Strategy

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

What do you do when the very breakthrough strategy that once made your business uniquely powerful now threatens to turn you into a commodity? That’s the question stationery supplier Staples is facing. I still remember when Staples changed my life. Before its 1986 opening, buying stationery and office supplies was a time-consuming, inconvenient, and expensive […]

Accounting for almost 30% of world GDP, the United States is the world’s largest and most demanding market for almost everything from oil to microprocessors to premium coffee. Companies around the world aspire to do business in the US, or at least with US companies in their home markets. By doing so, they learn much […]

I recently moved to a new home. As is typical, my wife and I spent many hours throwing out things that we no longer needed. Old shoes, clothes, electronics, mounds of papers, and old books. It is shocking how much junk one family can accumulate over the years. My 5 year old — our resident […]

Nine problems that face start-ups who are trying to scale.

Give yourself plenty of opportunities to change course.

The primitive, emotional parts of our brains have a powerful influence on the choices we make. Now, neuroscientists are mapping the risk and reward systems in the brain that drive our best—and worst—decision making.

Standardization has been a powerful strategy in consumer markets, but it's reached the point of diminishing returns. And diversity is not the only chink...

It is always instructive to examine how successful firms can go wrong, even in markets that they think they understand well. The market failure of the Michelin run-flat PAX tire illustrates the common mistake of failing to realize that even a groundbreaking product has to create a complete consumption chain. Broken links in the chain […]

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 […]

Executing a new strategy nearly always requires new resources and capabilities-and most firms seek them out the wrong way. In a 10-year study of 162 telecom...

Awareness of these forces can help a company stake out a position in its industry that is less vulnerable to attack.

It’s the new Swatch.

A source of customer complaints became a source of revenue.

Companies say they want breakthrough products, but most are far more adept at making incremental improvements to existing lines. A pioneering division at 3M successfully navigated a process that leads to breakthrough thinking.

Your organization can become more decisive—and can implement strategy more quickly—if you know where the bottlenecks are and who’s empowered to break through them.

Lessons from the head of McKinsey's negotiation practice.

For the past ten years, my colleague, Chris Trimble, and I have studied one critical question: What are the best practices for executing an innovation initiative? Execution is the poor stepchild of the innovation challenge. People love to engage in the hunt for the big ideas, but, let’s face it, without execution capability, an idea […]

During the past 25 years an increasing proportion of U.S. companies have seen wisdom in pursuing a strategy of diversification. Between 1950 and 1970, for example, single-business companies comprising the Fortune “500” declined from 30% to 8% of the total. Acquisition has become a standard approach to diversification. In recent years the productivity of capital […]