Last week at the Managing Partners’ Forum held on March 12 in London, Caspar de Bono of the Financial Times opened this high-level conference for leaders of professional services firms with an observation about the… Read more »
Business Strategy
CVS and the decision to drop tobacco sales – savvy strategic repositioning?
CVS’s decision to stop offering tobacco products is an example of a company shifting its resources from cash-flow-generating, but declining businesses into higher growth markets. Tobacco, although a cash cow for many retailers (and a… Read more »
An interview with Rita by Thinkers50’s Des Dearlove
A while back, I was in London and took some time to catch up with the folks behind the Thinkers50 management awards. We did a wide-ranging video in which we talk about the nature of competition… Read more »
Disruption visits law firms
Be a doctor or a lawyer – that was once the route to a guaranteed good life. Both professions are seeing an erosion of that premise, with legal work being the most dramatic victim. … Read more »
What are we to use to replace industry analysis in strategy?
In my blog over at the Harvard business review web site, I noted that industry boundaries are blurring and that this can lead to serious strategy miscalculations. Several people wrote in to say that they… Read more »
Lessons from the Growth Outliers – HBR Article available for download
This is an article about an exceptional group of companies – publicly traded, with market cap as of 2009 of over $1 Billion USD – who were able to grow their net incomes by at… Read more »
So much for “Keep the Change”
In 2005, Bank of America did something very unusual – they introduced an innovation in financial services that customers actually liked! Called Keep the Change, the program targeted young women who were terrified of running… Read more »
Growth ambitions, yes. Growth capability? Still working on that…
My colleagues over at the growth practice at consultancy Accenture surveyed some of their largest clients about their growth prospects. The results are in my blog, “ready for growth, but not prepared” over at the… Read more »
Analysts or business designers in today’s strategy work?
A LinkedIn Question went like this: Is business strategy as we teach it in Harvard Case Studies Obsolete? Do we need to develop business designers and not strategic planners? Traditioal strategic planning takes a… Read more »
Expanding role for Finance Chiefs – utterly predictable
The Wall Street Journal last week published an article on the expanding role of CFO's and financial people generally in corporations. Well, it's a trend I've been watching for a while, and it isn't going to… Read more »
Profit from the Core - A growth theory is put to something of an empirical test and OUCH!
One of the more popular books on growth in recent years has been Profit From the Core, a book that suggests firms should focus their efforts on core and adjacent markets to find growth opportunities. … Read more »
Profit from the Core – A growth theory is put to something of an empirical test and OUCH!
One of the more popular books on growth in recent years has been Profit From the Core, a book that suggests firms should focus their efforts on core and adjacent markets to find growth opportunities. … Read more »