In a global economy, sustained competitive advantage arises from tackling social, political and environmental issues as part of a corporate strategy — not just pursuing business as usual.
Social web platforms don’t thrive by magic. They can succeed only if they attract the right individuals, motivate them to act in the right ways and empower them to know and trust others in the network. That’s where online reputation systems come in.
Companies are remarkably myopic when they go about forming strategic partnerships. Systematizing the analysis process should produce more gain and less pain.
Marketers and sellers hate product returns, but smart companies aren’t passively accepting them as bitter pills to be swallowed. They’re managing product-return policies to maximize future profits.
Courtesy of BMW.
Continuous innovation is the engine that drives highly successful companies such as Apple, General Electric, Google, Honda, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Tata group and many others.
Customer-centricity may sound like a good idea. But a new breed of companies focuses instead on getting the customer to comply with a company’s systems.
Courtesy of New York: Basic Books.
Marketers have increasingly recognized that their world has been changing from “push” to “pull.” Traditionally, they could push advertising and other marketing content toward potential customers to tout new products or services.
Courtesy of Citizens of Humanity
Stimulating consumption has become a key ingredient in the global effort to revive economic growth.
Teams that fight wildfires have much to teach business managers about preventing complex and dynamic problems from spiraling out of control.
To become a customer-focused organization requires senior executives to open up communication with people throughout the organization so they can hear what is actually going on — as opposed to a sanitized version. Few companies make this leap, even though not doing it can hurt long-term performance. However, managers can come to terms with their company’s weaknesses in the realm of customer focus by posing a set of five questions specifically designed to uncover their vulnerabilities.
Sexual harassment — and how to deal with it — is well understood by most companies. But now new dangers are being recognized in the ways an office romance affects the people around it. “Hostile work environment” claims, and their financial costs, are just the start.
What it means when people who grew up with technology in their hands become the heart of a work force — and what it means if managers don’t understand them.
From Apple to Twitter, some of the most successful businesses are not what their inventors originally envisioned.
A user’s guide to the building blocks of collective intelligence: By recombining CI “genes” according to the work required, managers can design the powerful system they need.