strategy+business: STRATEGY & LEADERSHIP

Can Best Buy Thwart the Grim Reaper?

by Ken Favaro — Mon, 13 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

As Best Buy takes a pounding in the financial markets, its leaders need to look beyond conventional solutions and reach for true strategic innovation. But is the once-dominant big box retailer up to the challenge of seeking solutions from outside its comfort zone and, indeed, from outside its own industry? Doing so may be its last hope for survival.

The Agility Factor

by Thomas Williams, Christopher G. Worley, and Edward E. Lawler III — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

A few large companies in every industry show consistently superior profitability relative to their peers. And they all have one thing in common: a highly developed capacity to adapt their business to change. With the right level of agility, companies such as ExxonMobil and Harley-Davidson have become steady outperformers.

We're from Corporate and We're Here to Help

by Ken Favaro — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The one true measure of a company's corporate strategy is the profitability of its corporate center. That's right, we're talking about "corporate," that "dead weight" of administrative functionaries most business unit leaders love to loathe. In strict accounting terms, corporate headquarters is a cost center because it has no revenues, but it can and should be profitable. In fact, a profitable corporate center is both literally and figuratively at the center of corporate profit itself.

Solving China's M&A Maze

by John Jullens — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Western executives undertaking M&A in China often lack the in-depth knowledge required to navigate the countless pitfalls unique to China's business environment they are sure to encounter--from the pre-deal phase through the postmerger integration. Here are eight battle-tested best practices that can go a long way in ensuring that deals run smoothly and end in successful partnerships.

The Right Ideas in All the Wrong Places

by Ken Favaro with Nadim Yacteen — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Capable strategists must embrace and enhance strategic intuition to generate groundbreaking ideas for where their companies most need to innovate . That requires knowing where big, practical ideas come from.

The Discipline of Managing Disruption

by Art Kleiner — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

To Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, coauthor of How Will You Measure Your Life? a primary task of leadership is asking questions that anticipate great challenges. His insight about the innovator's dilemma became conventional business wisdom. Now he is applying it to a deeper question: What is life for?

The Thought Leader Interview: Cynthia Montgomery

by Ken Favaro and Art Kleiner — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

A Harvard Business School professor of strategy observes that leaders become better strategists by engaging in conversation about the purpose of a company. Cynthia Montgomery's perspective, based on her experience with executive education for entrepreneurs and managers, could reconcile long-standing debates about position versus resources, analysis versus execution, and entrepreneurship versus large business management.

Hyundai's Capabilities Play

by William J. Holstein — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Fifteen years ago, Korean automaker Hyundai Motor Company was an also-ran in the U.S. market, with low-quality cars and a troubled brand. But a bold gamble--the industry's most comprehensive warranty--and significant quality-improvement initiatives turned the company around. It now puts quality ahead of sales growth, and its new designs are winning converts, to the point where the company controls 5 percent of the U.S. market.

Product Management Gets Stronger

by Barry Jaruzelski, Richard Holman, and Ian MacDonald — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The diffusion of decision rights across functions throughout a product's life cycle can result in wasted customer insights, subpar innovation, and ineffective complexity management. Companies should adopt strong-form product management: giving responsibility for top-line growth and other financial outcomes to one person, who also has cross-functional decision-making authority.

Beyond Functions

by Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The value of functions is undeniable; no company could do without them. But the business and organizational models that govern corporate functions need updating. How about a model based on capabilities instead?

Think Functionally, Act Strategically

by Deniz Caglar, Namit Kapoor, and Thomas Ripsam — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The specialist leaders of HR, IT, finance, and other functions have had their time, attention, and (in some cases) money freed up by more efficient practices. They now have the ability--and the mandate--to play a more influential role, especially when building capabilities. Instead of balancing services among all business units equally, or striving to be best in class in everything, they can become increasingly "fit for purpose," thinking and acting in line with the enterprise strategy.

Well-Tailored IT

by Peter Burns, David Hovenden, and Mark Johnson — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

If you are a senior IT leader, you need to make the same kinds of disciplined choices for your department that the CEO and top leadership team are making about the strategic direction of the enterprise. Here's how to develop a sophisticated, more strategically oriented information technology approach--based on six ways to create value for the enterprise, and five archetypes that resolve the tension among those six value drivers.

Designing the Right Supply Chain

by Richard Kauffeld, Adam Michaels, and Curt Mueller — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

When a company's supply chain practices are directly aligned with its enterprise strategy, the result is superior performance and a strong market position. And yet, a true strategic fit between enterprise and supply chain strategy is all too rare in the business world. This article describes how to marry your strategic goals with your operational capabilities.

Six Secrets to Doing Less

by Matthew E. May — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Business leaders today need to cut through the noise when developing their innovation strategies, using the art of subtraction to reveal the quiet truth. Six rules point to a single, powerful idea for achieving simplicity in any innovative effort: When you remove just the right things in just the right way, good things happen.

How Leaders Mistake Execution for Strategy (and Why That Damages Both)

by Ken Favaro — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

When leaders confuse visions, missions, purposes, plans, or goals for the real work of strategy, they send their firms adrift. They must first address five much more fundamental--and difficult--questions. Among these: What business or businesses should your company be in? Who are your target customers? What are your value propositions to those customers? And perhaps most importantly, what will be your differentiating capabilities?

What Drives a Company's Success?

by Art Kleiner and Nadia Kubis — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Booz & Company and strategy+business have introduced an online survey to explore the relationship between management theory, corporate identity, and high performance.

The Multipolar MBA

by William J. Holstein — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 06:00:00 GMT

To Rakesh Khurana, a Harvard professor known for his histories of business schools, the management academy is facing a crisis of irrelevance. In this Q&A with business journalist William Holstein, Khurana argues that global companies are recruiting new types of future executives, and business schools are struggling to adapt.

Building the Skills of Insight

by Art Kleiner — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 06:00:00 GMT

To eminent systems therapist David Kantor, learning to "read the room" (to recognize hidden patterns in conversation) is the first step toward more effective executive leadership. Kantor categorizes speech acts in terms of action (moving, opposing, following, or "bystanding"); content (power, meaning, or affect); and legitimacy (open, closed, or random), and this interview explains how the right speech act at the right moment can help an executive team move forward in new ways.

Best Business Books 2012: Strategy

by Phil Rosenzweig — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 15:10:00 GMT

The three best business books on strategy in 2012 bring fresh thinking to important questions of global competition and business strategy. The New Emerging Market Multinationals and Pragmatic Strategy seek to explain the 150 percent increase in emerging-market companies on Fortune 's Global 500 list over the past 5 years. Competitive Strategy describes how game theory and real options can be combined to inform many kinds of strategic decisions.

The Lesson of Lost Value

by Christopher Dann, Matthew Le Merle, and Christopher Pencavel — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 13:00:00 GMT

A new survey by Booz & Company reveals that strategic risk -- risk embedded in the top-level decisions made by the executive team -- is the most significant contributor to destroyed shareholder value. Companies need to look beyond their traditional enterprise risk management teams and adopt a more top-down approach: broadening awareness about uncertainty and risk, integrating risk awareness directly into strategic decision making, and focusing on strategic resiliency.

The Thought Leader Interview: William J. O'Rourke

by Ann Graham — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 11:00:00 GMT

The former head of Alcoa Russia teaches executives that international business practice should start with a strong sense of ethics -- or it won't survive. In this Thought Leader interview, Bill O'Rourke looks back at his efforts to run an ethical company in Russia, and ahead at the ethical challenges facing today's business students.

The Offline Executive

by Henry Mintzberg and Peter Todd — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 10:00:00 GMT

New technologies are transforming our lives, for better and for worse, with profound implications for management. Mobile computing can help managers cope with the many demands on their time, but it can also increase the chaos and cause them to miss nuances that could be gleaned from personal interactions. Managers can take several steps to avoid the pitfalls and regain control.

School Reform for Realists

by Andrea Gabor — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Partnerships between business and education have a place in solving the talent gap, but it's not what most executives think. Draw on the most collaborative, generative aspects of business thinking -- following the examples of companies that promote transparency, engagement, shared accountability, continuous improvement, and organizational learning.

The Business Case for the European Union

by Robert Gogel, Per-Ola Karlsson, and Ludo Van der Heyden — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 05:00:00 GMT

To corporate leaders around the world, the economic crisis in Europe is a sign that convergence and strong regional management are the solution, not the problem. Business leaders want more Europe, not less. They feel there is far more to gain from bringing Europe closer together than from letting it further fall apart.

Planning for Facebook's Future

by Peter Thies and Jane Stevenson — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has an opportunity to launch a public company that not only focuses on increasing revenue by filling an exciting new product pipeline, but places just as much attention on developing the strong pipeline of leaders who will create them. To do so he'll need to engage his board, for whom reducing CEO succession risk from Day One is a mandated fiduciary responsibility.