Strategy execution

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.

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.

Recently, I asked some business executives for their top three IT wishes. Across the board, their responses echoed a common plea: “I wish IT projects would come in on time and on budget.” Funny thing is – this very reasonable sounding request is actually quite unreasonable. You see, we are no longer simply automating existing […]

Stacey Barr, performance measure specialist at Stacey Barr Pty Ltd, recommends using sensory words to make your goals stick.

Learning should be guided by a company’s strategy and execution.

Throughout most of modern business history, corporations have attempted to unlock value by matching their structures to their strategies: Centralization...

Quality is more important than quantity.

Drawing on a rich set of company examples, Thomas H. Davenport, a professor at the University of Texas's Graduate School of Business, provides a fresh,...

This post is part of the HBR Insight Center Making Collaboration Work. Like death and taxes, one of the inevitable realities of organizational life is...

Just five years ago, salespeople at Whirlpool were in the habit of referring to their supply chain organization as the "sales disablers." Now the company...

If you were a military general on the march, you'd want your troops to have plenty of maps--detailed information about the mission they were on, the roads...

Ask any CEO who has overseen a corporate transformation what should have been handled differently, and you are likely to get this answer: "We should have...

This short quiz can gauge how committed your company really is.

Business has gone through a dramatic transformation in recent years. So has warfare. Every executive knows firsthand the daunting challenges of the twenty-first-century business environment: rapid and disruptive change, fleeting opportunities, incomplete information, an overall sense of uncertainty and disorder. While military commanders have long faced such challenges on the battlefield, meeting them has be […]

Strategies for leaders to align all three.

Research shows that enterprises fail at execution because they go straight to structural reorganization and neglect the most powerful drivers of effectiveness—decision rights and information flow.

The three are different, though their boundaries are hard to draw.

The main goal of any international strategy should be to manage the large differences that arise at the borders of markets. Yet executives often fail...

The success of Yahoo!, eBay, Enron, and other companies that have become adept at morphing to meet the demands of changing markets can't be explained...

Buried in the news reports of the past two weeks, with hardly any fanfare or attention, was a report by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) that it lost $3.8 billion in fiscal year 2009. This was despite reducing expenses by $6 billion, eliminating 40,000 jobs, and reducing payments for retiree health benefits by $4 billion. […]