341 Posts found for Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

Most companies urgently need to boost their innovation productivity. However, many lack the discipline to systematically filter their innovative ideas, focus only on the most promising among them, and follow through effectively in developing, launching, and sustaining the resulting products. To isolate the best ideas and drive them to market, managers need to set clear, data-driven targets for innovation, install oversight mechanisms to increase success … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: James P. Andrew, Kermit King | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Innovation

People businesses are the fastest growing sector in developed economies. This report focuses on four areas of people businesses that are markedly different from traditional businesses: performance measures, operations, compensation, and strategies. A managers’ ability to measure the productivity of employees, as well as to enhance it operationally, reward it appropriately, and transform it strategically is central to building sustained competitive advantage. It can’t be … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Felix Barber, Phil Catchings, Yves Morieux | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

All compensation systems involve a series of complex tradeoffs. How much of the compensation should be fixed and how much variable? Should it reward revenues, profit margins, or both? How will it weigh mature products against new ones? How will it encourage salespeople to stretch for incremental dollars once they have hit their quotas? The right answers to these questions will balance the salesperson’s primary … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Management, Marketing / Sales

The road toward being successfully different usually involves one of three broad initiatives: leveraging a deeper understanding of customer needs; exploiting a deeper understanding of industry economics; or simply having the courage to challenge conventional wisdom-to overturn “the way we’ve always done it.”

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Innovation, Management

Managers can create value within an organization in four different ways. They exercise power by hiring, evaluating, and firing employees. They manage work by setting objectives, allocating resources, and providing training. They develop careers by coaching and mentoring. And they provide leadership through motivation, recognition, and empowerment.

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Management

Executives often suffer from pricing myopia. They don’t see the freedom they have to use pricing to enhance the performance of their businesses and even create competitive advantage. Because of their distorted or limited vision, they underestimate their power to manage pricing, mistakenly believe that their customers are paying the amounts stipulated by their pricing guidelines, passively accept the prevailing approaches to pricing in their … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: George Stalk Jr., Peter Stanger, Peter Wetenhall, Philippe Morel | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Pricing

The failure of many transformation efforts is caused not so much by people’s resistance to change or by the details of “implementation” as by a deficient understanding of the interplay between organization and behavior.

Content: Article | Author: Yves Morieux | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

Alliances have become an increasingly important part of corporate strategy. They can be extremely useful in situations of high uncertainty and for growth opportunities that a company either cannot or does not want to pursue on its own. But the advantages of shared risk are often offset by unclear governance and lack of genuine commitment. This report distills lessons about alliance strategy and management drawn … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Alexander Roos, Kees Cools | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Strategy

Successful companies ask themselves, “What must I keep at home?” rather than “What can I send to LCCs?” The burden of proof shifts from the LCC advocate (often procurement) to the existing producer (manufacturing), which now needs to prove – and improve – its own competitiveness. Best-practice companies investigate and communicate the LCC options and costs, specify the target costs that will be considered competitive, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Outsourcing / BPO

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A stable competitive market never has more than three significant competitors, the largest of which has no more than four times the market share of the smallest.

Content: Article | Author: Bruce D. Henderson | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Economics, Strategy

The first objective of corporate strategy is protection of the cash generators. In almost every company a few products and market sectors are the principal source of net cash generated.

Content: Article | Author: Bruce D. Henderson | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Finance, Strategy

Business thinking starts with an intuitive choice of assumptions. Its progress as analysis is intertwined with intuition.

Content: Article | Author: Bruce D. Henderson | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Management, Miscellaneous

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The single most important word in strategy formulation is why. Asking why is the basic act of probing. Searching for root causes takes strategy formulation away from the unconscious repetition of past patterns and mimicry of competitors. Asking why leads to new insights and innovations that sometimes yield important competitive advantages.

Content: Article | Author: Jonathan Isaacs | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Miscellaneous

Behaviors are the solutions people find to deal with their problems, given their resources and constraints. Treat with suspicion any explanations alluding to people’s irrationality or to their “mentality.” These are tautological explanations at best. What is necessary is to understand the problems (operational challenges, personal goals or aspirations), resources (skills, power, interpersonal network), and constraints (dependence on others, rules to abidy by) fromthe employee’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

Cooperation always improves, without added metrics or incentives, when poor cooperation becomes a constraint for those who do not cooperate – when they cannot externalize the consequences of poor cooperation to third parties. And engagement always imporves when better performance becomes a means, or a resource, to attain one’s own goals and aspirations.

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

One of the messages of reengineering is that companies, once structured as hierarchical pyramids, now need to be “turned on their sides” and restructured as horizontal organizations. The logic for this restructuring flows from the logic for reengineering: if processes, not functions, are the correct way to organize work, then horizontally must be the correct way to organize a company. It seems obvious. And it … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jill E. Black, Philippe J. Amouyal | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Traditional organizational structures, whether designed around functions, products, or geographies; whether centralized or decentralized, can’t cope with the complexity that global operations entail. Matrix arrangements, while explicitly designed to manage complexity, too often end up just adding to it. Managers need new ways to think about molding their international organizations, simply and flexibly, to the needs of their customers and the imperatives of their business … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Mark Blaxill, Xavier Mosquet | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Organizational Behavior

What gets measured gets done for better or worse. Too many companies chase growth in earnings per share, only to find themselves employing too much capital at too low a rate of return and thereby eroding shareholder value. Economic Value Added(1) offers a beguiling solution: an easy-to-understand measure that recognizes improvements in earnings only to the extent that they exceed the cost of the capital … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Eric E. Olsen | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Finance, Management