Strategic planning

Give yourself plenty of opportunities to change course.

Bonuses and other forms of incentive compensation are an effective motivator of executives to achieve ever higher earnings per share. The drive to produce short-term results, however, often influences management to forgo investment in capital equipment and R&D that would benefit the corporation several years hence even more than improved earnings next year would. The […]

Across-the-board cuts often backfire.

In most companies, strategic planning isn’t about making decisions. It’s about documenting choices that have already been made, often haphazardly. Leading firms are rethinking their approach to strategy development so they can make more, better, and faster decisions.

Get everyone moving in the same direction.

Rutgers sociologist and disaster studies expert Lee Clarke discusses how organizations unwittingly make pie-in-the-sky plans--what he calls symbolic plans--that...

Otherwise you'll drown in a to-do list.

To understand your customers' expectations, look beyond your industry.

Political scientists, legislators, educators, business executives, lawyers, consumerists—practically everyone, it sometimes seems—is calling for better public management. For businessmen, the need is especially important because they feel surrounded by government institutions with which they are legally required to interact. But enthusiasm for good government is one thing; understanding the nature of it, to say nothing […]

Shakeouts are a fact of life in almost every industry--witness the shrinking number of players in areas as diverse as banking, software, and hospital...

Few economic decisions are as difficult as those involving the choice between present and future consumption. Some people, unable to place much faith in the future, happily borrow to fund present pleasures; others, with longer time horizons, are wary of such “fly now, pay later” policies. They fear that the required payments, when viewed up […]

The most dubious business plan can look solid—even smart—if it’s cast as a virtuous circle. “See, we invest our profits in innovation to create delightful products that customers buy—which generate profits that we invest in innovation!” Who could argue with that? Indeed, the merit of self-reinforcing systems seems so obvious that businesspeople instinctively describe their […]

Despite the benefit of high profits, as well as the enjoyment of a position of leadership, a company that has a high market share is a tempting target...

How to establish the right KPIs.

Of all the meetings top executives attend in a year, none is more important than the strategy off-site, where the most essential conversations for the...

Of all the competing objectives every company faces, three pairs stand out: profitability versus growth, the short term versus the long term, and the...

Today it's not unusual for corporations that have dominated their markets for decades to be blindsided by upstarts with radical new business models. A...

How to close the gap between knowing and doing

When the author agreed to accept the top job at UPS, the global shipping service, in late winter of 2019, she expected to steer the company toward a brighter...

One bothersome aspect about the future when you’re trying to plan is all the uncertainty that surrounds it. In past years forecasters have tried to cope with the problem by coming up with a best guess—a “most probable” scenario—by extrapolating from trends, making a few assumptions, and then suggesting that management plan as if the […]