Mapping a Business Strategy in a Broken Economy

The troubled economy of the past several years has challenged – and weakened – many businesses around the world. Although business leaders can’t manage the myriad external factors that impact their organization, they can take advantage of wounded competition through solid strategies.

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Top 6 – October 2012

Fine. Life sucks and then you die. Get over it. Be happy. Do your work. Any executive can blame a bad market environment for poor performance. Leaders don’t. Words are nice. Action is better. Either achieve or sit on the sidelines. The field of competitive battle is no place to just wait. Target charged forward.…

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A Case Study on Sears versus Target and Divergent Responses – Blame the Market Environment or Command Your Performance

Charting a winning corporate strategy is rarely an easy task, and 2012 has been particularly difficult for executive decision-making. Yet difficult times do not get executives off the hook for poor performance. A case in point: Sears is floundering while Target is advancing. What is driving the significant divergence in performance between these two competitors? Is a role reversal possible in the next 18 months?

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Don’t Look for Nissan’s new “World Car” to be Seen on U.S. Roads

Theodore Levitt in his monumental “Globalization of Markets” treatise predicted the future of international marketing will be the truly “global product.” He envisioned products that everybody in the world could use and not worry about such products being customized to any nationality or culture. Everybody would understand how to work the product and not even have to worry about language and directions. Well, the future is now!

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What will drive Mobile Payments Adoption?

All over the world, existing and new players are working to make point-of-sale mobile payments a reality. The two key challenges in realizing this are building partner ecosystem, and changing consumer behavior to adopt mobile device as a payment instrument. To change consumer behavior, providing a compelling yet secure consumer experience is a critical factor. This paper contends that having the right balance between consumer experience and security is a must to drive adoption.

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