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Your Company’s Networks Might Matter More than Its Strategy

Harvard Business Review

Therefore, the ability to manage operation and the capacity to inspire employees is no longer enough. Starting his career as a trainee at 7-11, he worked his way quickly through the ranks, gaining a reputation for operational excellence. To do that, he would need to integrate operations at a scale no one had thought possible.

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Nabob and the Coffee Kerfuffle: How the 120-year-old brand managed to maintain its challenger status.

In the CEO Afterlife

The change in management, which included Bell and Powell, meant a big change in how the company would operate in the following decades. Its strategy to get out ahead of the competition rested on the innovative, hard, vacuum-sealed packaging its then-parent company, Jacob Suchard, was using in Europe at the time.

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Is Your Company Actually Set Up to Support Your Strategy?

Harvard Business Review

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. But exactly how do today’s companies create or update an operating model to match adaptations or wholesale changes in strategy?

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At Multinationals, Country CEOs Should Be Both Local and Global

Harvard Business Review

The China head of the packaging business, Li Xin, spent 13 years working in Sealed Air's American and Canadian operations before taking up the China assignment in 2004. Take Kwang-Ro Kim, who launched LG Electronics' India operations in 1997, and led them until he retired a decade later.

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The Big Disconnect in Your Talent Strategy and How to Fix It

Harvard Business Review

HR systems emphasize long-term relationships and high performance, with big investments in selection and development, amortized over a long career. The disconnect between HR and Procurement often means either choice is suboptimal on its own, so operating managers circumvent both HR and Procurement.

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How IBM's Sam Palmisano Redefined the Global Corporation

Harvard Business Review

Executing this strategy required seamless integration of IBM's product capabilities with its geographic reach. This meant abandoning IBM's existing organization, in which product silos and geographic entities operated independently and frequently were more competitive than collaborative. When the U.S. It is not about you.

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You’re Never Too Experienced to Fake It Till You Learn It

Harvard Business Review

And that’s precisely what gets us in trouble as we hit career transitions that call for new and different ways of leading. In my research on how experienced managers and professionals step up to bigger leadership roles, I have observed both the value and the difficulty of returning to our youthful, fake-it-till-you-learn-it strategies.