1297 Posts found for Source: strategy+business

There’s a very strong confirmation bias for all content today, regardless of whether it’s entertainment, news, or just information. It will grow even stronger as technology improves. As content distributors, we are fighting the hardest fight ever: getting through the personal filters of people who have opted into their own world view. Many have no interest in getting out of it. […] The free and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Shelly Palmer | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Customer Related, Information, Knowledge, Marketing / Sales, Personality / Behavior

The 18th-century economic philosopher Adam Smith, best known for his foundational book The Wealth of Nations, spent his last two decades considering the problem of virtue in capitalism. The vitality of the industrializing world was based on the good faith of energetic, creative people, acting individually. But no human society had ever resisted the temptations of corruption and exploitation. How would capitalism survive? Smith said … [ Read more ]

Authors: Adam Smith, Art Kleiner, Jeffrey Schwartz, Josie Thomson | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

Explicitly give middle managers the support and encouragement they need to communicate up the hierarchy — even when sharing difficult messages — without fear of negative consequences. Executives are often so consumed with shaping the future that they lose track of the feelings within the organization at large. Managers need to let them know what’s happening in the trenches, to help remind them to address … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Deniz Caglar, John Plansky, Vinay Couto | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Management

[The] question — should we cooperate or should we compete — is often the wrong one. Our most important relationships are neither cooperative nor competitive. Instead, they are both. Rather than choosing a single course of action, we need to understand that cooperation and competition often occur simultaneously and we must nimbly shift between the two, and that how we navigate the tension between these … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Adam Galinsky, Maurice Schweitzer | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

The influential economic theorist looks ahead to a world of virtually free energy and zero marginal cost production, and to a desperate race against climate change.

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Art Kleiner, Jeremy Rifkin, Juliette Powell | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Economics, Trends / Analysis

This rising quantity of quantification has surely improved our understanding of what superior leaders can achieve, and has given organizations valuable information to use when hiring and developing talent. But has it improved the quality of leadership in the real world? High turnover rates and a paucity of effective leaders suggest either that there’s no correlation between studying leadership and leading or that the scientific … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sally Helgesen | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Leadership

Six years ago, two executives new to their jobs led the strategic transition that remade McGraw-Hill into S&P Global.

Content: Case Study | Authors: Jack Callahan, John Berisford | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Change Management | Companies: McGraw-Hill, S&P Global

We not only assign undue levels of importance to whatever captures our attention at a certain point in time, but also assign causality to it.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Robert Cialdini, Theodore Kinni | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Attention, Organizational Behavior, Thought

In the 1960s and 1970s, the hot concepts were the experience curve, the growth-share matrix, and SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis. The 1980s gave us five forces, value chain strategy, scenario planning, and total quality management. In the 1990s, business process engineering, customer loyalty, competing for time, competing for the future (core competencies), and growth horizons gained traction. Those ideas were followed by … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ken Favaro | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Strategy

First-mover advantage doesn’t go to the first company that launches. It goes to the first company that scales.

Content: Quotation | Author: Reid Hoffman | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Strategy

We have things called hard conversations, and we ask people all the time, “What’s the last hard conversation you had?” Because our belief is that as companies get bigger, people tend to be less willing to have the hard conversation. And if you look at companies that fail, it’s not like they sat there one day and suddenly said, “Oh, God, our business is gone!” … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Carolyn Everson | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Duke professor Aaron Chatterji believes business leaders have social and political responsibilities they can’t afford to neglect.

Content: Thought Leader | Author: Aaron Chatterji | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Social Responsibility (ESG)

We all start out as audience members. But sometimes, when the combination of factors aligns in just the right way, we become engaged as fans. For businesses, the key to building this engagement and solidifying the relationship is understanding the different types of fan motivations in different contexts, and learning how to turn the data gathered about them into actionable insights. […] Although traditional demographics … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Erin Reilly | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Distinctive capabilities have been central to Danaher’s success since the mid-1980s, when Mitchell Rales and Steven Rales, two brothers who owned a commercial real estate business, discovered they had a knack for buying and turning around ailing manufacturing companies. Over the years, the company had evolved from a highly leveraged startup to a profitable family of ventures with a market capitalization of more than US$40 … [ Read more ]

Content: Case Study | Authors: Art Kleiner, George Roth | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Mergers & Acquisitions | Company: Danaher

Sales leaders need to consider two critical but often overlooked factors when assessing their current and future customers: need and behavior. When combined with value, these indicators will reveal the customers whose strategic direction and operating model come together in a way that could make them huge sources of revenue. Sales teams should then tailor their deployment strategies toward these customers.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Lavanya Manohar, Namit Kapoor | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

How do you manage your company using the data you collect? There’s a technocratic approach in which you look at the numbers. But by the time you get the numbers, it’s too late already because the numbers only reflect what happened in the past. At the end, managing a company is still very analog, because human beings are analog, and the way you manage your … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Joseph Kaeser | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Human Resources, Management

You can walk up to a visual board on the shop floor in any Danaher business, and the metrics have the same labels: safety, quality, delivery, cost, and inventory. You can look at progress against clear targets — monthly, weekly, and daily cell-level targets. With that kind of visibility and transparency in performance, it’s easy to call it the way you see it. You can … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Thomas P. Joyce Jr. | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Measurement

[Our] first four core value drivers are core growth, operating margin expansion, working capital returns, and return on invested capital. Those are the four shareholder-facing financial metrics.

The next two are customer-facing metrics. On-time delivery is measured against when the customer wanted us to deliver something (even if that is yesterday). External quality is a broad measure of every dimension of a customer experience.

There are two … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Thomas P. Joyce Jr. | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Measurement

Although activist investors are successful at improving margins, they struggle to drive growth. We analyzed 55 companies over the past 10 years in which shareholder activists had a significant impact on company governance and strategy, and compared their performance to that of their industry peers. (The aims of activist actions included business focus, board composition, business restructuring, director election, focus on growth, board representation, general … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Joseph Duerr, Larry Jones | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Economics, Finance

The pursuit of innovation doesn’t depend on genius. Instead, it demands ingenuity — the ability to come up with solutions that are original and clever given the constraints that you and everyone else face.

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The penicillin story makes clear that the need to come up with a new and brilliant idea is often overrated. The ideas are out there, and people can see them. They just … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Andrew Hargadon | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Innovation