article thumbnail

The Challenges GM Is Facing, and the Reasoning Behind Its Plant Closures

Harvard Business Review

For example, the Lordstown, Ohio, factory that makes the Chevy Cruze is running one shift a day, down from three a few years ago, and last year produced 180,000 vehicles, down from 248,000 in 2013. Capital-intensive factories have a high-fixed-cost, low-variable-cost operating model.

article thumbnail

Why Tesco’s Strengths Are No Longer Good Enough

Harvard Business Review

If round after round of profit warnings was not enough – group operating profits fell 20% between 2011 and 2013 and are likely to fall another 30% in 2014 — the company recently announced it had overstated its first-half profit by about $400 million. billion in 2013, and operating profits increased 65% to $422 million.

Retail 11
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

How Drucker Thought About Complexity

Harvard Business Review

The need to decentralize organizations around employees — viewing them as assets capable of expanding growth rather than as fixed costs to be eliminated — and to move away from standardized and tightly-specified process flows. It is up to us to pick up where he left off.

article thumbnail

Aligning Your Organization with an Agile Workforce

Harvard Business Review

In 2013, Accenture suggested that 20 to 30 percent of the total workforce falls outside the organization’s traditional full-time, permanent employment relationship. Too often, purchasing departments manage the selection while operating managers—not involved in selection by fiat—are expected to make the relationship work.

article thumbnail

4 Types of Activist Investors and How to Spot Them

Harvard Business Review

According to Schulte, Roth & Zabel’s Activist Investing 2015 Annual Review, a total of 344 companies worldwide were subjected to activist demands in 2014, up 18% from the 291 recorded in 2013. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense for companies operating in the same space to continually compete. Example: MineMe Inc.

How To 8
article thumbnail

The U.S. Media’s Problems Are Much Bigger than Fake News and Filter Bubbles

Harvard Business Review

Like marketers, politicians obsess over messaging (what journalists would call “content”) and a few key metrics that historically have determined success: amount of television advertising, number of “foot soldiers,” intensity of get-out-the-vote operations, and voter demographics. An advertising-based model.

Media 11