design Your Organization to Match Your Strategy

An organization is nothing more than a living embodiment of a strategy. That means its “organizational hardware” (i.e., structures, processes, technologies, and governance) and its “organizational software” (i.e., values, norms, culture, leadership, and employee skills and aspirations) must be designed exclusively in the service of a specific strategy. Research suggests that only 10% of organizations are successful at aligning their strategy with their organization design. … [ Read more ]

Four Questions Every Marketplace Startup Should Be Able to Answer

Marketplace businesses can be messy, and every gain is hard earned. After all, you’re dealing with an ecosystem of participants — buyers and sellers — that’s constantly in flux, their needs and desires changing over time. Unfolding in both online transactions and offline interactions, marketplaces are organic and dynamic.

Marketplace leaders need to be experts in the dynamics of their platforms. Identify those dynamics in … [ Read more ]

How the 100 largest marketplaces solved the chicken and egg problem

This essay presents the findings from a six month marketplace research project. There has been a lot written about online marketplaces and the goal was to test these theories by exploring data from a broader set of companies. The authors started by making a list of every marketplace founded, identifying 4,500 companies in total, then collected public data to classify and compare these companies

Liquidity Hacking – How to Build a Two-Sided Marketplace

Marketplace businesses… They always seem great on paper, but it’s so insanely hard to solve the chicken or the egg problem. Every founder I meet who’s building a marketplace business basically says the same thing: “It’s so much harder than I thought to build a two-sided marketplace.“ But of course it can be done. There are plenty of examples of success. What I’ve noticed in the … [ Read more ]

A Manager’s Dilemma: Sow or Harvest

Vijay Govindarajan, Ashish Sood, Anup Srivastava, Luminita Enache, and Barry Mishra have found that companies must focus relentlessly on building long-term competencies, even if doing so reduces immediate profits. Nonetheless, it is vital to shift focus when your product or idea becomes unexpectedly successful, so that you can milk that opportunity’s profits before it vanishes in the face of competition and technological progress.