Competitive strategy

Managers should make environmental investments for the same reason they make other investments: because they expect them to deliver positive returns or to reduce risks.

Many managers of service businesses are aware that the strategic management (by which I mean the total process of selecting and implementing a corporate strategy) of service businesses is different from that of manufacturing businesses. This article discusses how pure service businesses are different from product-oriented businesses and why they require different strategic thinking. A […]

Companies in developing countries are often so focused on chasing growth that they fail to invest in improving their innovation, operations, and brand...

In the middle of an economic and jobs crisis, why should any politician or executive focus on a "soft" issue like work-life policy? Most are thinking...

When business conditions change, the most successful companies are often the slowest to adapt. To avoid being left behind, executives must understand the true sources of corporate inertia.

How can American industry rebuild the skills and supplier bases required to produce advanced technologies? I am losing confidence that the solution lies in American companies overhauling, unaided, their management practices. A whole generation of managers has been imbued, over a period of more than 20 years, with the supposed virtues of global outsourcing, and […]

Less than a decade after the frantic merger activity of the late 1960s, we are again in the midst of a major wave of corporate acquisitions. In contrast to the 1960s, when acquirers were mainly freewheeling conglomerates, the merger movement in the 1970s includes such long-established giants of U.S. industry as General Electric, Gulf Oil, […]

Call it the First Law of Media: Nothing sells like a juicy controversy. In the Fourth Estate of the 21st century, controversy’s a commodity. Everyone with a blog can generate it. If news publishers want to escape the trap they’re caught in, they have to stop building business models on it, stop dedicating smart, dedicated […]

Unions can make a pivotal contribution to competitiveness. In a world where business success increasingly depends on creating more flexible, team-based...

A second generation of electronic commerce is emerging, one that will be shaped more by strategy than by experimentation. The battle for competitive advantage will be waged along three dimensions: reach, affiliation, and richness.

The past decade reveals managers’ growing awareness of the need to incorporate technological issues within strategic decision making. They have increasingly discovered that technology and strategy are inseparable. For technology has an inner logic that simply must be considered in a company’s strategic planning—that process of creating a concept of the business it is in, […]

History is bound to repeat itself.

It’s fashionable today to enthuse over globalized markets and cite glowing examples of standardized marketing winners around the world. True, some markets are globalizing, and more companies are taking advantage of them with signal success. But the rosy reports of these triumphs usually neglect to mention the complexities and risks involved; for every victory in […]

The recent hearings on Apple’s tax practices raises significant questions about who pays what and why.

A major shift is occurring in the nature of global competition, but it’s widely misunderstood. Emerging markets are no longer competing solely on price—by offering the lowest-cost manufacturing, for instance. Rather, they are increasingly competing with sophisticated skills in key sectors like health care, software, entertainment, consumer products, and manufacturing. They’re leveraging a fast-growing ability […]

Studies of corporate performance reveal a growing link between certain kinds of technology investments and intensifying competitiveness.

As more and more industries decline or increase only modestly, the need for competent managers in stagnant industries will grow. Instead of following the often-heard advice to harvest such businesses, managers should understand the characteristics of their markets and build strategy accordingly. On the basis of their study of a number of declining industries, these […]

In a postindustrial economy is the value chain obsolete?

As leaders, we’re all hungry for ideas. But where do ideas come from? The old answer was top-down: Ideas came from the masterful CEO or the visionary entrepreneur. The new answer is bottom-up: Ideas can come from anyone, and anywhere, if you as a leader design an “architecture of participation” that allows talented individuals to […]

The U.S. may be the world’s leading innovator, but it won’t be for long if investors, regulators, and the legal establishment continue to penalize companies for risk taking, says Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness. Recently, the council’s National Innovation Initiative, a leadership network of CEOs and university presidents, released a report in […]