Strategic planning

Today's dynamic markets and technologies have called into question the sustainability of competitive advantage. Under pressure to improve productivity,...

A well-conceived business plan is essential to the success of an enterprise. Whether you are starting up a venture, seeking additional capital for an...

It’s become a trendy managerial acronym: VUCA, short for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and a catchall for “Hey, it’s crazy out there!” It’s also misleading: VUCA conflates four distinct types of challenges that demand four distinct types of responses. That makes it difficult to know how to approach a challenging situation and easy to […]

Risk management is too often treated as a compliance issue that can be solved by drawing up lots of rules and making sure that all employees follow them....

This package begins with "What the West Gets Wrong About China," by Rana Mitter and Elsbeth Johnson, which discusses three fundamental misconceptions:...

How some large companies infuse their planning process with new entrepreneurial vigor, maintaining market leadership over the long haul.

To convert a tantalizing concept into a managerial instrument of competitive power…

Many people don't tackle negotiations in a proactive way; instead, they simply react to moves the other side makes. While that approach may work in a...

A detailed plan may be comforting, but it’s not a strategy.

What makes for a good strategy in highly uncertain business environments? Some executives seek to shape the future with high-stakes bets. Eastman Kodak Company, for example, is spending $500 million per year to develop an array of digital photography products that it hopes will fundamentally change the way people create, store, and view pictures. Meanwhile, […]

Companies profess devotion to shareholder value but rarely follow the practices that maximize it. What will it take to make your company a level 10 value creator?

Most companies feel compelled to give to charity. Few have figured out how to do it well.

In many companies, sales forces and marketers feud like Capulets and Montagues—with disastrous results. Here’s how to get them to lay down their swords.

Projects fail at a spectacular rate. One reason is that too many people are reluctant to speak up about their reservations during the all-important planning phase. By making it safe for dissenters who are knowledgeable about the undertaking and worried about its weaknesses to speak up, you can improve a project’s chances of success. Research […]

Most business executives who have put time, effort, and investment into developing a presence in China resist the notion of decoupling. With the Biden...

Design is a team effort, but how do marketing and engineering talk to each other?

Corporate strategy, the overall plan for a diversified company, is both the darling and the stepchild of contemporary management practice—the darling because CEOs have been obsessed with diversification since the early 1960s, the stepchild because almost no consensus exists about what corporate strategy is, much less about how a company should formulate it. A diversified […]

Many leaders I work with struggle with strategy. They know it’s important to have strategies in order to align decision making in their businesses. They understand that they can’t observe and control everything in their organizations (much as many of them would like to). They earnestly want to develop good strategies and they get the […]

Many companies abandoned activity-based costing because it did not capture the complexity of their operations, took too long to implement, and was too expensive to build and maintain. Here’s a way around those problems.

On my first visit to Samsung’s Suwon complex, the headquarters of the company’s electronics and appliance division was even more Third World than I expected. The factory floors were bare concrete. People hand-wheeled parts to and from the production line. The research lab reminded me of a dilapidated high-school science classroom. But the work going […]