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Is Your Company Actually Set Up to Support Your Strategy?

Harvard Business

For every company wrestling with evolutions in its strategy, success depends as much on matching the operating model to those evolutions as it does on the soundness of the strategy itself. But exactly how do today’s companies create or update an operating model to match adaptations or wholesale changes in strategy?

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The Biggest Obstacles to Innovation in Large Companies

Harvard Business

. “Any time you start something new like [an innovation initiative], that cuts across many areas, there’s a potential for people feeling like you’re in their backyard,” says Michael Britt, a senior vice president who heads the Energy Innovation Center at Southern Company, a major utility operator.

Company 53
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Design for Conflict: Make Tension in the Matrix Work to Drive Business Results

Kates Kesler

Take Nike, marketing a core brand across a number of consumer categories with hundreds of footwear and apparel products all over the world. Senior leadership must learn to lead a more diverse, sometimes dissonant orchestra. Nike’s money-making matrix. The solution.

Apparel 56
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Maximizing Agility and Leverage in the Global Organization

Kates Kesler

Agility and scale rarely co-exist in the design of the organizational operating model. In foods, beverages, health, beauty, and apparel local variations really do matter. These four roles serve as the basis for differentiating responsibilities between the global center and the regional operating units. The global/local tension.

Agile 50
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Case Study: When Two Leaders on the Senior Team Hate Each Other

Harvard Business

Lance Best, the CEO of Barker Sports Apparel, was meeting with Nina Kelk, the company’s general counsel, who also oversaw human resources. The team wasn’t perfect, but it was still operating at a pretty high level. “I did talk to that leadership development firm last year,” he said. Of course I have.

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Organizational Fitness for Growth: Five Insights for CEOs

Kates Kesler

We recently completed a study for the CEO of a very well known, global sports-apparel brand company. Our sports-apparel CEO had the right idea in challenging his team to think about the organization and ask: are we fit for growth, given our strategies going forward? Learning from Big Companies.

Apparel 82
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An Agenda for the Future of Global Business

Harvard Business

Toward a New Leadership Agenda. We already see companies localizing time-sensitive and highly customizable forms of production to move closer to customer demand, particularly in the fast apparel (Adidas, Zara) and automotive (Tesla) industries, thus turning global supply chains into two-way streets. Essential background.