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 [...]

Tuck professors Vijay Govindarajan and Richard D’Aveni have once again been named to the Thinkers 50, the 4th biennial ranking of the world’s most influential living management thinkers. Tuck professor Sydney Finkelstein is also named as a management thinker to watch. Created and compiled by Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove of CrainerDearlove*, Thinkers 50 has [...]

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 [...]

There is a saying that nothing is as old as yesterday’s news. This week I read a newspaper article about much older news. As it seems, these can be quite interesting again. Most people, including me, did not even notice it: one of Germany’s most popular TV news formats – Tagesschau – has been broadcasting [...]

Despite the poor economic situation many finance departments seem to be afraid that their key players could switch to a competitor. More than half of HR managers and finance department heads in the world see the risk to lose their best people. Also in Germany companies are afraid of losing finance specialists. That is one [...]

Naseem Javed is a regular contributer of interesting articles for our Management Portal. His latest piece of thought covers nine opportunites that – as he thinks – will be hot for businesses in 2009. I think these are very interesting ideas. If you think about your business strategy for 2009, it is well worth to [...]

Well, we do not have been published posts for a while. There is a very good reason. Also the headline might be confusing. Enterprises, people, and governments have to manage the results of a large financial crisis that started as a crisis related to US subprime loans in 2007. A great year? A couple of [...]

When I read about this advertising campaign I remembered a specific strategic approach called “judo strategy”. This strategy was presented in the book “Judo Strategy: Turning Your Competitors’ Strength to Your Advantage”; the authors describe an approach how this kind of martial arts can also be used to help organizations battle seemingly bigger and stronger [...]