Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 8, 2013

Offshore Outsourced Product Development. In fact, these six Indian engineers were not employees of Otis at all, but rather on the payroll of an outsourced product development company headquartered in Andhra Pradesh, India. One such example is a rack-mounted storage server system for the "cloud computing" market.

Engineering 8

Engineering Globalization Innovation Marketing 8

N2Growth Blog

APRIL 21, 2011

Most people tend to look at acquisitions from a rather myopic and traditional M&A perspective: making a strategic or synergistic purchase of an operating entity on an accretive basis. However restricting your view of acquisitions to operating companies is like playing a football game with only one play in your playbook.

Real Estate 353

Real Estate Company Brand Operations 353

Strategy Driven

MARCH 18, 2011

In The Essential Advantage : How to Win with a Capabilities-Driven Strategy , Booz & Company’s Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi maintain that success in any market accrues to firms with a coherence premium – a tight match between their strategic direction and the capabilities that make them unique. Let’s go after it.”

Resources 51

Resources Industry System Strategy 51

Harvard Business Review

MAY 26, 2016

Conventional wisdom holds that improving working conditions (which typically costs money) would undermine the competitive advantage these firms enjoy. Workers specialize in simple, highly routinized operations. They are incentivized to complete operations as quickly as possible. Operations in a Connected World.

Lean Manufacturing 9

Lean Manufacturing Supply Chain Apparel Compliance 9

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 26, 2012

Huge retailers such as Walmart and Target also use scale to keep their purchasing costs down and their prices competitive. Packaged food companies like Kraft and Pepsi use their scale to penetrate markets quickly and efficiently. In the past three decades, managers have embraced off-shoring, outsourcing, and open innovation.

Porter 13

Porter Competitive Advantage Safe Harbor Efficiency 13

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 27, 2017

Even better, they would respond 10 times faster to market moves than existing processes while requiring minimal human intervention. In reality, “handoffs” and transitions prove to be significant operational problems. The Autonomous Outsourcer. Business process outsourcing becomes business process algorithmization.

Outsourcing 8

Outsourcing Software CAPEX Competitive Advantage 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 26, 2013

There is a growing sense that so-called lean start-up techniques — developing a minimal viable product, learning in the marketplace, and pivoting based on market feedback — can help to unleash this potential. Studying the book market then led Bezos to locate his company near some of the major book distributors.

Ries 8

Ries Telecommunications Business Model Competitive Advantage 8

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 18, 2012

When Palmisano retired this month, the media chronicled his success by focusing on IBM's 21% annual growth in earnings per share and its increase in market capitalization to $218 billion. Palmisano could not have succeeded at placing values at the center of IBM's operations without strong principles of his own. When the U.S.

Globalization 15

Globalization Golden Parachute Short-term Long-term 15

Marshall Goldsmith

JANUARY 13, 2014

The trend toward globally connected markets will become stronger. Future leaders will have to learn how to manage global production, marketing, and sales teams to achieve competitive advantage. Leaders who can make globalization work in their favor will have a huge competitive advantage. Thinking globally.

Competitive Advantage 140

Competitive Advantage Globalization Diversity Technology 140

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 24, 2015

Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win — or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether?

Strategy 8

Strategy Competitive Advantage Environment Execution 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 19, 2015

Wall Street began charging a “conglomerate discount,” saying that diverse operations were hard to analyze with confidence. True synergies across the diverse operations were often hard to see. 3D printing offers even more advantages to these groups. In some contexts, they add competitive advantage.

Engineering 8

Engineering Learning Curve Fixed Costs Competitive Advantage 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 20, 2016

” Rather, this approach recognizes a fundamental shift in the sources of value creation and competitive advantage toward software. Disney has reinvented the customer experience by translating what it exclusively knows about park operations into software, substantively enhancing its customer value proposition.

Software 8

Software Company Airlines Business Model 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 27, 2015

Likewise, no matter how slick your company’s online idea market, it won’t yield many high-value ideas if your associates haven’t been taught to think like innovators. Balance: the mix of different types of innova­tion (product, service, pricing, distribution, operations, etc.);

Innovation 8

Innovation Company Engineering Supply Chain 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 23, 2015

The team is the company’s raw DNA, the purpose their religion, and culture their unique way of operating based on common principles, norms, and values. This is about mission, not marketing. Like aiming a rocket ship into orbit, if you get this wrong from the start, your trajectory will only get worse over time.

Company 8

Company Self-aware Long-term Mission Statement 8