Strategy: Low Cost or Differentiation

M Dana Baldwin, Senior Consultant When your organization does strategic planning, what strategies do you consider for each of your market segments?  It is likely that you may select different bases for competing in different segments, because your competitive...

Etsy: Can a company outgrow its Niche?

by Margaret Lawrence Etsy is often described as the “world’s largest flea market”. Since its beginnings in 2005, the company has created a vibrant on-line community of buyers and sellers of “handmade” and vintage items as well as craft supplies, it’s the online...

Strategy: Turning Trash into Treasure

By Denise Harrison, Executive Vice President and COO Discussions concerning waste disposal and environmental impact are showing up more frequently during strategic plan development. With disposal costs and environmental regulations increasing, companies are finding...

Accounting and Strategic Objectives

By Robert W. Bradford, President and CEO Recently, I discussed a simple test to tell whether an objective you set for your organization is truly strategic, and highlighted a common type of non-strategic objective, the incremental objective.  Today, I’d like to cover a...

Are Your Objectives Really Strategic?

One of the issues that comes up in the second session of the Simplified Strategic Planning process is whether your objectives are “strategic enough”.  Strictly speaking, objectives are only strategic if they have a significant impact on what you sell, how you sell it,...

Execution: Can You See the Path?

Denise Harrison; EVP & COO Recently I was discussing action plan progress (or lack of progress) with the action plan team. I asked the team what are the milestones for next month? What do we need to be doing in order to achieve our objective? It surprised me that...

Sit still or move forward?

Conventional wisdom has it that sitting still is a strategic disaster – especially in high tech, but also in more mundane industries. As with many chestnuts I hear in strategic planning meetings, this one is both true and false. It’s true because the world will...