Strategy

Success brings profits, growth, and unbounded optimism. But it also has a way of blinding executives to the many organizational dangers that creep in at the same time. How much internal risk is hiding within your company? Use the risk exposure calculator to find out.

The disruptive economics of unmanned vehicles are taking hold. Here's how to think about the drone economy and your place in it.

The CEO wants to increase collaboration and cut costs with an open-plan work space, but the knowledge workers say they need their walls, their doors, and their privacy.

What do the Burroughs Corporation, Crown Cork & Seal Co., Inc., and the Union Camp Corporation have in common? Although none of them enjoys a dominant market share, all three earn quite respectable returns on their equity, have healthy profit margins, and continue to maintain strong sales growth year after year. In this article, the […]

You're already making them, so you might as well learn from them.

A customer-research technique that requires respondents to make a sequence of explicit trade-offs when choosing their preferred product attributes can...

The CEO's pledge to create millions of jobs was met with protests.

As a recent article in the Wall Street Journal noted, a spate of companies in the high technology/high-end services space has rediscovered the joys of vertical integration — you all remember (or at least those of you of a certain age remember) the excited discovery of “M” form organizations and the power of giving product […]

In a rapidly changing world managers need to increase their skills at diagnosing resistance to change and at choosing the appropriate methods for overcoming it.

Everyday encounters can prepare you for when the stakes are high.

This post is part of Creating a Customer-Centered Organization. If American companies are to grow their way out of the doldrums, they will need to show...

Can the Philippines catch up to Singapore?

With a keen eye and a flair for romantic copy, John Peterman created a successful catalog company. As an entrepreneur, he was in his element. As top manager of a fast-growing enterprise, he was ultimately much less successful. What happened?

The organizational structures of many multinational corporations are inadequate to the task of capitalizing on opportunities in emerging markets. Locating...

The key is knowing what your top price is—and having the discipline to stick to it.

Baldwin Farms, a California-based organic lettuce grower, has opened a distribution center in Pennsylvania to meet the rising demand for its product on...

Denial dogged my travels around the world these past weeks. At a World Economic Forum gathering in Dubai just before Dubai World’s debt problems made headlines, the head Sheikh touted Dubai’s superiority over the West for problems that Dubai had seemingly avoided. But the idle cranes and empty buildings I saw were monuments to denial […]

The crisis in financial institutions and the imminent failure of the US-based automobile producers have raised the issue about whether use of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) would have helped these companies avoid the disasters that occurred. Let us explore the possibilities. Many of the failed or failing organizations suffered from having a much too narrow […]

Understand how you’re perceived, but focus on results.

One of the great facts of a quarter of a century of scholarship from MIT Professor Eric von Hippel and his co-authors is that a vast number of useful innovations come not from some scientist and engineer tinkering in a lab, but people who would best be described as users solving their own problems. Examples […]