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The business has become more challenging as the global market becomes more demanding. This change in the global market is putting pressure not only on Management but also on the Board. Strategy Development now demands that organizations should not only be effective but there should also be Board Excellence.

Today, the demand has ceased to be about spending more time. Boosting the effectiveness of the Board is not anymore about spending more time. The urgent call now is to focus on changing the na

When things go wrong on a grand scale, often we direct our attention to the role of the Board. Debate exudes and often gets heated up and intensifies. This often happens when the Board spends more time looking in the rearview mirror and not enough scanning the road ahead. When this happens, governance suffers.

Often, the Board of Directors spend a bulk of its time on quarterly reports, audit reviews, budgets, and compliance.  However, with the change in the business environment, there is a greate

Michael Eugene Porter—a Professor at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard Business School—is widely acclaimed for his unmatched prowess in competitive strategy, strategic planning, global economic development, and the application of competitive principles and strategic approaches.  Renowned as the father of modern day strategy, Dr. Porter is an author of 18 books and a number of articles.

His scholarly writings on management and competitiveness are ranked as the most influentia

With startups ready to disrupt traditional players, established firms need to form an even stronger bond with their customers instead of waiting for customers to reach out to them.

The traditional Customer Experience model—referred to as the “acquire what we make” model—is characterized by occasional interaction between the companies and the customers, once a customer ascertains her/his needs and looks for products or services to fulfill them.  In this model, companies do all they can to offer qu

The routes to market that Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies use to sell and service their trade account is essentially critical. It determines their sales volume, their ability to deliver the proper levels of customer service in a cost-effective manner, and their success at securing scarce retail shelf space for their products.

Yet, only a few CPG companies have a comprehensive conceptual framework for optimizing their routes to market.

Diving into a Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy

The Go-to-Mark

In the increasingly competitive business scenario, the end-to-end customer experience and delight has become a new area, which no one can afford to neglect. It is of paramount importance to deliver superior services with differentiated experience while aligning with the ever-changing customer preferences and needs.

Likewise, technology has changed the way organizations manage relationships with customers. While companies may argue this new reality, we cannot refute the fact that consumers are inc

Formulating a Capabilities-Driven Strategy (CDR) is easy, but the execution is difficult, especially in turbulent times. This is not the time to find a cave and hibernate until the economic storm passes. It is unlikely that the storm will pass anytime soon. Capabilities-Driven Strategy is the only way to remain equipped for perpetually stormy weather.

Companies need to take care or build those capabilities that are genuinely needed and not those that do not serve our customers. Capabilities do no

Golf is a club-and-ball sport in which players use various clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible.  The more we play golf, the more we realize that there is a negative correlation between how hard we swung and how far we hit the ball.  In golf, rarely is much accomplished from merely swinging hard. Sheer force does create action, but this is often negated by a lack of strategy. Life in golf, we need to learn to pull back a little, focus, and work on s

Value-Based Management (VBM) has been regarded traditionally as a tool to help investors evaluate firms, optimize performance management, and maximize shareholder value.

However, there are mixed opinions on whether to utilize VBM as a mandatory investment or management tool.  Many investors, analysts, and executives, to this day, are skeptical of the influence and role of VBM in confronting the dot-com bubble or other financial downturns.  They are even cynical of the efficacy of VBM as a robust

While the concept of “leading alongside” is a noble one for an internal adviser, it is not accomplished easily overnight. You see, the problem is the “unconscious” in “unconscious bias”. The decision makers you are trying to influence are not aware of the unconscious biases that may be clouding their judgement unless they have been trained to understand their sources and to recognise them. It is useful to understand and recognise the sources of their biases: genes, beliefs and aspirations.

Our un

Customers, these days, demand ever-higher levels of personalized products and services to suit their needs. Their demand is grounded on technological disruption and access to up-to-date information. They believe that in an economy characterized by disruption and operational innovation—that makes customization possible—they have an excellent chance of getting customized offerings from the suppliers.

Thus, Product Strategy needs to evolve and become more robust, accordingly, to keep up with changin

What is Mobile Marketing?

Mobile marketing is a multi-channel digital marketing strategy that is designed to reach a target audience via websites, emails, SMS and MMS, social and apps on their smartphones, tablets and/or other mobile devices. Mobile interferes with how people deal with brands. All that is possible on a desktop is now available on a mobile device. Much of it is accessible by small mobile displays from opening an email to visiting your Website to reading your contents. Efficient mo

Cost Optimization Programs are hard to manage, sustain, and often tend to fall short of delivering the promised value. The failure could be attributed to many reasons—including lack of clearly delineated objectives, failure to account for the operational difficulties, internal resistance to change, trying to cut corners from everywhere, not paying attention to planning optimal utilization of resources; lack of direction, accountability, and management agreement.

However, the tremendous pace of te

According to Michael Henderson, Corporate Anthropologist on Oscar Trimboli’s Deep Listening Podcast, people in the western world like threes because we like balance.

We like Low, Medium and High. We like the Three Little Pigs and Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

We also like it when a salesperson stops at three when telling us about the wonders of their product. Trust and desire builds to three and starts to wane above three. As in, “Why does she need to keep listing stuff? Is there something not g

Bedtime data stories are telling stories about data with data.

Have you ever asked yourself, “Why bedtime stories?”. Maybe you grew up with them and you have kept up the tradition. Maybe you understand they are good for your child’s development, in particular their vocabulary, comprehension and the development of their creative brains. If so, you would be right as evidenced in this research published in the journal Pediatrics.

However, there is more to it than their personal development. You are a

Those of you that know your maths know that an S-Curve can have an exponential portion to its curve but it can’t BE an exponential curve. However, I recently came across a diagram showing a series of S-curves overlaying an exponential curve which to me portrayed something very different to seeing either in isolation. It was in this post by Tim Urban The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence.

There are data miners and then there is data mindset. The former are the people and/or their tools that do the digging through the numbers. The latter is about a whole lot more. 

Last week I blogged about how to help people believe the numbers. This week I am going a big step further talking about four different types of data mindsets and the implications for decision making in an organisation (see figure).   

                                                                                 Data Mi

Decisions are all about emotion, however, numbers are so very important. At the end of the day if the bank balance is zero, no amount of emotion is going to change that. 
When it comes to numbers and decision making there are essentially three positions people take. 

One of the most soul-destroying events that can happen to a company is for a bean counter to be appointed as CEO with a vision that involves cost cutting and not much else. While I am one of the first to hold true to “In God we trust, all others bring data”, I have seen too many companies damaged from a CEO overly focused on cost cutting. A CEO that is dumped within a few years. 

Don’t get me wrong. A focus on costs is important and sometimes dramatic cost cutting is essential, however, as with a