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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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How Chinese Companies Disrupt Through Business Model Innovation

Harvard Business

The American textile and apparel industries, for example, will tell you that the evidence can be found in the blood on the floor — their blood, on what used to be their floor. Experts continue to debate whether Chinese businesses are truly disruptive. For some industries in the West, this question appears a bit ridiculous.

Company 39
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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. A clear approach to operating governance is the key to making the tension in the matrix work for customers, shareholders and the assorted teams inside the business. Nike’s money-making matrix.

Apparel 56
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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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The 3 Essential Jobs That Most Retention Programs Ignore

Harvard Business

But over and over again in our three decades of experience as talent development and retention specialists, we’ve seen that companies consistently overlook half of them. That makes retaining them very different from retaining someone who wants to scale the corporate hierarchy by managing increasingly larger operations.

Talent 28
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Innovation Should Be a Top Priority for Boards. So Why Isn’t It?

Harvard Business

Innovation ranks fifth, after more-conventional concerns such as attracting and retaining top talent and the regulatory environment. This isn’t all that surprising given the level of innovation activity in these sectors, but directors operating in similarly disrupted sectors should take note.

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Why Top Management Should Listen to Activist Investors

Harvard Business

For our recent book we studied companies from a broad range of industries that operate this way, including Apple, CEMEX, Danaher, Haier, IKEA, Inditex (known for its Zara apparel business), Starbucks and many others. Starbucks applies its capabilities in talent management and distinctive retailing to everything it does.