Competitive strategy

In the traditional approach to venture capital, an investment firm parcels out funds to a portfolio of start-ups, knowing that most will fail but that...

Managers should make environmental investments for the same reason they make other investments: because they expect them to deliver positive returns or to reduce risks.

Many managers of service businesses are aware that the strategic management (by which I mean the total process of selecting and implementing a corporate strategy) of service businesses is different from that of manufacturing businesses. This article discusses how pure service businesses are different from product-oriented businesses and why they require different strategic thinking. A […]

The Olympic gold medalist in diving talks about his early training, why he mentors rather than coaches other divers, finally winning a place on the Wheaties...

When business conditions change, the most successful companies are often the slowest to adapt. To avoid being left behind, executives must understand the true sources of corporate inertia.

How can American industry rebuild the skills and supplier bases required to produce advanced technologies? I am losing confidence that the solution lies in American companies overhauling, unaided, their management practices. A whole generation of managers has been imbued, over a period of more than 20 years, with the supposed virtues of global outsourcing, and […]

Call it the First Law of Media: Nothing sells like a juicy controversy. In the Fourth Estate of the 21st century, controversy’s a commodity. Everyone with a blog can generate it. If news publishers want to escape the trap they’re caught in, they have to stop building business models on it, stop dedicating smart, dedicated […]

Less than a decade after the frantic merger activity of the late 1960s, we are again in the midst of a major wave of corporate acquisitions. In contrast to the 1960s, when acquirers were mainly freewheeling conglomerates, the merger movement in the 1970s includes such long-established giants of U.S. industry as General Electric, Gulf Oil, […]

A second generation of electronic commerce is emerging, one that will be shaped more by strategy than by experimentation. The battle for competitive advantage will be waged along three dimensions: reach, affiliation, and richness.

Three critical components-the facts, competition, and the right incentives-help people to do their jobs better.

The past decade reveals managers’ growing awareness of the need to incorporate technological issues within strategic decision making. They have increasingly discovered that technology and strategy are inseparable. For technology has an inner logic that simply must be considered in a company’s strategic planning—that process of creating a concept of the business it is in, […]

Money is no longer a scarce resource. That changes everything.

While many believe that technological disruption has been rampant for decades, there's actually been much less creative destruction than people think....

New research shows that companies really are failing faster than they used to: In particular, digital companies are far more vulnerable to quick imitation...

It’s fashionable today to enthuse over globalized markets and cite glowing examples of standardized marketing winners around the world. True, some markets are globalizing, and more companies are taking advantage of them with signal success. But the rosy reports of these triumphs usually neglect to mention the complexities and risks involved; for every victory in […]

It's cheaper to sue a person than a company.

It led to fewer readmissions and complications.

A look at the impact on market presence, cost savings, and brand image.

A major shift is occurring in the nature of global competition, but it’s widely misunderstood. Emerging markets are no longer competing solely on price—by offering the lowest-cost manufacturing, for instance. Rather, they are increasingly competing with sophisticated skills in key sectors like health care, software, entertainment, consumer products, and manufacturing. They’re leveraging a fast-growing ability […]

A new class of European discounters have U.S. retailers squarely in their sights.