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How Your Leadership Team Can Slow Down to Speed Up

The Practical Leader

An old fable tells of a farmer with a wagon brimming full of cabbage heading to a new market. He stops for directions and asks, “How far is it to the market?” For decades, Harvard professor Michael Porter has studied, written about, and consulted top companies and countries on competitive strategy.

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The Big Trends Changing Community Development

Harvard Business Review

This is what is going on now in community development. Three lines of progress are crossing, and rapidly reshaping how businesses and nonprofits together strengthen the locales in which they operate. Take the example of child sponsorships, highly popular as a marketing tool for many NGOs.

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The Commoditization of Scale

Harvard Business Review

Packaged food companies like Kraft and Pepsi use their scale to penetrate markets quickly and efficiently. To understand my point, let's think about how big companies have developed scale advantages through information systems. Consider Porter's value chain. Develop a strategy that doesn't simply rely on being the biggest.

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The Best Companies Know How to Balance Strategy and Purpose

Harvard Business Review

Before the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, Nokia was the dominant mobile phone maker with a clearly stated purpose — “Connecting people” — and an aggressive strategy for sustaining market dominance. The once-dominant Nokia soon lost much of its market cap and was eventually acquired by Microsoft. Insight Center.

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Secure Your Flanks, Protect Your Business

Harvard Business Review

In Operation Desert Storm , more than 100,000 Iraqi troops crossed into Kuwait, fixed themselves into strategic positions — in front lines — to combat U.S. When Netscape Navigator imagined the disruption of Microsoft Windows, it forgot that its web browser was an add-on on the operating system.

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Meet Your New R&D Team: Social Entrepreneurs

Harvard Business Review

The 'iPods' of poverty alleviation and literacy have likely been invented and put to use by small organizations in some corner of the globe, but there is no market for identifying these breakthrough ideas and ensuring widespread adoption.". Consider these examples: 1.

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Three Unexpected Ways to Help with Disaster Recovery

Harvard Business Review

By 1997 it had established AlertNet , originally fashioned as a private channel for aid workers and which later developed into the first global humanitarian news and information portal. They can examine the company's core operations to discover ways to help make a difference while continuing to make a profit. Take Cisco.

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