Posts Tagged ‘strategy’

So REI has a clever ad on the radio right now. It plays to the zeitgeist by mentioning that they’re a member co-op (not a greedy for-profit company). And then it ends with the bottom line: members get a refund at the end of the year.
There’s a line in the ad along the lines, “We [...]


managers and shareholders value growth more than strategy research… and that’s a problem for researchers not practitioners


giving women a crack at the urinal


struggling traditional manufacturing leading the way into reorganization and liquidation


This ought to be a more common approach to surviving the downturn: decapitation. When Lulu saw the sharp downturn, rather than laying off across the board they cut top executives, including the president. The managers had been put in place to lay the groundwork for growth and (probably) a public offering. With markets tanking and [...]


In a December New Yorker column that got linked around a bit, Surowiecki mentioned the ‘Marketing Myopia’ take on newspapers – that they might do better if they defined their business more broadly as an information business rather than a print business. Like most strategy profs, I’ve taught this issue of ‘defining the business’.
The traditional argument [...]


So Cisco is rolling out its network-based entertainment operating system, or EOS. The idea of the companyusing its network chops to support home networks and entertainment file transfer seems like a good one at first glance.
But look at the details. It’s charging media firms for installing and managing the software, which can “monitor consumers as [...]