How Corporate Boards (Should) Work: Perspectives on the 2004 Corporate Governance Effectiveness Survey
The bottom-line objectives for good governance are simple. The role of the board is to protect and grow shareholder wealth and ensure ethical and equitable corporate behavior for all stakeholders. The board must trust, but verify, the management team’s stewardship. Boards should reinvent their roles and the protocols under which they operate to be effective in recognizing and acting when necessary. How Corporate Boards (Should) … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: Kearney | Subject: Corporate Governance
Filling the CEO’s Chair: Creating and Implementing CEO Succession Strategies
Expectations placed on directors have moved beyond selecting the CEO; they must now wrestle with the larger issues of redefining the board’s role, culture and operations-of preserving and increasing value on behalf of the company’s stakeholders.
Filling the CEO’s Chair offers a summary and analysis of the major findings of A.T. Kearney’s 2004 Corporate Governance Effectiveness survey of S&P 500 independent directors. It also examines changes … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: Kearney | Subject: Corporate Governance
The Complexity Challenge: A Survey on Complexity Management Across the Supply Chain
Anyone who has visited a supermarket or mass merchandiser recently has an appreciation for the explosion in the variety of products being offered for sale. Consumer product manufacturers have added brands, extended lines and altered pack sizes, shapes and colors to lure consumer dollars. In introducing these new products and variants, companies have made their businesses more complex.
Designing, marketing, forecasting, pricing, producing and distributing … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: Kearney | Subject: Operations
Banks Shift Gears in Drive for Top-Line Growth: Focus Turns to Customers in the Financial Services Industry
The battle of the banks is taking on new urgency. After spending the past few years fiddling with their cost structures, leading banking organizations around the world are shifting their efforts toward growth-with an eye toward creating value.
Yet while their growth expectations are high, the markets are not cooperating. Low GDP (gross domestic product) and inflation rates in almost every market mean tepid-to-moderate growth … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: Kearney | Subject: Industry Specific | Industry: Finance / Banking
Transforming Field-Service Operations: Running Faster, Longer, Smarter In Customer-Delivery Services
Business boundaries continue to be tested and surpassed; what was once good enough to win the gold medal won’t even qualify you to take part in today’s race. This is principally the case for field-service retailers and other companies that deliver products or services that people use every day: packages, consumer goods, groceries, maintenance and repairs. Being able to simply cover the distance will never … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Customer Related, Operations
Success Through Shared Services: From Back-Office Functions to Strategic Drivers
If you think the book has already been written on shared services, think again. With the renewed emphasis in recent years on profitability as the key corporate metric, “forgotten” functions such as finance, human resources, procurement and IT are back in the spotlight. They are not only being viewed as sources of cost efficiency, which has been the traditional focus, but also as tools for … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Best Practices, Operations
The Four Stages of Industry Consolidation
Customer Loyalty Interdependencies
What to Move Offshore? Selecting IT Activities for Offshore Locations
Going offshore has become less a strategic advantage and more a competitive necessity. Pioneering firms are adopting more aggressive plans and the followers are struggling to keep up. Approaches that were leading edge just two years ago are little more than an entry ticket today. By all projections, offshoring should continue to see unprecedented growth and will dominate business strategies in the coming months and … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: Kearney | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Outsourcing / BPO
Technology and the Value Chain
How Many Supply Chains Do You Need? Matching Supply Chain Strategies to Products and Customers Products and Customers
In the field of supply chains, there are many different strategies, fads and cures for a variety of problems. There is an abundance of information that outlines every new concept and idea on how to improve supply chain performance. But what works for one company or industry will not necessarily work for another. Given the diverse needs of different industries and businesses, one-size-fits-all or try-everything-until-something-sticks … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Operations, Strategy
Improving the Medicine Supply Chain: An Imperative for Public Health Care
Medicines play an important role in public health care programs, saving lives and drawing people to health facilities, where they can also receive preventive treatment. Medicines can also help keep health care costs down. Many insurance carriers would rather pay for drug treatment than for potentially risky and more expensive surgery. And the cost of complications from not treating illness with medicine in the early … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: Kearney | Subject: Industry Specific | Industry: Healthcare
Breakaway Speed!: Strategies for Creating a Faster, More Empowered Workforce
There is an old African proverb: When the sun comes up, the gazelle wakes up knowing that it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be eaten. The lion knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. So it doesn’t matter if you are a gazelle or a lion, when the sun comes up, you had better be running. … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior
Unknown
Anyone who has tried to justify investments based on cost avoidance rather than cost reductions knows it is difficult to make the financial case by comparing against “what might have been.”
Content: Quotation | Source: Kearney | Subject: Finance
Demand Management: Changing the Way Organizations Acquire Goods and Services
In today’s organizations, managers are required to do more with less. Everyone is looking for new ways to cut costs and increase value. A.T. Kearney is helping a growing number of companies take a new approach to cost reduction. Instead of focusing primarily on suppliers and prices, we are helping launch firmwide initiatives in “demand management” – a proven mechanism to take costs out of … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Best Practices, Management
Finding New Answers To the Pricing Question: What’s It Worth to the Customer?
The two most popular approaches to pricing a new product or service are cost and competitive positioning. But it’s time for a third option: an approach that focuses on value. Unlike the traditional methods, companies use value-based pricing to build a deeper understanding of their customers’ business drivers, align their goals with their customers’ goals, and share in each others fortunes in a way that … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Pricing