In spite of the dot-com implosion, Web-based businesses continue growing at a fast clip. Indeed, the Internet is now extending its reach beyond sales of just books, music, PCs and travel services.
Learning rarely follows a linear, upward progression. People forget what they once knew; institutional memory fades; obstacles of all kinds block individuals and groups from making progress. Sometimes an initially successful program or approach stops delivering results.
Do big discount strategies really prompt new customers to buy more items, more often? Or does promotional pricing actually undermine attempts to increase future spending among existing customers? A recent large-scale study of a U.S. catalog retailer investigated how discount promotion strategies ultimately affect the bottom-line business.
Recent research relates the importance of corporate governance not to stockholders but rather to another important stakeholder: bondholders. Ever since spectacular failures occurred at previously well-regarded companies, the spotlight has shone on corporate governance activities as the means of preventing fraud and aligning management with shareholders’ interests.
The design of a corporate portfolio should be based primarily on its strategic intent and desired competitive impact, that is, on how a select set of market positions builds a platform for growth while influencing the behavior of rivals and the structure of the industry.
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Teams that are basically left to run themselves can be highly efficient and productive. To be successful, though, such autonomous groups require a specific type of external leadership.
By sourcing and integrating knowledge from dispersed geographic locations, companies can generate more innovations of higher value and lower cost.
Many companies have struggled to design IT systems, databases and content repositories that provide their employees with easily accessible and relevant information. The authors urge organizations to emulate the strategies of Google, eBay and Amazon.com, whose core competence is based upon making it easy for customers to find what they want — quickly, accurately and usefully.
A decade ago, multinational companies seemed poised to dominate in China. Today that picture has changed. Whereas IBM, HP and Compaq had quickly won more than 50% of the personal computer market, for example, Chinese company Legend Group Ltd. is now the number one supplier. Research in 10 industries over the last 10 years reveals a pitched battle of competencies between multinational and local players and points to five strategies that can help multinationals regain the edge.
A company’s ability to execute today’s strategy while developing tomorrow’s arises from the context within which its employees operate.
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Even the best companies let their customers down sometimes, and many disappoint frequently. The authors lay much of the blame for this on companies’ obsession with uniqueness and differentiation. According to their analysis, companies are too quick to dismiss “category benefits” as a source of advantage. They explain why companies such as Toyota, Cemex, Orange, Medtronic and Sony are successful because they are simply better at offering what customers really want.
Every company lives in fear of competitors that offer seemingly similar products for much lower prices. Dealing with such discounters is no simple matter, as Hewlett-Packard, May Department Stores, Salomon Brothers and others have discovered. Nevertheless, various strategies — ignoring or blocking the competitor, strengthening your value proposition or even strategic retreat — can help slow or even stop the low-end competitor without destroying the industry’s profit margins.
A corporate sphere of influence is not just a platform for a company’s offensive or defensive initiatives. It is the basis upon which the company builds market power over rivals so it can maneuver freely without fear of retaliation.
Kellogg‘s profit margins and the stature of its brands both declined throughout the 1990s. A wake-up call came in 1999 when the venerable company lost market leadership. The author describes how it embarked upon an ambitious and, for the food industry, novel strategy, emphasizing profit and value over volume and employing compensation and organization strategies to help cascade the change through the company and re-establish its innovativeness, profitability and reputation.
We may be in the second decade of the knowledge-worker era, but companies still have much to learn about what makes such workers tick.
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As health care costs continue to skyrocket, companies must aggressively seek ways to work with employees and providers to reduce costs, while improving quality.
The authors contend that contemporary management education does a disservice by standardizing content, focusing on business functions (rather than on managing practices) and training specialists (rather than general managers). Working with several major international universities, the authors have developed seven tenets to improve MBA programs by grounding them in practical experience, shared insight and thoughtful reflection.
Today’s almost mythical notion of the hero-leader demands that vision be a pre-eminent executive trait. Time and time again, if a corporate leader is successful, his or her vision is cited as the cause and lauded as the foundation of the leader’s greatness.