Search results

Strategy Question: How do we determine and prioritize which products/services need action?

Summary: This very important tool helps provide a perspective on where product/service improvements are needed relative to performance and margin parameters. It is designed to provide a concise “current state” assessment of product/service offerings using three categories: (1) No deficiency — competitive in both Product and Price/Cost areas (color coded white), (2) One deficiency — Product performance or Price/Margin deficiency (color coded gray); and (3) Two deficiencies — Product performance and Price/margin deficiency (color coded black). When these product/service deficiencies are displayed relative to the most important market segments (ranked in decreasing order of priority), the tool output serves as an insightful baseline from which to scope, frame, define and prioritize product improvement and margin-enhancement projects needed. Your list of potential projects begins here. Many of the prior tools come together at this point. Through previous tools, the markets, environment, and the current competitive positions of the products or services are understood. This tool helps to define a structure to pull all this information together in a simple way to add perspective toward defining and prioritizing potential actions.

Purpose: Since the referendum in 2016, European companies have taken pre-Brexit measures to face the uncertainty over the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. The purpose of the chapter is to identify and discuss the strategies of Polish companies in face of Brexit.

Methodology: The chapter presents results of an empirical quantitative analysis. The data have been collected with the use of Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) method with a pre-defined questionnaire. The research focuses on 500 Polish companies active in the British market and involves a cluster analysis.

Findings: The conducted analysis enabled us to distinguish four main groups of companies: observers, cautious expanders, opportunity seekers, and diversifiers.

Most of the companies decided to adjust their strategies and take an active approach in the time of uncertainty. The majority relied on their existing product/service portfolio and only the diversifiers engaged in both: new market entries and new product/service development. Data from the survey show that companies feared mostly the “no deal” scenario and many of their decisions ahead of Brexit were motivated by it.

Value: The strategies identified in the analysis relate to those we can find in the Ansoff’s matrix. It has been shown that cautious expanders and diversifiers coincide with the exact Ansoff strategies of Diversification and Market development. Two other strategies, on the other hand – observers and opportunity seekers are hybrids of the existing Ansoff ones.

Adapting to external and internal transformations is a difficult task that managers and scholars must face while attempting to keep their organisations alive and well-established. This chapter explores the various decision-making tools that can assist practitioners and scholars to improve their understanding of the external scenario to determine the contemporary appropriateness of these approaches for analysing the environment and their implications for various types of organisations. The chapter investigates the barriers and drivers of these methods and proposes existing alternative paradigms created by academics and practitioners to analyse and comprehend the context. It demonstrates how these decision-making tools can be implemented by providing examples and case studies.

Strategy Question: How do I get the right product/service specification defined in timely fashion?

Summary: Potential projects have now been suggested for action. Getting the right specification in timely fashion is now critical. Many companies take months to define a specification, and when done suffer because an “everything is #1” mentality hamstrings the development team. QFD is a powerful yet expensive and time-consuming method to defining specification attributes. The Poor Man’s QFD Tool incorporates the intended rigor, but in a timely and resource friendly fashion. This tool provides a powerful way to define a specification for a product/service development project, especially when there is no prioritization clarity for the improvement parameters. For each feature attribute, a specification is developed by a multi-functional team considering market and business needs. Those line item attributes are then “forced ranked” against each other. Compromises in each line item specification, if necessary, are made respecting the rank order chosen, with lower ranked items giving way to those of higher rank. The resulting prioritized list of feature attributes defined is then used to manage the development project. The chart also serves as an excellent one-page management summary highlighting status against both the given specification and performance relative to the best competition.

We present an empirical investigation into how customers and competitors respond to merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, using data obtained from business-to-business customers of logistics industry acquisitions. We draw on the M&A and marketing literatures to develop a set of hypotheses about how customer loyalty may be affected by a supplier's involvement in an acquisition, including the influence of competitors reactions. Our data confirm that customers purchase behaviours can be affected by M&A activity, both positively and negatively, and we find support for a causal chain whereby post-acquisition integration actions cause changes in key customer relationship variables, which in turn drive changes in customer loyalty. Our results also provide empirical evidence of the significant role that competitors responses can play in reducing customer loyalty following an acquisition. We identify a number of factors that appear to influence the magnitude of competitors reactions, namely the scale and scope of the acquisition, the form of post-acquisition integration pursued and the ‘stickiness’ of existing customers. The implications of our findings for future research, as well as for executives engaged in M&A activity, are discussed.

Organizations today operate in highly dynamic environments and are becoming more complex. Helping their organizations master this complexity is a major leadership challenge. To better understand how managers’ behaviors aggravate or reduce complexity, we reviewed 1,400 responses to a proprietary organizational complexity survey. Analysis identified specific managers’ behaviors that contribute to perceived complexity. We draw from these findings, literature on complex adaptive systems, and our consulting experiences to identify specific strategies managers can use to make it simpler for people to get things done, and even to “master” complexity by turning it into a source of strategic advantage.

The literature advises managers that under certain conditions developing an entrepreneurial orientation (EO) may lead to superior financial performance. However, little guidance has been forthcoming about how to develop an EO and the impediments that may be encountered. Data collected from senior managers in 120 Canadian firms in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector reveal four sets of capabilities that enhance EO (research, recruiting and retention, building customer relationships, and decision-making processes), and three primary impediments (risk-aversity, complacency, and scarcity of capital or other resources). This study provides practical insight into how firms can develop their EO.