682 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

Setting the right price for your product or service is hard. In fact, determining price is one of the toughest things a marketer has to do, in large part because it has such a big impact on the company’s bottom line. One of the critical elements of pricing is understanding what economists call price elasticity. To better understand this concept and how it impacts marketing, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Amy Gallo, Jill Avery | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Pricing

Many businesses are reaping rewards from big data analytics. But there are also some areas of disappointment. Experts caution that big data, like any other, is only as good as the questions being asked – and that some algorithms can make unhelpful assumptions.

Content: Article | Author: Daniel Goleman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

Leaders hoping to boost their ability to drive growth through innovation need to simultaneously direct it strategically, pursue it rigorously, resource it intensively, monitor it methodically, and nurture it carefully. This is clearly not easy stuff. Many of the most common missteps we see companies make would fit nicely in Steve Kerr’s management classic, “The folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B.” Here are … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Scott Anthony | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Innovation

When setting priorities it is helpful to distinguish between absolute and relative performance. Absolute performance sets the minimum requirements — are you in the red or black, are you growing or contracting? Relative performance, expressed in percentile rankings, tells you where you have the most room for improvement and sets an upper bound on what is reasonable for you, given how well you’re already performing … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management

Just imagine, a few centuries ago, who would have thought that everyone will be able to read and write? Now, today, we need risk literacy. I believe if we teach young people, children, the mathematics of uncertainty, statistical thinking, instead of only the mathematics of certainty – trigonometry, geometry, all beautiful things that most of us never need – then we can have a new … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gerd Gigerenzer | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Risk Management

We need statistical thinking for a world where we can calculate the risk, but in a world of uncertainty, we need more. We need rules of thumb called heuristics, and good intuitions. That distinction is not made in most of economics and most of the other cognitive sciences, and people believe that they can model or reduce all uncertainty to risk.

Content: Quotation | Author: Gerd Gigerenzer | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Risk Management

I’m sour on the word empowerment and I’m sour on empowerment programs. To me, saying we need an empowerment program is like saying we need a swimming program. The implication is that swimming isn’t a natural occurring behavior for our people. So, what we are saying when we say we need an empowerment program is that the fundamental way we run our organization is dis-empowering, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: David Marquet | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Organizations have always depended on data — to manage operations, to communicate with customers, to pay employees and suppliers, to plan their futures, and so forth. Those with the best data have enjoyed distinct advantages — in commerce, for example, better understanding the market leads to better products offered at better prices, and so forth. Data has enabled strategy, but, with few exceptions, neither driven … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Thomas C. Redman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Strategy

In “What Is Strategy,” [Michael] Porter argues against a bevy of alternate views … At a fundamental level, all strategies for Porter boil down to two very broad options: Do what everyone else is doing (but spend less money doing it), or do something no one else can do.

A tour de force by any measure, “What Is Strategy?” is certainly required reading for all … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Andrea Ovans | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

The first person to think seriously about how businesses function was Ronald Coase. In his groundbreaking 1937 paper he argued that firms gained competitiveness by reducing transaction costs, especially those related to information. In his view, firms could grow until the point that organizational costs cancelled out transactional benefits.

In the 1980s, Michael Porter built on this idea and made it more possible for … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Greg Satell | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Strategy is not the inevitable outcome of a process of analysis: it is a choice of where a firm wants to play and how it will win there going forward. Yes, a working knowledge of the industry and its likely evolution, the customers and their likely preferences, the firm itself and its potential capabilities and cost structure, and its competitors and their likely responses and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

Anyone taking the time to delve into the literature of strategy quickly realizes that there are two fiercely opposed camps.

In the red corner we have the “positioning school” (TPS) and in the white we have the “resource-based view of the firm” (RBV). Michael Porter is credited with (or more often accused of) creating TPS in 1980—positing that a firm should think about positioning itself in … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

Smart executives know that sustaining great companies requires both strategic consistency and reinvention. But how do you achieve each without sacrificing the other?

In my experience, the answer lies in being able to answer — and act on — two important questions: what capabilities set your company apart from everyone else? And, are there changes happening in your world that will make those capabilities obsolete or … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ken Favaro | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Efforts to grow blur uniqueness, create compromises, reduce fit, and ultimately undermine competitive advantage. In fact, the growth imperative is hazardous to strategy.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael E. Porter | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Growth, Strategy

Back in the early 1960s, the great Boston Consulting Group founder and strategy theorist Bruce Henderson asserted that there was only one way to successfully compete: gain a relative market share advantage over all competitors so as to have lower costs than all of them. The payoff is that it puts the firm in a position to drive those relative costs even lower as competition … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

The “scientific model” of management, as Warren Bennis and Jim O’Toole called it, emphasized conceptual knowledge and tools and techniques – what Greek philosophers would have called episteme and techne. It was assumed that organizations could be studied by detached “objective” observers and that management science could be “values-free” – just like the natural sciences. More generally this scientific model has resulted in a misanthropic … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: David K. Hurst | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Capitalism, Education, Leadership, Management, Mission

An economist falls apart and turns into a blubbing puddle on the floor if you take away the concept of trade-offs because they all started in the same place: the societal trade-off between guns and butter. Trade-offs are a sacred article of faith for economists. You simply can’t be an economist if you don’t consider trade-offs to be a central feature of your worldview.

Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Economics

Doesn’t every business want to maximize its profits? Pricing textbooks certainly all assume they do, or at least that they want to achieve a certain profit level under given constraints. But in truth businesses rarely focus on only profitability; most strive to satisfy various stakeholders and meet the goals of balanced scorecards. And even when a company is focused tightly on financial performance, there are … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Stefan Michel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Finance, Management, Pricing

Virtual meetings don’t have to be seen as a waste of time. In fact, they can be more valuable than traditional face-to-face meetings. Beyond the fact that they’re inexpensive ways to get people together – think: no travel costs and readily available technology – they’re also great opportunities to build engagement, trust and candor among teams.

Several years ago, my company’s Research Institute embarked on an … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Keith Ferrazzi | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

When something seems too good to be true, it usually is. And management techniques, practices, and strategies are no different. When you read a business book or attend a presentation on a particular management practice, it is a good habit to explicitly ask, “What might it not be good for?” When might it not work; what could be its drawbacks?

[…] There is a second … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Freek Vermeulen | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Knowledge, Management, Thought, Trends / Analysis