Stanford Executive Briefings: Business Strategy

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.