How Business Strategy Tamed the “Invisible Hand”

Theories of competition and strategic planning are essential ingredients in running a global business. In this excerpt from Business History Review, HBS professor Pankaj Ghemawat outlines their development.

Is Performance-Based Pricing the Right Price for You?

Not every industry or company can benefit from performance-based pricing. But where there is a fit, PBP can be a powerful tool that merges the interests of buyers and sellers, says Harvard Business School professor Benson Shapiro.

Your Company Strategy – in Pictures

Preparing a company strategy can bury you in data. Make it easier by drawing a strategy picture, advises this excerpt from Harvard Business Review. Here’s how Southwest Airlines found “The Big Picture.”

How to Fashion Your New E-Business Model

In this chapter from The E-Business Handbook, HBS professor Lynda M. Applegate considers the future of E-Biz models. Her advice for satisfying customers who want tailor-made service? Get vertical.

Outsourcing: It’s Not Just About Cost Cutting

To get the real strategic value out of your third-party relationships, the first thing to do is throw out what you thought you knew about outsourcing. Here’s why.

What it Takes to Lead Through Turmoil

What are the characteristics of companies that successfully transition in times of dramatic change? HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter separates the leaders from the laggards in times of turmoil.

Sharpening the Focus of Focus Groups

Focus groups can run aground for many reasons, yielding information that’s of little use to your business. Here’s how to glean the facts you need, according to Kirsten Sandberg in the Harvard Management Communication Letter.

Keys to Making Your Offsites Effective

Companies use offsite meetings to recharge management and set clear goals and tactics. But is your company getting the most out of this time? One idea: Consider hiring an outside facilitator.

Keys to Effective Executive Off-sites

  • Set aside sufficient time.
  • Set clear goals and agendas.
  • Set and enforce guidelines for interactions.
  • Employ exercises to help participants learn and use new concepts.
  • Recruit experienced facilitators.
  • Follow up

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Disruption: The Art of Framing

Your chief competitor creates a breakthrough technology. Should you frame that event inside your company as a threat or opportunity? The answer in this Harvard Business Review excerpt by HBS professors Clark Gilbert and Joseph L. Bower just may surprise you.

Cyrus the Great

Leaders must balance the need for diversity in counsel, unity in command.

How to Look at Globalization Now

How should smart companies position themselves in the global economy? By training a historical lens on the process of globalization and thinking about strategies that can take advantage of its current, intermediate state-what HBS professor Pankaj Ghemawat calls “quasiglobalization.”

How to Succeed With Your New Boss

We all know it’s true: Managing up is as important as managing down. That’s especially true when you are starting a relationship with a new boss. HBS professor Michael Watkins discusses the importance of clearly defining goals with your superior.

Tips for Benchmarking Against Your Peers

“How does your company stack up against the competition? You better know the answer to that question on a number of fronts. Our new column on business research debuts with a look at sources available to help you get started in your quest to benchmark against your peers.”

Four Keys of Enduring Success: How High Achievers Win

What is success to you? HBS professor Howard Stevenson offers insights from research he and HBS senior research fellow Laura Nash are conducting on the meaning of success for high achievers.

Reviving the Lost Art of Debriefing

If you go to the expense and trouble of sending an employee to an event, you’d better capture that knowledge for your organization. How? The answer: Integrate the art of debriefing into everyday corporate life, writes media consultant Jimmy Guterman in the Harvard Management Update.

Can You Predict the Unpredictable?

The study of so-called emergent phenomena can help you grapple with issues as difficult and squishy as motivating employees, predicting changes in corporate culture, and preventing small errors from snowballing into catastrophes.

How To Tame CEO Compensation

Does soaring CEO pay hurt pension fund investments? That’s the argument of Harvard University’s Archon Fung. In this book excerpt, Fung and co-author Dean Baker say workers should press for reform. Plus: Q&A.

Entrepreneurship in Asia and Foreign Direct Investment

A look at local entrepreneurship in four economies in Asia offers a fascinating lens on Foreign Direct Investment, says HBS professor Yasheng Huang. Discussing his new research proposal at an HBS International Seminar recently, Huang also offered insights on what it might mean as China rises.

The Key to Diverting Disaster: Preparation

A firm’s failure to communicate effectively after an emergency strikes can be more destructive than the emergency itself. Here are six tips for creating an effective crisis communications plan.