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Putting Customers at the Heart of Your Brand to Create Passionate Fans: What Microsoft Learned About Customer Engagement in the Sports Industry - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM Microsoft

Harvard Business

At Microsoft, we continuously collaborate with businesses in an industry whose customers already self-identify as fans: sports. For billions of people around the world, sports are a matter of passion, touching lives by offering a depth of human engagement unparalleled in other activities. In sports, every second matters.

Sports 28
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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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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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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. The feedback in the 360-degree reviews was supposed to be anonymous. Of course I have.

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Growth Needs to Come from the Entire Company

Harvard Business

Consider the sports apparel company Under Armour. If you build a robust growth engine on a strong foundation, rather than seeking individual opportunities, you can be confident knowing that sustainable expansion will follow. Haier’s engine for growth developed over years; it is the heart of the company’s identity.

Company 28
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Case Study: When You Have to Choose Between Core and New Customers

Harvard Business

Alan Kurtz, MMC’s chief operating officer, was standing off to the side, and she moved to join him, but a racer intercepted her. She’d joined the company six weeks before, following a long stint as CMO of Atawear, a high-end sports apparel company. “Do you work for Mendoza?”