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

Jeanie Duck is known for mixing Southern charm and sass with business insight and acumen. For the past three decades, she has used that mixture to good advantage in helping companies initiate change and make it stick. Duck recently retired as a senior partner and managing director at The Boston Consulting Group, but not without leaving behind ten lessons from her long career.

Content: Article | Author: Jeanie Duck | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Change Management

Fundamental change is painful. The intellectual and logistical challenges may be daunting, but the emotional confusion and chaos created during such change can virtually paralyze an organization. In today’s turbulent environment, however, change is not optional. Farsighted leaders endeavor to use times like these to sprint past their less nimble competitors. In order to capitalize on potential new opportunities, such leaders are able to harness … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Evelyne Brooks, Kimberly Powell, Perry Keenan, Rolf Bixner | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

Managing a global company’s IT comes with a host of challenges. One of the most difficult involves striking an optimal balance between centralized and decentralized decision-making. Which choices should be the purview of local or regional IT organizations—and which decisions need to be made by global leadership? Too much decentralization and independence can lead to redundancies and unnecessary costs. Too much centralization risks forcing inappropriate … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Ron van Kemenade, Saul van Beurden | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: IT / Technology / E-Business | Company: ING

Growing turbulence in the global economy is forcing many companies to revisit their corporate strategy. But unless they also redesign their corporate strategy process to focus it more explicitly on value creation, they are unlikely to generate superior shareholder value. This report (the tenth in BCG’s Value Creators series) introduces a comprehensive approach to corporate strategy that supplements the traditional focus on business and portfolio … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Strategy

Competing successfully in this new decade requires companies to meet the needs of both low-growth and high-growth markets while differentiating themselves from foreign and local competitors. Building a low-cost global production network that taps into the strengths of each geographical region is critical. Also crucial to success: innovating products, processes and business models to increase margins wherever possible — and to gain market share. Key … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Sources: Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: International, Strategy

Managing complexity in products, processes, and supply chains is a growing challenge. The related costs are often hidden, but they can be a significant drain on profitability. This paper provides guidance on how to uncover the true costs of complexity, optimize the value of product portfolios, and master complexity across the value chain. By following these guidelines, companies can achieve a 25 to 100 percent … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Aaron Brown, Bernd Elser, Felix Münnich, Reinhard Messenböck, Satoshi Komiya | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Management, Operations

Today’s business environment often demands complex, high-risk change efforts such as aggressive cost reduction, ambitious revenue enhancement, or bet-the-future turnaround programs. But the traditional project management office (PMO) is better suited to running departmental projects on time and on budget than to managing complex, interconnected, cross-enterprise efforts. What’s needed is an SIO—a strategic initiative office that focuses on organizational alignment and value delivery. The authors … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Chris Barrett, Kimberly Powell, Perry Keenan, Rob Sims | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Project Management

Cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are on the increase in virtually every sector across the globe. Although such transactions offer significant advantages, they also pose several postmerger integration (PMI) challenges, ranging from difficulties in obtaining reliable, accurate information about a target to cultural, political, and regulatory hurdles. This Focus discusses five major challenges and suggests various solutions, drawing on the experiences of companies that have … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Chris Barrett, Daniel Friedman, Niamh Dawson, Peter Goldsbrough, Peter Strüven | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Mergers & Acquisitions

It’s said that timing is everything, and that rule certainly applies to pricing. An often overlooked factor in driving purchase decisions, timing can be applied to nearly every pricing approach. In this white paper, the authors describe a variety of options: from stretching out the elements of a purchase decision to bringing them closer together, from changing prices dynamically over time to setting time limits … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Gus Antorcha, Just Schürmann | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Pricing

Organization design can provide effective and practical resolution of many stubborn strategy and business-execution issues. If a redesign is to work, executives need to recognize that all three elements of design—structure, individual capabilities, and roles and collaboration—are essential. Indeed, there is a dynamic interplay among them. When structure, individual capabilities, and roles and collaboration are in alignment—and tightly linked with a company’s strategy and sources … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Andrew Toma, Julie Kilmann, Kuba Zielinski, Michael Shanahan | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The increasing interdependence between business and society presents an opportunity for companies to develop “social advantage” by aligning the business and social dimensions of their strategies to create more sustainable, valued, and expansive business models. Creating social advantage goes beyond financial metrics to renewing depletable resources and goodwill, meeting and capitalizing on consumers’ ecological needs, and developing new markets around alternative and renewable resources. This … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Dieter Heuskel, Martin Reeves, Tom Lewis | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

Companies adapt to rapid changes in competitive markets by introducing variation into their products and internal routines. They select the most promising variations through stage gates, portfolio management, pilots, or full-scale tests. And they amplify and embed their successes through resource allocation, internal or external competition, and specialization. These activities are fine-tuned through modulation—the locus of strategic intent in the process—in response to the environment, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Martin Reeves, Michael Deimler, Yves Morieux | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Strategy

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BCG has developed an analytical framework—the Global Advantage Diamond—for assessing a company’s current market position and devising strategies to achieve global competitive advantage. The Global Advantage Diamond differs from previous global-strategy models in its focus on all four aspects of global advantage: market access to reach new markets and segments, resource access to maximize competitive advantage, local adaptation to meet the full range of needs … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Arindam Bhattacharya, Bernd Waltermann, Jim Hemerling | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: International, Strategy

This report summarizes the findings of BCG’s latest annual global survey on corporate innovation. Topics covered include objectives, tactics, and perceived strengths and weaknesses. The report concludes with thoughts on how companies can improve their return on innovation spending and long-term competitive position.

Content: Related Content | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Innovation

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Traditional strategy becomes limited when variables are constantly shifting. Organizations with an adaptive advantage achieve superior outcomes by continuously reshaping the enterprise through a process of managed evolution. Readiness, responsiveness, and resilience are necessary for surviving turbulence, but a recursive approach—in which better strategies evolve iteratively in response to change—is essential for sustainable advantage. Choosing the best style of adaptive strategy depends on the rate … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Martin Reeves, Michael Deimler, Ron Nicol, Yves Morieux | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Strategy

Pricing is the language of business. Through pricing, companies tell customers which products have the greatest value or when costs have gone up. Through pricing, companies can “ask” customers to change their behavior. A comprehensive “pricing fluency” program for the whole organization focuses on improving the pricing model with better policies for how prices are set, and improving the pricing platform for organizational implementation. The … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jean-Manuel Izaret, Rich Hutchinson, Sylvain Duranton | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Pricing

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Layoffs are a fact of life today at many companies, as is survivor guilt–which engenders the feelings of fear, frustration, and distrust harbored by some people who still have their jobs. Companies can address survivor guilt by recognizing that large-scale layoffs represent fundamental organizational change. Leaders need to manage layoffs carefully, ensuring that departing employees are treated fairly and respectfully while striving to give remaining … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior