Below is a selection of blog entries from Rita Gunther McGrath's blog: The Discipline of Strategic Growth.
You know those moments when you read something in the paper, convince yourself that you must have misunderstood and go back to see what the article really said? Well, I just had one of those moments while reading yesterday's Wall Street Journal.
An article entitled Why the Self-Employed Might Owe OfficeMax a 1099 reports on collateral damage from health care reform. Apparently, to pay for some of its costs, lawmakers have vowed to close an estimated $300 billion 'tax gap' by requiring everyone who does more than $600 worth of business with a vendor in a year to file a 1099 form stating how much they paid the vendor. This is the case whether it's Larry's Plumbing… read more...
A judge has just ruled that postings to social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace are admissable as evidence! And you thought you were protected by blocking your messages and only showing them to friends? Not any longer..
Here is the lead-in to the article:
Court Allows Use of Facebook, MySpace Communications
July 27, 2010 (PLANSPONSOR.com) – A federal judge has agreed to allow a Florida-based self-storage company being sued for sexual harassment to have copies of two female plaintiffs’ postings on the Facebook and MySpace social networking Web sites.
In another example of how the courts continue to struggle with the legal implications of the wildly popular social networking… read more...
I was recently fortunate enough to be teaching in a very interesting program for strategy consultants at IBM. One of their senior leaders, an ex-BCG guy, pointed out to me that I really could use a picture to communicate the value of Discovery Driven Growth. Here, therefore is his suggestion! What it basically shows you is how uncertainty is brought down simultaneously with investment increasing so that you tie the level of investment you are making to the level of uncertainty you face. Pretty interesting idea.
read more...
So, you've decided that its time to get out from under that black cloud your business has been in for the last two years and start thinking about growth again. If you're a senior leader or CEO, what do you do next? If you're like many, you'll gather together a group of important people in your organization and start brainstorming about new growth opportunities for your company, hoping that the great ideas coming out of the session will catapult your organization to a new growth trajectory.
Hmmm. Not so fast. For starters, most companies don't lack for good ideas - just ask a randomly selected group of employees and you'll be flooded with suggestions for how… read more...
Brand Management re-posted Rita McGrath's post We do it because we really care - health insurers try empathy. read more...
Innovation Management recommends Rita McGrath's Thinking the Unthinkable post at Harvard Business Review in its post about summer blogging. To read the entire post, click here. read more...
Rita McGrath is quoted at the CFOZone.com site in a post by Sheryl Nash. "Companies all too often stick with losing ventures despite signs of trouble, critics contend. But they acknowledge that it is often difficult to determine just how long is too long."
"The majority of companies I work with have no rigorous process for disengaging at all, with the result that it usually ends in a nasty mess," says Rita Gunther McGrath, an associate professor at the Columbia University business school. Instead, Gunther McGrath says, they explain away declines in these benchmarks, even though they are indicative of larger potential problems. And without a plan to turn things around, those problems will inevitably materialize, she… read more...
A reporter recently asked me about the downsides of a firm going public - why might it not be the best course of action for them? Here are my "top ten":
- It is a major distraction from the business of serving customers and meeting customer needs.
- Leadership teams today have to ‘recruit’ the right kinds of shareholders – activity which has nothing to do with actual business wealth creation but everything to do with staying alive in the stock markets.
- Being publicly traded means you will tend to overpay your executives.
- Executive (particularly CEO) tenure will tend to shorten as public company pressures make any slip up intolerable.
- It depresses the… read more...
One of my more interesting assigments in recent years has been to be part of the design effort for the Microsoft CEO Summit. At the most recent Summit, in 2010, Hans Rosling was a main-tent presenter. What he had to say about population growth, the future of the developed world and what we can expect in the new economy was just amazing. Watch for yourself - you will be enlightened.
read more...It must be my week for seeing bad news in many places. I just love reading Scott Anthony's blog over at the HBR web site, where I also am a regular blogger. Scott is part of Innosight, a terrific consulting firm which helps companies figure out how to address some of the more characteristic problems that can get in the way of their capacity to grow. He recently talked about a phenomenon which a number of us have written about, the Innovator's Paradox. While he used Microsoft as a case in point, it applies to many situations, in which phenomenal success can put in place all the wrong incentives if your ambition is growth.
When… read more...
