As you might remember, our team was completed by our baby last year. Our little daughter is now 14 months old and makes us very happy. Looking back at the time with her, I see some parallels between living with a baby and strategic management:
Let’s start with the time before the baby arrives. The expecting […]

This is a little story from my daily travel to work that happened some years ago. I went to work by car and had to refuel about every two weeks. There was a gas station that was situ-ated very conveniently on my morning route. Thus, I was a regular customer there. I did not care […]

Keeping track of all tasks and projects can be difficult sometimes. However, this is an essential part of manager’s roles. That led us to the question, whether there are any small pieces of software which might help managers to keep track of all their duties. Well, in most cases you might use MS Outlook (or […]

A provider of on-demand sales tools and related services has published an interesting paper on cost cutting. Its title is quite promising: “Simple Savvy Savings - 9 ideas to make anyone a Cost-Cutting Hero”. The underlying idea behind this paper is the current financial crisis and the resulting consequences, i.e. in terms of cost cutting: […]

A few days ago I did participate in a discussion concerning the transfer of existing print mail campaigns to new e-mail-campaigns. An issue within this discussion was, whether and to what extent content and structure should be changed.
The basic answer can be summarized as follows: E-Mail campaigns are quite different in comparison to print mail […]

…and how to manage them. When company managers discuss their personal experiences in terms of external consultants you can find a broad range of opinions and beliefs. Point of views may vary between very positive experiences when hiring external knowledge and very bad experiences; the later ones are sometimes expressed in jokes about “flippy” PowerPoint […]

Strategic planning is about preparing a business for the future. As we all know, a strategy should put a business in a position to maximally exploit potential chances and to minimize the damage of potential threats.
We all witness the worst financial crisis most of us would have thought of in these days. We also witness […]

Since many, many years an amazing number of articles, books and studies discuss CRM systems and their importance or effects on corporate success. Furthermore companies did spent large amounts of capital for implementation, training and very often for consulting when introducing CRM systems. But sometimes the best CRM system is a very good value for […]

Security and liquidity are important issues in bond market. Now the financial crisis and the general uncertainty (due to the subprime crisis) have an impact in the market for covered bonds (so called Pfandbrief). Dealings of them have come to rest.
In regular times securities traders generate their income from turnover – the more the merrier. […]

One of the basics to be successful in competition is to give the customer what he or she wants. Since this aspect is a basic it is very likely that your competitor will do the same. So what’s next? The answer is a little bit more complex and needs to stress factors like learning, training […]