Coming In Out of the Rain
By Denise Harrison, Executive Vice President and COO Note: The following article was first published in 2007 but is still relevant today. What? How could a low cost company in India have trouble with low cost competition from China? Welcome to global competition. Over the last year several articles in Course and Direction addressed dealing […]
Continue readingWhy Stretch Goals Make Bad Strategic Objectives
This is my fifth post on bad strategic objectives. In my first post, I discussed a test to tell whether an objective you set for your organization is truly strategic. By now, I’ve also highlighted four common types of non-strategic objectives, the incremental objective , the accounting objective, the lead brick objective and the world […]
Continue readingWhen Is It Strategic to Say No to New Business? When can higher volume lead to lower long-term profitability?
By Denise Harrison, Executive Vice President & COO As a company looks for additional growth, its strategic planning team needs to remember that not all growth is good growth. When searching for growth, a team can be lured by the siren song of a big customer or a high growth segment. However, the team might […]
Continue readingCustomer relationships: What does this concept have to do with strategy?
By Denise Harrison, Executive Vice President and COO Frustrated by losing a bid, one CEO called up his peer at the procuring company and asked, “What could we have done better?” The two firms had a long history of working together, and the CEO wanted to know what had gone wrong. The CEO at the […]
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