Strategic Spotlight

This category is Strategic Spotlight, highlighting key business strategies, industry innovations, and leadership insights. It features expert perspectives on decision-making, competitive advantage, and transformative approaches shaping the future of business and management.

GDPR – Death Knell or a New Life for Customer Analytics?

By Amit Joshi Even before the enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) across the European Union’s 28 member states, European firms apparently had...

An Innovator’s Midsummer Dream Come True

By Ulrich A.K. Betz , VP, Head of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Incubator, Merck   Organisations are eagerly looking for new ways to boost their innovation capabilities and...

Industry 4.0 –Designing the Factory of Tomorrow in North Rhine-Westphalia

It is the topic with the biggest economic dynamic. Industry 4.0 is revolutionising the production process – and North RhineWestphalia (NRW), Germany's industrial heartland,...

The Simplexity Gap Why Boards are Always a Step Behind their Management Teams –...

By Mihnea Moldoveanu and Richard Nesbitt How impactful can simplexity gap be in corporate boards? In this article, the authors show how such gap undermines...

Amazon, Just a Click Away from Luxury

What are the Implications for Selective Distribution? By Xavier Derville and Jean-Noël Kapferer Has the strategy of selective distribution, on which luxury brands depend for survival, evolved in the...

The Three Types of Big Data That Matter for CMOs

By David Dubois and Gilles Haumont Organisations today have massive amount of data at their disposal. However, not all C-level executives have clear typology of the...

Breaking the Mould! A New Business Model for the 21st Century

By Karl-Heinz Streibich The pace of change in the digital era is too fast, and survival is the main objective.  Software AG CEO Karl-Heinz Streibich...
Group of happy businesspeople

From Products to Solutions – Mastering Sales Force Incentives

By Johannes Habel and Olaf Ploetner As B2B companies strive to become providers of solutions rather than products, sales managers face significant challenges. Among them:...

Knowledge Architects Wanted

By Tammi L. Coles Organisations that embrace cross-domain knowledge can attain sustainable agility. In this article, the author highlights the significant yet often overlooked difference...

United Airlines, Artificial Intelligence, and Donald Trump: Reawakening Values in the Era...

By Avi Liran and Simon L. Dolan Society has evolved and not all aspects of our lives were able to cope up with the changes...

Who Needs Silicon Valley? Made in Digital Germany is Europe’s Big Hope

The industrial and manufacturing landscape of 2025 will be massively different from today and every single “traditional” company has to digitally innovate if it...

Strategising for the Future

By Joan E. Ricart and Carlos Rey In this article the authors discuss how organisations can better strategise for the future by integrating and balancing...

IT Negotiators: What’s Your Approach?

By Will Baber and Arto Ojala IT and software industries appear to be collaborative in projects in house and among organisations as they plan and...

At Your Service: Management with HEART

Interview with Rommel Gonzales The Bellevue Resort, Bohol, Philippines   “In the hospitality and airline industry, you are not selling rooms, nor selling airline seats. You are...

The Strategic Leader’s Roadmap

By Harbir Singh and Michael Useem Based on the authors’ new book, The Strategic Leader’s Roadmap, this article stresses that strategic leadership constitutes a skillset...

Managing Difficult Personalities

By Zahir Irani and Amir Sharif Taking a lead in handling difficult situations and difficult people can be the hardest part of any management role....

Organisational Identity as the Touchstone for Strategic Decision Making

By John C. Camillus A firm’s Identity – its core values, enduring aspirations and distinctive competencies – is intended to guide management’s decision making. This...

Have We Lost the Ability to Listen to Bad News?

By Kim E. van Oorschot, Luk N. Van Wassenhove, Kishore Sengupta & Henk Akkermans Research shows that project managers continuously prioritised good vibes (positive, but...

What causes managers to change their business model?

By Tina Saebi, Lasse Lien and Nicolai Foss Business models define how companies create, deliver and capture value. But business models are not static –...

Disrupting the disruption: 10 Principles for Digital Success

By Chris Outram These ten principles for success will steer the most digitally ambitious organisations (pure-play or hybrid) safely along on the road to digital...

Why has Microsoft paid US$26 billion for business networking platform LinkedIn?

By Mark Skilton The Microsoft move to acquire LinkedIn is a better move than past buyouts, the infamous failure of the Microsoft purchase of Nokia...

Building the Everything Store: Amazon’s Cycles of Creativity and Circles of Destruction

By Sean Culey In just 20 years, Amazon has grown from an online startup focusing on selling books, to a devastating multi-platform, multi-industry technological disruptor,...

Managing Customer Satisfaction Better

By Johannes Habel Many companies draw the wrong conclusions from their customer surveys. There is a simple method that can provide a remedy, leading to...

The Key Levers for Sales Transformation Success

By Warren Shiver and Michael Perla For a sales organisation to reach its “ideal transformational advantage” it needs to pull the right levers in...

The Missing Puzzle Piece? How Action Learning Can Help Solve the Dual Challenge of...

By Alex Makarevich, Christian Acosta-Flamma and Simon L. Dolan To win in the “war for talent”, companies can no longer rely on conventional recruitment methods...

Why Focus-Based Leadership is Important to Huawei’s Business Strategy

By David De Cremer and Jess Zhang Contemporary business develops at a rapid pace, with many uncertainties, internationally connected stakeholders, and little latitude to make...

Market Makers… Innovate your market, then innovate your business.

By Peter Fisk Peter Fisk explores how the next generation of businesses innovate from the future back, and outside in. They start by finding the...

Industry 4.0: How Businesses in Aargau are Mastering Technological Change

Businesses operating in Switzerland are particularly exposed to global competition. High production costs and the strong Swiss franc mean that they are forced to...

Why Robots May Not Be Taking Your Job – at least, not in...

How Organisations Can Embrace Automation By Leslie Willcocks In this article Professor Willcocks discusses the reality of robots, what they mean for ‘human’ jobs and how...

Change Capability Building

By David Miller and Audra Proctor The volume and complexity of change that organizations are facing continues to increase, and they cannot risk the negative...

Internationalisation in Online Retailing

By Moritz Hahn and Niccolò Pisani Online retailing is clearly on the rise. In this article the authors offer a snapshot of the current status...

Why Focus Matters to Your Leadership: Understanding Huawei’s Business Strategy

By David De Cremer Contemporary business develops at a rapid pace, with many uncertainties, internationally connected stakeholders, and little latitude to make mistakes. In such...

Structure Follows Strategy – But May not Look Like You Imagined

By John Sutherland In the world of structural design, one size does not fit all. It pays massive dividends to get the structure fit for...

What We (Think We) Know May Not Be So

How to Get (More of) What You Want in Negotiations By Margaret A. Neale and Thomas Z. Lys The results of empirical research on the performance...

Change as Strategy

By Walter McFarland This article suggests that some traditional approaches to organisational change are obsolete – and recommends a new approach focused on creating new...

Impact of Digital on How We Implement Change

By Audra Proctor No one doubts the effectiveness of face-to-face workshops for organisational change implementation. But the practicality of things, such as, availability, time, expense...

Sharing Business Ownership to Execute Your Strategy

By Felix Barber and Michael Goold Co-owners sharing business rewards do not need to take on the same mix of responsibilities; instead, to create more...

What Companies Must Do Now That Better Is Also Cheaper

By Paul F. Nunes and Larry Downes Industry-disrupting products used to enter the market as inferior but more affordable versions of existing offerings, giving incumbents...

A Transformation Manifesto

By Richard Lynch and Jack Calhoun Transformation is not about external forces, they are inevitable. It’s not about reorganisations, they don’t work. There are more...

Strategising to Win On the Global Playing Field: Making Real Strategic Choices in...

By Bart Tkaczyk Attract the best people. Own shares either in good ships, or in none at all. Make your ship attractive, then good people...

Senior Team Development for the Unwilling

By John Sutherland Traditional team work over-emphasises the whole team approach far more than is needed for most practical purposes. In this article, John Sutherland...

Growth Principles from a Decade of Billion-Dollar ‘Startups’

By Josemaria Siota and Luiz Zorzella How did LinkedIn achieved a 35% revenue growth in 20151, after suffering media earthquakes in the previous months? Some...

Talent Management 2.0: Transformation Powered By People

By Amber Román and Richard Lynch In “Moving Beyond the Anecdotal: What Will It Take To Create Your Digital 2.0 Business Model,” we discussed our...

The 4 P’s: Saving 25% of Meeting Time

By John Sutherland Ineffective meetings are the bugbear of many organisations. In this article, John Sutherland, Director of Strategic resource introduces and discusses the 4...

Your Seventh Sense: Beyond Mindfulness

By William Duggan In this article, Willian Duggan explores the practice of Free Your Mind, a way to turn stress into strategy and to turn...

The Practice Of Strategy

By Carlos Rey Peña and Joan E. Ricart What is strategy? In this article, the authors view strategy as a discipline that harmonizes business model...

Fads and Fashions in Management

By Adrian Furnham In this article, the author shows that many fads and fashions in management are short lived and based upon flimsy evidence, yet...

Behavioral Strategy: Thoughts and Feelings in the Decision-making Process, the Unconscious and the Company’s...

By Claudia Nagel It is evident that the psychology of the decision-making person – to a certain extent the human factor – plays an important...

Moving Beyond the Anecdotal: What Will It Take to Create Your Digital 2.0 Business...

By Todd Fisher and Richard Lynch A Strategy to Execution planning process focused on Technology Strategy, will raise the TQ (Technology Quotient) of ...

Aargau – The Swiss High-Tech Canton in Hot Pursuit of Silicon Valley

"Hightech Aargau" is a program of the Aargau government to encourage innovation and growth. With that, the canton of Aargau aims to become the...

TOP READS OF THE WEEK

Person using laptop with Ai Content Generator. Interaction with the Ai assistant to solve some tasks more easily.

AI Search Revolutionises Brand Discovery – Here’s How to Get Noticed

By Claire Snook In 2025, AI-powered search is poised to become the foundation of how brands connect with their customers. Advances like ChatGPT, SearchGPT, as well as the strategic pivot from traditional search engines toward...
Many small ideas lead to big innovation. Lawbreaker concept

The Lawbreaker: How Deliberate Rule-Breaking Drives Innovation 

By Doug Hall  Transformational ideas require a leap of faith. They require you to break free of your “adultness” to allow your mind to run free and unconstrained. This article presents one of the most...

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Andy Palmer

The Better Boards Podcast Series: Selling Bold Ideas in the Boardroom

The podcast and the article are brought to you by The Better Boards Podcast Series. Have you ever wondered how to sell a bold idea in the boardroom? Not just an idea different from what your...