Incremental Strategy Development
Research on historical patterns of strategy development in organizations shows a pattern of what has become known as incremental strategy development. Strategies do not typically change in major shifts of…
Customer Intelligence Management
As products become commodities, the importance of services rises. That is, as differentiation from product advantages is reduced or neutralized, the customer relationship grows in importance. There is an unarguable…
Performance Measurement vs Process Benchmarking
The benchmarking starting point is measurement. However, we must distinguish between the act of measuring performance and the process of benchmarking. A benchmarking process uses a common measurement standard to compare…
Benchmarking Strategic Processes
It is in establishing strategy that an organization creates the distinctions that drive its competitiveness. The process for strategic planning engages an entire organization at all three levels of its…
Big Data Business Value
The convergence across business domains has ushered in a new economic system that is redefining relationships among producers, distributors, and consumers or goods and services. In an increasingly complex world,…
Drivers of IS/IT Strategy Development
The purpose in developing an IS/IT strategy is to ensure that the best possible value can be delivered from IS/IT investments. This can be achieved by tightly aligning the IS…
Evolution of strategic management maturity
All organizations have some form of strategy, whether implicit or explicit, and the essence of business strategy lies in creating future competitive advantages faster than competitors. Yet, formal strategic planning,…
Hyper-Competition Factors
Many industries have entered into a state of competition called hyper-competition. Hyper-competition is a state of intense and often lethal competition within an industry. It has some very alarming characteristics:…
Asking the right strategy questions
Questions are the spanners that unlock the mind. Here are the kind of questions you should ask yourself– and others. Understanding the problem • When did you first sense or…
Diversification Strategy Value
There are many reasons firms use a corporate-level diversification strategy. Typically, a diversification strategy is used to increase the firm’s value by improving its overall performance. Value is created either…
Corporate Levels of Diversification
Diversified firms vary according to their level of diversification and the connections between and among their businesses. There are five categories of businesses according to increasing levels of diversification. The…
Global Strategy/Structure Relationships
Although most organizations remain small or die, some firms continue to grow in terms of revenues, vertical integration, and diversity of products and services. In addition, their geographical scope may…
Information Technology Options for Strategy Implementation
The many ways in which advances in information technology (IT) affect strategy implementation is an important issue today. Evidence that managerial capabilities in managing IT can be a source of…
Strategy Implementation with Organizational Design
Strategy implementation involves the use of organizational design, the process of deciding how a company should create, use, and combine organizational structure, control systems,and culture to pursue a business model…
Performance Rewards and Risks
In a period of financial fragility the perception of many employees is that they are working longer and harder and yet are financially worse off. Pay freezes and reduced discretionary…
Innovation is a Group Sport
There can be no doubt that bringing new products and services to market successfully requires the broad cooperation of many very different teams beyond just the ideas merchants. Marketers, product…
Management by Objectives and Performance
Each member of the enterprise contributes something different, but all must contribute toward a common goal. Their efforts must all pull in the same direc- tion, and their contributions must…
Managing Service Providers for Performance
Different classes of service providers need different structures. But all of them, we may conclude, need first to impose on themselves such discipline as did the managers and leaders of…
Service Innovation Categories
An important decision regarding the service product of a provider is to invent new services. Why are successful service providers looking for innovations on a regular basis? One typology which…