The successful organisations of the future will be performance-focused, principles-led and purpose-driven.
It is down to you, as leader, to align these three characteristics.
Before you rush into a change programme, make sure it’s the right one.
Understand the catalyst for transformation, your underlying quest, and the leadership capabilities needed to see it through.
When human resources steps out of its traditional silo and embraces a strategic role the rewards can be significant.
Take these steps to move towards the next generation of HR.
Rigid implementation of strategy leads to failure.
Start treating strategy as a hypothesis, using data from staff and customers as a tool for re-evaluation and revision.
How can you ensure you get the best outcome as a Western leader at the Chinese negotiating table?
Understanding the negotiating culture will give you a head start.
The best social-purpose programmes are authentic, inform innovation and steer investment towards social causes.
Match your firm’s social aspirations to its growth needs to create social programmes that meet consumers’ expectations and build business value.
What is the key to becoming a major player in your industry?
If you want to get ahead of your competitors and stay there, you must acknowledge that operational excellence is vital to executing your strategy.
Innovation is often viewed as more art than science.
Here's a structured approach to developing new products, using ‘patient’ and ‘impatient’ innovation strategies.
It's easy for entrepreneurs to overlook the need for a clear and coherent business strategy.
Here are the very basics of how to put that right.
Design thinking may be the go-to approach for positive change, but all too often it fails to deliver.
Discover the key steps to help your company use design thinking effectively.
Your company must foster a culture of innovation in order to take advantage of the recent resurgence of corporate R&D departments.
Here's how to create an innovation culture in your firm.
As a successful entrepreneur and market disrupter, you might think you have all the right skills to personally handle constructive transformation of your firm.
But handing over to an outsider could pay off.
The global economy is coalescing around a few digital superpowers. A winner-take-all world is emerging where economic power is now concentrated in the hands of a few digital “hub firms”.
Here’s how you can push back.
GE CEO, Jeff Immelt, has turned the 125-year-old conglomerate into a startup.
As he prepares to leave his job, Immelt’s shares his own insights on how to achieve corporate transformation.
Could an excessive reliance on data analysis be limiting your company’s scope for imagination and innovation?
Management is more than just a science; discover an alternative approach to business strategy.
Driving successful change isn’t simply about knowing what you want to achieve and getting the economics and technology right.
If you want your teams fully engaged, you will need to create and communicate an appealing vision of a better future.
For continued success in our digitally driven age, your company’s culture needs some close scrutiny.
It’s up to you to take a strong lead rather than hold out for an organic organisational shift.
Treat digitisation as a crisis that’s happening right now by taking the sort of decisive action normally reserved for emergencies.
If you wait for digitisation to disrupt your markets, you’ve already left it too late.
In the modern world of sales, Amazon is ever poised to make disruptive moves in any industry it sets its sights on.
But it’s how it sells, rather than what it sells, that gives it the edge.
Megadeals are the holy grail for many organisations. It’s not unusual for 40% of projected revenues to come from just 1% of deals.
Losing one can mean missing revenue targets. But winning one on the wrong terms can destroy value because of bad pricing or terms and conditions.
Here are seven ways to win the right megadeals.
When you develop new technologies you can never be sure how the market will respond. Yet the future of a given technology is not as unforeseeable as it might seem.
Here's a three-step method to help you anticipate the next development in your industry. This exercise isn’t just for high-tech firms; it’s been used with managers from grocery stores to hospitals.
The onward march of digitisation will change the nature of the game for everyone – including your company – over the next ten years.
It's time to recognise and accept this impending change and create a gameplan for a borderless economy.
Here are your four new critical priorities.
Five of the ten most valuable companies in the world – Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft – get much of their worth from their “multisided platforms”.
Writing for Harvard Business Review, Andrei Hagiu and Elizabeth J Altman outline four ways you can turn your products and services into a platform, and examine the strategic advantages and pitfalls of each.
It pays to avoid classic pitfalls when the business you take on has been left in a mess by your predecessor. Taking over leadership of any business, especially as an outsider, is a challenge.
Over half the leaders who take over a mess will have failed within a year and a half.
Here are five ways to avoid stepping on the land mines that were left for you.
As a senior executive, you need to balance the long-term strategic and short-term operational needs of your company. This is not easy, writes Sabina Nawaz for Harvard Business Review, when meetings so readily become dominated by day-to-day concerns.
Here's how to maintain your focus on the long term and stick to the bigger picture.
To help people understand your strategic vision and implement the change you want, make sure you send the right signals.
This is especially important during times of strategic change.
Writing in Harvard Business Review, Elsbeth Johnson describes three signals that leaders often get wrong, causing confusion, or even the opposite of what they’ve asked for.
Marketing is one of the most rapidly developing areas of the business world and your company needs a champion with the qualities to embrace that challenge for the long haul, writes David Clarke for Strategy+Business.
It’s not so many years since the extent of most companies’ marketing efforts was an advert in the telephone directory. Today it’s a specialised field.
Traditional companies are not immune from the disruption associated with new technologies. To avoid disaster transform your core operations while growing into new business areas.
If you’re complacent, you leave yourself vulnerable to ‘industry compression’ – a form of slow but dangerous change that results in a prolonged decline in operating profits and revenues.
Market conditions change, and when they do leaders need to decide whether to respond by restructuring or reconfiguring.
There are two key reasons why a company might need to consider reorganisation: to “reduce ‘organisational cholesterol’” or to “change strategic direction in the face of major industry change”.
What to do with all that cash stacking up on your balance sheet
Today, financial capital is abundant and cheap. But most of present day leaders cut their teeth under the old rules, in a time when capital was both scarce and expensive. If their business is to thrive in this era of capital superabundance, managers must make the transition from canny investor to robust experimenter.
View uncertainty as an opportunity to gain competitive advantage.
When there is market disruption most companies focus on managing the potential negative consequences for their business, with the aim of minimising losses. But when the financial crisis hit in 2008, Hyundai took a different approach; the car manufacturer “leaned into market anxiety”.
A leader with foggy focus can lose their direction. So, how do you define your goals and keep your whole team on the same path?
It’s easy to be thrown off course as a new business leader. You seem to know where you’re heading then suddenly you find yourself being swayed by the grand ideas or passions of staff, customers or financial backers.
If you want your company to continue to flourish, know when to stop growing it.
All managers should pause to consider when high growth is good for their business, and when it is bad. “What should a retailer do when growth slows? Is it doomed, or is there a way to prosper when its business matures?”
Thinkers from Albert Einstein to Peter Drucker have emphasised the importance of correctly diagnosing problems. So why do we still struggle to get it right?
Companies are good at problem solving. What they struggle with is diagnosing what those problems are.
Create customer loyalty by making your products habit-forming rather than innovative.
Marketers spend a lot of time and money trying to make products stand out so they’ll be chosen. But what if novelty has the opposite effect? Writing in Harvard Business Review, A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin argue that you should offer customers not the perfect choice but the easy one.
“What do you do when things in your business go exactly opposite to plan?”
Dealing with things occasionally going wrong is an integral aspect of business management. The trick is to make sure that we don’t repeat our mistakes. Nobody likes to dwell on failure, but as contentious and painful a process as it might be, businesses need to undertake a thorough ‘disaster diagnosis’ before moving on.
Multinational corporations have invested huge sums in emerging markets – yet returns on those investments have sometimes been disappointing.
This is often blamed on the fact that these markets are different, and companies need to adapt their products, operations and business models. But that in turn requires good market intelligence – which is harder to come by than in advanced-economy countries.
Stop bad habits from reasserting themselves – and appoint a chief transformation officer.
Six years ago an engineering business realised its earnings had stalled. It embarked on a major and seemingly successful effort to transform the business: earnings increased by more than the $100m target, and it declared victory 18 months later. Yet, earlier this year, the same business filed for bankruptcy.
For your company to succeed you must develop a bespoke digital strategy to complement its unique selling proposition (USP).
A clear digital strategy is vital to provide direction and enable you to manage your company’s digital efforts, track their progress and, if necessary, change course.
Limit the fallout from crises by building trust with consumers and the public CEOs should axe corporate social responsibility units and instead make accountability everyone’s…
Companies must avoid routine thinking and behaviour and embrace wholesale transformation to ensure they remain at the top of their game.
Your company’s way of doing business might have brought success for 20 years. It might still work today. But routine leads to complacency, and in the world of business, complacency can be deadly.
When a product fails, should you improve it or kill it? Senior managers are best placed to make the right choice – quickly.
Your engineers and managers work for months, often years, to develop and launch new products. They invest significant resources in research, marketing and distribution. So to see those products go down in flames creates a difficult choice: do you try to improve the quality and support for products – or terminate them?
How nuclear thinking can help you eliminate human error. JPMorgan Chase was hacked because somebody forgot to update the security settings of a server to…
Don’t rush to transform your business. Slow down, and follow the four Ds – Direction, Diligence, Development and Delivery – for lasting change.
Most business transformation projects falter because they’re rushed, but you can’t build successful transformation in a hurry. The best transformation projects are slow-cooked, not microwaved.
How do you build a startup with no venture capital? Slowly – but you’ll end up with a sustainable business you can call your own.
The stereotypical startup begins with young entrepreneurs fresh out of Harvard with a bright idea for a disruptive innovation, and ends when they go public after a few years’ rapid growth enabled by selling off big chunks to investors. But there is another way.
Safeguarding sensitive company information is something we all need to be vigilant about in this technological age. But did you know that security breaches are far more likely to be an inside job than the work of an outside hacker?
Marc van Zadelhoff, writing for Harvard Business Review, cites IBM’s 2016 Cyber Security Intelligence Index which established that 60 per cent of all attacks are carried out by people within the company.
Five key leadership behaviours lay behind rare ‘breakthrough’ success in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) business.
‘Breakthroughs’ are products that expand or create new product categories – often required to maintain or grow a company’s market share. In the CPG market, 80% of growth comes from 1% of brands. Breakthrough success is so rare that of 3,500 new brands only 18 made the grade.
You may have great products with competitive prices and know who to target, but without an effective customer strategy you can still miss out on sales.
Writing in Strategy+Business, Thomas Ripsam and Louis Bouquet present ten principles to help you succeed by adding distinctive value and experience to your offering.
