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Megastores Want to Be Like Mom-and-Pop Shops… Sort Of

Harvard Business Review

To protect their advantage, forward-thinking national chains are combining their brand recognition and market penetration with a local approach. It takes organizational, cultural, and operational changes. Empowering store managers is the most critical shift. There are other operational considerations.

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Jack Welch’s Approach to Breaking Down Silos Still Works

Harvard Business Review

After some investigating, they discovered that their fragmented, geographically dispersed matrix structure made it very difficult for the program managers to coordinate efforts across functions, keep everyone focused on the cost and delivery goals, and get people to reach consensus. Senior management knew this was an issue.

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6 Reasons Platforms Fail

Harvard Business Review

Studying these successes and failures, we’ve identified half a dozen key reasons platforms fail, all of which boil down to managers’ misunderstanding of how platforms operate and compete. Steve Jobs failed miserably at managing openness at Apple in the 1980s. Let’s look at the key errors.