I posted a while back on Michael E. Porter's idea that either you can compete on cost or differentiation but not both. How should you make that decision? How will you know if your choice will be profitable? First of all my advice is to NEVER compete on cost as a small company. As Porter … Continue reading Porter’s Five Forces Analysis
Category: Strategy
As businesses go to market with a product or a service they are quickly confronted with the need to compete on price. The questions here is "Should we?" In 1985, Harvard Business economist Michael E. Porter gave the world some tools to answer this question in his book Competitive Advantage. In the book Porter postulates … Continue reading Strategy, Competition & The Porter Curve
Having sat through many organization’s strategic planning session witnessing nearly the same amount of SWOT analyses, I’ve come to the concusion that they rarely create value. It’s not that they NEVER are useful, it’s just that they typically get a team looking inward and backward as opposed to outward and forward. Further, SWOT can be disembodied … Continue reading STP over SWOT
I just finished reading Deborah Mills-Scofield’s HBR article on bringing back corporate accountability. This is a great article in its own right. It lead me to an article she posted in April of this year on building Communities of Practice by Building Virtues into the Organization’s DNA. Her moonshots to fix problems we see in … Continue reading Revamp an Organizations DNA?