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How Eastern Bank Shifted Its Strategy to Compete with Online Lenders

Harvard Business Review

How one 200-year-old regional bank in the U.S. used intrapreneurship to compete with online lenders.

Banking 16
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Leading by Cause

Lead Change Blog

A recent conversation with a community bank CEO focused on his vision for the company. With depth of affirmation around cause preceding effect, why do business leaders focus so heavily on analyzing their numbers, or, focus on the effect instead of the cause? Logic tells us we can manage cause, but only measure effect.

P&L 220
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A Simple Way to Test Your Company’s Strategic Alignment

Harvard Business Review

Using the same 1 – 100 scale ask yourself: How well does our organization support the achievement of our strategy? If your organization is incapable of delivering its strategy, the strategy is effectively worthless and your company’s purpose will go more or less unfulfilled. The fall can come quickly.

Banking 14
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Don't Let What You Know Limit What You Imagine

Harvard Business Review

A classic example of this phenomenon, which I chronicled in my book Mavericks at Work , was the game-changing performance of Commerce Bank, one of the most colorful institutions in the history of retail banking. Ten years later, after a period of massive growth, the company sold itself to TD Bank in a stock transaction worth $8.5

Banking 18
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Is Your Company Actually Set Up to Support Your Strategy?

Harvard Business Review

How do banks switch customer relationships from branch offices to mobile phone screens? For every company wrestling with evolutions in its strategy, success depends as much on matching the operating model to those evolutions as it does on the soundness of the strategy itself. sweetvenom/Getty Images.

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When to Pass on a Great Business Opportunity

Harvard Business Review

One of your better managers comes to you with the idea of setting up an internet bank. For the Pru, internet banking proved not to be a high margin industry and although it did successfully launch an internet bank, it has not had a good return on its investment. The CEO should, therefore, have been wary about this opportunity.

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How Capitec Became South Africa’s Biggest Bank

Harvard Business Review

The consumer banking industry is notoriously difficult to enter, not least because most customers rarely switch banks. In some countries, people change spouses more often than they change banks. It has now become the largest bank in the country. These areas were underserved by the traditional banks.