Daily Updates

Idea 8  - Channel management We hear a lot about discontinuous change these days. It first cropped up in catastrophe theory, which may give pause for thought, but business thinkers and economists like the way it describes the quantum leap - the radical shift that makes everything look different. They also like how it (eventually) boosts growth, far more than incremental change ever does. Some of the most powerful discontinuities of the last century or so have been the coming of the horseless carriage, powered flight, the personal computer and now, dot.com bust or no, of the Internet. The Net has forced anyone running a business to reconsider exactly how they market, sell and distribute their products. And that boils down to some serious thought about channel management. Distribution Channels are a business's routes to market, part of the 'place' in the four Ps of marketing. In considering the four Ps, managers must make decisions on how many levels of distrib...

Idea  7 - Brand Apple has been running a transatlantic advertising campaign featuring two friends - Mac and PC. PC - who wears a tie - is nice enough but a little geeky and buttoned down. Doing what he has to, which is to be a computer, is a bit of a performance and ever-so-slightly perplexing. Mac - casual shirt - is relaxed, cool, takes everything in his stride. Not smug, he's simply the sort of guy you wouldn't mind meeting in a bar. Who would you rather have a relationship with? The campaign, which has played around the world using well-known faces in the roles of Mac and PC, takes the next logical step in brand advertising. It does what other marketers have been urging, which is to 'humanize' the brand - except that Apple has done it literally. Brands have travelled a long way from the rear ends of Texas cattle. Like the original, marketing brands are supposed to bum an image of the product into your brain. Marketing types won't all agree on a precise...

Idea 6  - BPR Business Process Reengineering (BPR) was the hot management idea of the 1990s. Enthusiasm for it has cooled, but its underlying principles still make good sense, particularly when applied to bigger, older companies that have become set in their ways. BPR was popularized, if not exactly invented, by Michael Hammer and James Champy in their 1993 book, reengineering the Corporation. Hammer liked to say that BPR was about 'reversing the Industrial Revolution'. What he meant was that, while customer wants and needs were continually shifting in the new Information Age, the way in which many companies met those needs was fixed in concrete. Unlike total quality management (TQM), which tended to end at the doors of each department, BPR took a bird's-eye view of the entire business, and tried to pries open the vertical hierarchies - 'silos' or 'smokestacks' - that had developed over time. It reasoned that satisfying customer needs involved ...

Idea  5 - Boston matrix The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix is the one of the greatest of management tools - brilliant, feted, poorly deployed and then discredited, but still illuminating in the right context. Otherwise known as the 'growth/share matrix' it is, according to one management writer, one of the 'two most powerful tools in the history of strategy'. Companies can use the Boston matrix to analyse their portfolio of businesses and then to decide what to do with them - spend money on building them up, simply keep them ticking over or dump them. Sometimes referred to as the BCG matrix, it was developed in the late I960s by Bruce Henderson of the Boston Consulting Group - hence its name. Henderson and his colleagues were also responsible for the other of those 'two most powerful tools'. The first step in using the matrix is to break the company down into strategic business units (SBUs). An SBU could be a subsidiary, a division, a product...

Idea 4 - Blue ocean strategy Innovate! Innovate! Hardly a new idea. Everyone knows that the dream Business strategy is to create a new product that everyone wants and no One else is offering, but that's easier said than done. How do you do it? W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne think they have an answer, a framework To help companies swim free of the threshing, bloody red ocean of Competition into calm and uninfested waters - the blue ocean Ever since Michael Porter, most companies have built their strategies around the idea of competition. But Porter's theories of competitive advantage through differentiation or cost leadership have been so persuasive that they have become a given. Everybody does it. Strategic and operational benchmarking has given us not differentiation but a bland international conformity. Oversupply of comrnoditized products, static if not falling demand and declining brand loyalties have led to price wars and shrinking profit margins....

Idea 3 -  Benchmarking If someone is doing something more successfully than you are, it makes sense to look over their shoulder and see what you can learn from them. US manufacturers started doing this when they realized that Japanese competitors were taking away their markets. It's called benchmarking and it's become so widespread among big companies that some business thinkers now caution against it. The history books point to Xerox as being the first large US Corporation to benchmark. That was in the late 1970s when, like many of its compatriots, it was feeling the competitive heat. It took all the key parts of the business, from production to sales and maintenance, and measured them against their counterparts in other companies, abroad as well as at home. If the performance of the other's process was better in some way - quicker, cheaper, more efficient - Xerox determined at least to match it. In so doing, it transformed its own overall performance and word s...

Idea 2 -  Balanced Scorecard The balanced scorecard (BSC) was first articulated in a 1992 Harvard Business Review article by Robert S. Kaplan and David Norton. BSC takes an  organization's strategy, separates it into quantifiable goals and then  measures whether the goals are being achieved. It starts with vision- mission statement, perhaps - and breaks that down into strategies, then tactical activities and concludes with metrics. It's the structure of the metrics - the measuring activities - that is 'balanced'. Kaplan later wrote a book called The Balanced Scorecard: You Can't Drive a Car Solely Relying on a Rearview Mirror, which says it all in a nutshell. The two academics didn't deny the need for financial statistics as an aid to navigation and to keep the shareholders calm, but insisted that other perspectives were necessary. They added another three, giving them four in total. The financial perspective 'How do we look to shareholders?...

Idea 1 - Adhocraey As organizational structures go, adhocracy is the direct opposite of bureaucracy unstructured, decentralized and, at least in theory, responsive. In a bureaucracy, the structure is more important than the people. An adhocracy, on the other hand, is designed to bring out the best in them. A bureaucracy is 'a hierarchical administrative system designed to deal with large quantities of work in a routine manner, largely by adhering to a set of strict and impersonal rules', according to the  Oxford Dictionary of Business and Management.  'It is characterized by its permanence and stability, its body of experience and precedent, and its absence of a reliance on individuals.' Which more or less sums up what an adhocracy is not. The idea first surfaced in the work of US leadership theorist Warren G. Bennis. Writing about the company of the future in  The Temporary Society  (with Philip Slater in 1968), he predicted that it would rely on nimble...

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