Sustained Cost Transformation: Delivering Savings that Stick

It’s no surprise that most companies routinely try to lower their costs. But few succeed in driving costs out and making the savings stick. Yet some companies succeed not only in significantly lowering their costs but also in maintaining those reductions over time. What do the successful companies know that the others don’t? To find out, we dug deep into our data and conducted a … [ Read more ]

The Focused Company

Complexity is a natural trait of any large organization—“natural” because it is a by-product of business decisions that are sound and rational. Is it any wonder that CEOs in a recent survey identified complexity as the primary challenge they face? Faced with such concerns, most companies try to take action. Teams attack product-line complexity, organizational complexity and complexity in IT systems. They create new structures. … [ Read more ]

A Fresh Look at Procurement

When supply cost pressures increase, so does the opportunity to gain an important source of untapped margin. By taking a more comprehensive approach to what they buy and how they buy it, companies can free up cash and refocus resources to fund strategic priorities without the pain of layoffs. A comprehensive approach means deploying a broader set of tools to better negotiate prices or becoming … [ Read more ]

Rudy Puryear, Nigel Cornish and Marc van der Vleugel

In most companies, the pressure to create new IT-enabled functionality usually takes precedence over fixing what’s broken or underperforming. The perverse result of piling new capabilities on top of an increasingly rickety foundation is to add unnecessary complexity and drive up costs, making it harder for IT to serve even basic business requests in a timely manner.

Ten Ways to Improve Inventory Management

There’s more to streamlining inventory levels than the standard advice, repeated ad infinitum, of applying “just-in-time” techniques.

Bill Bain

The most powerful weapon a leader has is the power of his or her attention.

Domenico Azzarello, Frédéric Debruyne and Ludovica Mottura

Just as the Net Promoter approach has strong descriptive and predictive power with customers, it works just as well in the realm of employee engagement. Loyalty leaders measure engagement by asking a handful of simple but predictive questions: Would you ask your friends and family to work in this company? Why? And would you recommend our product or service to your friends and family? What … [ Read more ]

Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey

If a hard asset like a machine is somehow impaired, a CFO must reflect the asset’s lower value on the books. The same applies to a contract or piece of software. If customers, on the other hand, suddenly decide they hate doing business with your company, this asset is clearly impaired—but the CFO may not even know about it until too late. And even if … [ Read more ]

Global Growth

Most of the executives we talk with at global multinational companies (MNCs) spend a lot of time scrutinizing the developing world. They know about the growth potential. If they’re not already operating in Indonesia or Poland or Nigeria, they’re making plans to do so. What they’re not seeing, often, are the obstacles to success. Building a large-scale business in the developing world—capitalizing on that world’s … [ Read more ]

Tom Springer, Domenico Azzarello and Jeff Melton

Some people believe that a leader should delight every customer. Others argue for eliminating defects in products and interactions, or reducing the effort customers spend in dealing with a company. We think these arguments miss the point. Delight, quality and reduced effort may all be part of the package, but the goal of change has to be the creation of promoters. They are the customers … [ Read more ]

The Strategic Principles of Repeatability

How can a company sustain profitable growth?

It’s no easy feat. As a benchmark, consider an annual growth rate in revenue and earnings of 5.5%. Most companies say they expect to attain that level or better— at least that’s what their strategic plans call for. But a Bain & Company study of more than 2,000 companies indicates that only about one in 10 actually … [ Read more ]

Jeff Melton, Kevin Loh and Jolyon Dove

Just as customers don’t fit neatly into a single homogenous group, employees are motivated by different factors that are often dictated by their stage of life or personal interests. By learning what motivates each group and offering a customized program that delivers what matters most, companies find that employees are willing to work more effectively and devote more discretionary thought and attention to their jobs. … [ Read more ]

The Great Repeatable Leader

In an effort to cover all the bases in an uncertain, changing world companies are trying to give themselves as many strategic and organizational options as possible. In doing so, however, they are making themselves unconsciously more complex organizations. It is a trend that’s slowly and silently killing them. Complexity turns people inward and distorts information flow, slowing the pace of decision-making down and making … [ Read more ]

Tom Tierney

Really great firms give people a fair amount of independence. They don’t control the people. They control the culture rather than the individuals…Culture influences people every day – it’s what guides them to act when management is not looking.

Tom Tierney

The three things you need to make money are the right strategy, the right people and the right behavior. Strategy matters most when there is turmoil but it is only about 10 per cent of the answer because implementing strategy is so challenging. People and behavior are 90 per cent of the equation.

Culture and leadership are hard to copy. There’s no such thing as … [ Read more ]

How to Bridge the IT Alignment Gap

Information technology organizations and the businesses they support do not occupy parallel universes. Although most executives understand that, few have successfully aligned IT strategy closely with business strategy. Doing so, however, can unleash an organization’s full potential.

How Leaders Get the Most Out of their Salesforce

A more productive salesforce offers one of the biggest opportunities for growth. But what company can afford to shut down its sales engine for an extended overhaul? Among 25 leading companies that successfully managed this dilemma, Bain & Company found that six frequently used tools consistently produce the most value.

Right-Sizing the Balance Sheet

When performance is an issue, most executives focus on the income statement—they cut costs. But tight management of the balance sheet often liberates cash and creates more value for shareholders.

Inventory Management: 10 Questions to Diagnose Your Inventory Health

CFOs and other senior executives already know the importance of inventory management. And yet even the most attentive managers often find it difficult to get it right. In our work with clients, we’ve found that decision makers often rely on external benchmarks that seldom deliver expected insights. And they make operating assumptions that send them down the wrong path. Two of the classic misconceptions: improving … [ Read more ]

Realize results: Busting three common myths of change management

Bain analyzed the barriers to successful change management at 184 global companies. The study enabled us to identify predictable patterns of risks in a broad cross-section of change efforts. We found, for example, that about 65 percent of initiatives required significant behavioral change on the part of employees-something that managers often fail to consider and plan for in advance. Nearly 60 percent of the companies … [ Read more ]