Most Recent Ideas
Identify the Current Constraints on Your Company’s Progress
Imagine you are a new CEO, looking at your company with fresh eyes. Ask yourself: What function or resource most constrains our progress? Where would the smallest improvement yield the biggest impact on our business? In other words, you need to identify your “Herbie-group.” Are you limited by how well field staff in sales, operations, or customer support translate new offerings, new markets, or improved … [ Read more ]Author: Elizabeth Doty | Source: "Finding the 'Herbie' in Your Change Initiative"Original Publication: strategy+business | Subject: Change Management
Create a Sales War Room for Better Post-Merger Integration
After a merger, it is a mistake to expect sales reps on their own to address all of the inevitable questions from customers and tactics of competitors. Unfortunately, sales managers are often too preoccupied with integration issues, so the front line is left to its own devices.To resolve this problem, successful acquirers create a temporary sales war room, or interim leadership group. Led by two … [ Read more ]Author: Matthias M. Bekier | Source: "Merging? Watch Your Sales Force"Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Mergers & Acquisitions
New Leader Tip: Learn What Is and Isn’t Working
One of the first things I did when I joined [Philips], in late 2010, was to write an open letter to about 700 people—basically, the group we call the Consumer Lifestyle leadership and a layer below them. I invited them to tell me what they thought was working well in the business and what wasn’t. This gave me a pretty good idea of what was … [ Read more ]Author: Udo Kopka | Source: "From Bottom to Top: Turning Around the Top Team"Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Leadership, Management
Introduce a Secondary Domain for Better Email Inboxing
By creating multiple sending domains, email marketers have a great opportunity to increase inboxing as a result of segmentation.First, marketers can use multiple domains to mail different subscriber segments (more and less engaged) or different types of campaigns (one domain dedicated to marketing campaigns, another dedicated to support emails, a third dedicated to triggered, etc.)Domain separation also helps maintain a consistent deliverability rate by setting … [ Read more ]Author: Ivy Shtereva | Source: "Five Tips for Increasing Email Engagement and Improve Inboxing"Original Publication: MarketingProfs | Subjects: IT / Internet / E-Business, Marketing / Sales
Developing Perceptual Acuity
There are several tools you can use to develop perceptual acuity for yourself and your organization in this way. One of the most valuable is a simple exercise at the start of any staff meeting. Allocate the first 10 minutes to learn about and discuss anomalies in the external landscape. Ask a different staff member at each meeting to present to the team a structural … [ Read more ]Author: Ram Charan | Source: "20/20 Foresight"Original Publication: strategy+business | Subject: Innovation
Most Popular Ideas
The Premortem Technique
The premortem technique is a sneaky way to get people to do contrarian, devil’s advocate thinking without encountering resistance. If a project goes poorly, there will be a lessons-learned session that looks at what went wrong and why the project failed—like a medical postmortem. Why don’t we do that up front? Before a project starts, we should say, “We’re looking in a crystal ball, and … [ Read more ]Author: Gary Klein | Source: "Strategic decisions: When can you trust your gut?"Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Management
Profit Mapping
A profit map, the core analytical tool of profitability management, displays the profitability and cost structure of every product in every customer in the company. Profit maps show exactly where profit is flowing and where it is lost.
A profit map is not especially difficult to develop, but it is completely different from the information developed for financial reporting. Many finance managers make the … [ Read more ]Author: Jonathan Byrnes | Source: "3 Steps to Turbo Charge Profits"Original Publication: Business Finance | Subjects: Accounting, Finance, Management, Operations
Review Profitability Before Expanding Capacity
When faced with the need to expand manufacturing capacity and the inherent investment required, first perform a thorough profitability analysis (a profit map) of each product produced from the capacity-constrained factories (this includes profitable products being sold unprofitably to selected customers). Since many companies have a significant amount of unprofitable business, it is quite possible that stopping the unprofitable sales can free up enough capacity … [ Read more ]Subjects: Management, Operations
Deploy a Redeployment Pool
Intel monitors changing skill requirements and institutes a redeployment program when it becomes necessary to downsize a business. Under this program, managers effectively lay off people, and the head count of the business unit is moved off the payroll. These excised people enter a redeployment pool under the auspices of human resources. Once in the pool, employees generally have four to six months, and can … [ Read more ]Author: Bruce A. Pasternack | Source: "The Triumph of People Power and the New Economy"Original Publication: strategy+business | Subject: Human Resources
Downsizing Effectively: Eliminate Hierarchy
The way a company approaches downsizing can make or break its performance. Using 355 undergraduates as their sample, the authors randomly assigned five-person teams to work on military-based command-and-control simulations. The teams’ performance was gauged first at full strength in control groups and then after one of three separate downsizing approaches was applied to the same groups.The first approach was to maintain the hierarchy, eliminating … [ Read more ]Author: D. Scott DeRue | Source: "How Different Team Downsizing Approaches Influence Team-Level Adaptation and Performance"Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior
