Stanford Executive Briefings: Business Strategy

Executing Your Strategy

In a business environment of fast-moving markets, global supply chains, and dynamic technologies, executing strategy is becoming increasingly difficult. How do you aim for a target that is constantly shifting—while standing on a platform that is constantly destabilized?

The Enterprise of the Future

Jim Bramante distills the findings of IBM’s latest Global CEO Study, based on interviews with one thousand CEOs worldwide, to define the Enterprise of the Future.

Billion-Dollar Lessons

While we are inspired by business success stories, we are educated by business failures. Chunka Mui and Paul Carroll researched 750 of the most significant business failures of the past quarter-century and found the Number 1 cause of failure was not sloppy execution, poor leadership or bad luck. It was, instead, misguided strategy. Mui gives examples of the seven most common strategic failure patterns: illusions of synergy, misjudged adjacencies, faulty financial engineering and others. He explains that each pattern has predictable red flags.

Leveraging China and India for Global Advantage

A successful China or India strategy is likely to become a matter of survival for multinational companies. China’s GDP will catch up to that of the U.S. by 2025, predicts Professor Gupta. By 2050, GDP of both China and India will reach or surpass that of the U.S., Europe and Japan combined. Strategies that capture market share, talent, and innovation opportunities in these emerging giants necessitate understanding their unique yet complementary strengths.

Change Management and Strategic Planning

Change inevitably engenders resistance. Even the best strategic plans can fail if this resistance is not met and overcome. Dr. Roberta Katz explains six principles for effective implementation and discusses current efforts within Stanford University that provide a model for successful change.

Finding Untapped Growth in Existing Markets

Managers are under constant pressure to grow, but it is often difficult to find new avenues of growth within an existing line of business. In order to win in the marketplace, it is essential to understand which customer behaviors make and lose money for your organization. Dr. James Hollingshead offers specific tools for seeing existing markets differently and uncovering hidden opportunities for growth.

Built to Change

In today's highly competitive business environment, organizations must be ready to change—and change frequently. Edward Lawler and Christopher Worley discuss methods for creating strategies, structures, communication processes, and human resource management practices that are designed to facilitate an organization's ability to change.

Drive Business Performance

To achieve a culture of performance that drives growth, organizations need to build accountability, intelligence, and informed decision-making into their organizational DNA, arming employees with relevant business data to focus their actions and speed strategic decisions.

What Drives Phenomenal Success?

According to Colleen Barrett, success comes from an idea that is so simple, nobody quite believes it: customers return because they like the experience and they like the way they are treated. Her guiding rule is to hire on attitude and then train for skills, seeking individuals who will take the business—but not themselves—seriously.

Why Don't We Naturally Make Good Decisions?

We rarely study—much less apply—the fundamental thinking processes that should be undertaken before we make important decisions. Dr. Howard describes the elements of high-quality decisions and tells how to increase our clarity of action in the personal and professional decisions that shape our lives and organizations.

Strategy by Design

Successful innovations must be desirable to consumers, technically feasible, and viable from a business point of view. But how do you meet these requirements? Tim Brown advocates using the three stages of “design thinking”: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. For inspiration, innovators must look at the world through the eyes and the ears of users, perhaps studying analogous situations or extreme users to spark a generative process. Ideation, the core of the process, involves prototyping and realistic testing. Implementation begins with storytelling to bring the idea into the world. If a narrative can be developed around an idea, it has the best chance of being understood and implemented.

Building a Feedback-Positive Organization

An effective leader must be prepared to offer timely and honest feedback, both to employees and to other members of the management team. David Brady examines what it takes to have a "feedback-rich" organization, while Scott Brady relates how feedback propelled his own organization through tremendous growth.

Strategic Alliances

Many factors come into play when deciding whether to proceed with a strategic alliance. As Steve Steinhilber explains, there are formal and informal mechanisms that should be put in place—persuading your partner to act for mutual benefit, overcoming the inevitable rough patches in the relationship, and ensuring your alliances stay focused on what matters.

Numbers DO Lie

All too frequently firms measure the wrong variables, assign the wrong people to do the measuring, and grant too much credibility to the numbers generated. Christopher Meyer details a framework for identifying what practices need to be changed, clarifying who should measure what, and showing how to align measurement with corporate strategy.

Focus Your Business

Growing companies have difficulty eliminating excess baggage. Steven Brandt describes proactive measures to maintain flow and growth: setting expectations, concentrating on one issue and excelling in it, strategic pruning, and enterprise character development.

Mergers & Acquisitions: 100 Days to a Successful Integration

Ram Gupta discusses the details behind PeopleSoft's decision to acquire J.D. Edwards and the process of merging the two companies. He explains that the 100 days preceding mergers and acquisitions present decision makers with a critical "make or break" opportunity.

Open Business Models

Dr. Henry Chesbrough describes how to open your closed innovation model and rejuvenate your company's broader business model. He details specific examples of enterprises that have successfully leveraged innovation to create and capture value from ideas and technologies.

Hard Facts, Dangerous Half Truths, and Total Nonsense

Today's leaders are surrounded by an abundance of business advice that can be inconsistent and contradictory. It's difficult to tell which ideas are good and which are bad, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Dr. Robert Sutton believes your best bet is to determine the facts, and act on what you know.

Collaborative Entrepreneurship

Since many existing business practices inhibit innovation, new organizational designs and managerial approaches must emerge to meet today's new challenges. Professor Raymond Miles describes how self-managed projects among firms can generate innovation and market placement.

Innovation Management and Incentives Design

Innovation generates value when supported by an infrastructure that provides discipline without killing passion. To accomplish this, management systems for innovation require careful design. Antonia Dávila provides guidance for setting goals and incentives that ensure your strategies foster, rather than stifle, the creative strength of your organization.

Preventing Burnout in Your Organization

What can be done about burnout and its high costs both to the employee and the organization? Professor Christina Maslach describes six contributing factors that increase the risk of burnout, and the toll it takes on individuals and job performance. Learn strategies to turn exhaustion into energy, ineffectiveness into achievement.

Implementing Strategy

Professor Jennifer Chatman defines organizational culture in terms of observable behaviors and shows examples of firms that use strong, strategically-aligned cultures to enhance organizational performance. She outlines how to establish and maintain a healthy and thriving culture by focusing on the power of effective selection and socialization processes.

Doing Well and Doing Good

Jeffrey Swartz firmly believes in commerce, and that profits for Wall Street are necessary—but not sufficient. It's no longer enough to be solely focused on the bottom line. Timberland is proof that profit-minded companies can "do well" for shareholders and "do good" for communities.

The Search for Life After Planning

Instead of producing a business plan on paper, which subsequently disappers into a desk drawer, you need to focus on strategic thinking and implementation. Rick Berthold presents a unique process for strategy formation that assures organizational alignment and leads to effective execution.

How Debt Makes Companies Perform Better

Corporate finance has risen to the forefront of the tools that business leaders employ to create value and contribute to economic efficiency, productivity and profitability. Explaining the balance sheet in straightforward, logical terms, Dr. George Parker details a forward-thinking perspective for weighing risks against opportunities.

The Dilemmas of Team-Based Organizations

Dr. Christopher Meyer offers suggestions on how to avoid "teaming": the deadly reflex reaction to form a team regardless of the situation. He details fifteen key architectural elements that help create productive teams that work effectively—and can actually fulfill their promise.

Dealing with Crisis and Transition

Professor Charles O'Reilly explains the overwhelming power of culture within any organization, and why failure to understand culture leads to failure in implementing change. He describes aligning culture with strategy, and how to introduce control systems that will allow the organization to respond to ever-changing demands.

Red Queen Competition: A Dynamic View of Strategy

Your job as a manager is not to come up with solutions—it is to be the architect of an organization that comes up with solutions. William Barnett explains how to see competition as an engine that generates capability. He offers ways to help you develop the strength to persevere and prosper, while others lose themselves in the struggle of just trying to keep up.

Death by Growth

Christopher Meyer shows how growing companies can avoid creating internal traffic jams and accidents that ultimately cause their own failures. He advocates a "less is more" philosophy in which companies match and leverage their growth capacities with their capabilities.

Executing Leadership Transitions

Scott McNealy believes leaders cannot be created—only identified. But even natural leaders need exposure. That's where coaching comes in. McNealy explains how to develop your own strengths to lead other leaders, and shares his methods for selecting and grooming dynamic leaders.

Judo Strategy

In this lively step-by-step guide to business competition, Professor David Yoffie explains how some companies succeed in defeating stronger, more powerful rivals, while others fail. Using the metaphor of martial arts, Yoffie details how successful challengers can turn their opponents' own size and power against them—and bring them down.

Managing for Both Bottom and Top Line Performance

Managers have spent the past few years in a bunker mentality, ruled by cost-cutting and bottom-line retrenchment. Now that headcount and expenses have been cut to the bone, attention to the top line must once again reign supreme. As Jeff Rodek explains, your goal must be a company-wide commitment to teamwork and accountability, with the belief that profit is the only effective test of performance.

Avoiding the Workforce Crisis

Tamara Erickson explains how different generations of employees perceive the workplace, and describes how to attract and retain workers with this viewpoint in mind. Learn how to engage the hearts and minds of your employees by giving their work meaning and personal value.

Zero Time: Learning to Respond Instantly

What is it that successful companies "get" that others don't? In order to stay ahead, organizations must know how to react instantaneously. Zero Time success is founded on five disciplines: instant alignment of values, instant adaptation, instant learning, instant execution and instant involvement.

Supply Chain Management in the Internet Age

Professor Hau Lee argues that companies should not be satisfied with the substitution effect or the scale effect when enjoying the benefits of the Internet on supply chain management. He shows how select companies have leaped ahead by collaboratively integrating supply chain management and the Internet.

Creating the Future

Never has there been a more exciting or more hazardous time to be at the helm of a corporation. How do you stay out of the band of mediocrity and position your company to become an architect of industry revolution? The answer, says Gary Hamel, is to reinvent who you are in meaningful ways, moving beyond incremental change to industry reconception.

Competing on the Edge

Instead of focusing on where you want to go, today's uncertain future requires that you focus on how you're going to get there. The process you need is structured chaos--a few simple rules setting priorities and responsibilities, and total creative freedom for business units within that framework. The result is a strategy that morphs, dynamically re-matching portfolios to meet current opportunities.

Structuring Strategic Business Alliances

Strategic alliances and other collaborative inter-firm agreements have become commonplace in today's economy. Companies are moving away from large, control-based structures to more flexible and relationship-oriented partnering. With emphasis on the three phases of the Alliance Life Cycle, Dr. Shavers explores the ingrediants to successful partnerships, focusing on the impact the alliance will have on each partner's bottom line.

Going Global

Recognizing that the status quo was riskier than radical change, Mary Cranston spearheaded the merger of two 125-year-old law firms that were historic market leaders in their respective birthplaces: San Francisco and New York. In response to new technology and a climate of deregulation, their corporate clients were going global--they had to do the same. Cranston explains how the merger of Pillsbury Madison & Sutro with Winthrop Stimson Putman & Roberts allowed them to become an international force in their industry virtually overnight.