A brand is made up of three things: what a company sells, what a company does, and what a company is. A brand represents a set of promises. It implies trust, consistency, and a defined set of expectations. The strongest brands own a positioning in the consumer’s mind that is unique to that...

Leaders at all levels of the company need to institute a simple but effective routine for collecting the information needed to take strategic action. This article explains how to make that process pervasive and suggests some specific tools to help it work effectively in your organization. There...

This article shows how scenarios provide a powerful methodology to identify, connect, and assess the critical strategic and knowledge uncertainties they inevitably contain within them, the seeds of any organization’s future marketplace opportunities. Although these two types of uncertainties...

This case of a Weyerhaeuser business unit’s use of the military’s methodologies provides an example for businesses that are faced with a daunting challenge to develop and execute strategies in a complex, rapidly changing business environment, when timely implementation is an important key to...

Family businesses are a powerhouse of the US economy. Some of the largest businesses in and outside the US are family controlled. Family businesses significantly out perform non‐family businesses. So how to learn from their strengths? Paradoxically, many of their outstanding strengths are also...

Purpose – The authors have identified a new type of innovator that combines the rascal‐like idealism of Robin Hood with the network‐based business models of early internet businesses to revolutionize many markets. These innovators are initially non‐profit entrepreneurs who develop...

Purpose – This author reminds us that strategic thinking is a critical part of every manager's job. Because strategy implies competing and outwitting competitors, so it follows that strategic thinking is the process of finding alternative ways of competing and providing customer value....

Purpose – To study blue ocean strategy (value innovation management), which not only reframes the strategic challenge – from competing to making the competition irrelevant – but also provides a series of tools and frameworks to act on this insight in a way that maximizes the opportunity...

Purpose – Every businessperson has repeatedly heard myriad reports and newscasts about the huge market opportunity in Asia. But western business managers will be caught flat‐footed if they do not update their notions of the new competitive capabilities of Asian companies and the rate at...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to discover the views of Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg on redefining value in health care. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is in the form of an interview with Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg with reference to their book Redefining...