Articles

Companies today will have to reinvent themselves to survive, and every large and ambitious company should be trying to figure out how to become a destination for its customers. Consumers are voting with their mobile devices and choosing from a handful of dominant “ecosystem drivers”— businesses such as Amazon and WeChat, which become destinations for their customers’ needs by offering complementary or sometimes competing services — for each domain in their lives.

Cybersecurity can no longer be the concern of just the IT department. Within organizations, it needs to be everyone’s business — including the board’s.

Lurking within the financial statements and communications of public companies is a troubling trend. Alternative metrics, once used sparingly, have become increasingly ubiquitous and more detached from reality.

Organizations often struggle with corporate strategy because executives lack clarity on how the parts of the corporation fit together. Without a shared understanding of the relationships between headquarters and business units, executives risk talking past one another when discussing strategy.

Effective strategic guidelines get three things right. They link to the corporate vision, identify critical vulnerabilities, and focus on what matters most.

Chief information officers need to oversee all of IT – in close collaboration with marketers and the business units. Only then can companies deliver digital experiences that win, serve, and retain increasingly demanding customers.

Managers in manufacturing companies often keep process innovation activities tightly under wraps. Some companies have good reasons for keeping process innovations concealed. However, the authors’ research suggests that for most manufacturers, such defensiveness deprives companies of a valuable source of ideas for productivity improvement. Many manufacturers, they argue, can benefit from sharing process innovations rather than keeping them secret.

Following the example of Alibaba in China, Amazon is leveraging strong trust in its brand and its broad customer base to enter the U.S. financial market. While Alibaba saw opportunity in the lack of credit cards in China, Amazon could use credit cards’ ubiquity in the U.S. to reach a large pool of potential customers.

Throughout the 20th century, autos and the auto industry propelled human development, bringing unrivalled utility and flexibility to the way people move. Yet the industry now faces fundamental disruption as vehicle ownership yields to on-demand mobility.

A study of 250 global companies found that a company’s digital intelligence is informed by four dimensions: strategy, culture, organization, and capabilities. Within these dimensions, the research identified 18 management practices that contribute the most to digital leaders’ financial and market success — and offer a roadmap for companies seeking to expand their digital know-how.