Finding your organization's sweet spots for cost management

Healthcare executives from three leading organizations offer these tips for driving sustainable improvements in value: Focus on fewer initiatives, execute them, make sure that the results are sustainable-then move on. Ensure that both clinical and operational experts take part in discussions on ways to improve value through care redesign and reengineering of processes throughout the organization. Zero in on the elimination of adverse events through evidence-based care for quick wins related to quality and cost.     

Match your innovation strategy to your innovation ecosystem

High-definition televisions should, by now, be a huge success. Philips, Sony, and Thompson invested billions of dollars to develop TV sets with astonishing picture quality. From a technology perspective, they've succeeded: Console manufacturers have been ready for the mass market since the early 1990s. Yet the category has been an unmitigated failure, not because of deficiencies, but because critical complements such as studio production equipment were not developed or adopted in time. Under-performing complements have left console producers in the position of offering a Ferrari in a world without gasoline or highways--an admirable engineering feat, but not one that creates value for customers. The HDTV story exemplifies the promise and peril of innovation ecosystems--the collaborative arrangements through which firms combine their individual offers into a coherent, customer-facing solution. When they work, innovation ecosystems allow companies to create value that no one firm could have created alone. The benefits of these systems are real. But for many organizations the attempt at ecosystem innovation has been a costly failure. This is because, along with new opportunities, innovation ecosystems also present a new set of risks that can brutally derail a firm's best efforts. Innovation ecosystems are characterized by three fundamental types of risk: initiative risks--the familiar uncertainties of managing a project; interdependence risks--the uncertainties of coordinating with complementary innovators; and integration risks--the uncertainties presented by the adoption process across the value chain. Firms that assess ecosystem risks holistically and systematically will be able to establish more realistic expectations, develop a more refined set of environmental contingencies, and arrive at a more robust innovation strategy. Collectively, these actions will lead to more effective implementation and more profitable innovation.     

Finding your next core business

How do you know when your core needs to change? And how do you determine what should replace it? From an in-depth study of 25 companies, the author, a strategy consultant, has discovered that it's possible to measure the vitality of a business's core. If it needs reinvention, he says, the best course is to mine hidden assets. Some of the 25 companies were in deep crisis when they began the process of redefining themselves. But, says Zook, management teams can learn to recognize early signs of erosion. He offers five diagnostic questions with which to evaluate the customers, key sources of differentiation, profit pools, capabilities, and organizational culture of your core business. The next step is strategic regeneration. In four-fifths of the companies Zook examined, a hidden asset was the centerpiece of the new strategy. He provides a map for identifying the hidden assets in your midst, which tend to fall into three categories: undervalued business platforms, untapped insights into customers, and underexploited capabilities. The Swedish company Dometic, for example, was manufacturing small absorption refrigerators for boats and RVs when it discovered a hidden asset: its understanding of, and access to, customers in the RV market. The company took advantage of a boom in that market to refocus on complete systems for live-in vehicles. The Danish company Novozymes, which produced relatively low-tech commodity enzymes such as those used in detergents, realized that its underutilized biochemical capability in genetic and protein engineering was a hidden asset and successfully refocused on creating bioengineered specialty enzymes. Your next core business is not likely to announce itself with fanfare. Use the author's tools to conduct an internal audit of possibilities and pinpoint your new focus.     

Mapping your innovation strategy

In the complex sport of American football, teams rely on playbooks as thick as the Manhattan phone directory. But when it comes to creating innovative growth businesses-which is at least as complicated as professional football--most companies have not developed detailed game plans. Indeed, many managers have concluded that a fog enshrouds the world of innovation, obscuring high-potential opportunities. The authors believe that companies can penetrate that fog by developing growth strategies based on disruptive innovations, as defined by Clayton Christensen. Such innovations conform to a pattern: They offer an entirely new solution; they perform adequately along traditional dimensions and much better along other dimensions that matter more to target customers; and they are not initially appealing to powerful incumbents. Companies can develop customized checklists, or playbooks, by combining this basic pattern with analysis of major innovations in their markets. The key early on is to focus not on detailed financial estimates--which will always guide companies toward the markets most hostile to disruptive innovations--but on how well the innovation fits the pattern of success. It's also crucial to encourage flexibility: Companies must be willing to kill projects that are going nowhere, exempt innovations from standard development processes, and avoid burdening project teams with extra financing, which can keep them heading in the wrong direction. Companies can create competitive advantage by becoming champions at defining the pattern of successful innovations and executing against it. But as that pattern becomes obvious--and others emerge-building a sustainable advantage on innovation competencies will again prove elusive.     

Finding the sweet spot: A two industry study using the zone of tolerance to identify determinant service quality attributes

This paper makes a detailed comparison of two major financial services in Singapore: life insurance and stockbrokerage. Relationships of perceptions and expectations of service quality, mean service adequacy (MSA) and mean service superiority (MSS) with service satisfaction and loyaltyare examined. Results indicate that the reliability aspect of service quality is strongly related to satisfaction and loyalty in the stockbrokerage industry, while the assurance aspect of service quality enjoyed a similar status in the life insurance industry. Results also confirm that whileMSA and MSS both drive satisfaction and loyalty, perceptions of actual service have the strongest correlations with those behavioural outcomes. The findings of this paper present some interesting managerial implications.     

Deep change. How operational innovation can transform your company

Breakthrough innovations--not just steady improvements--in operations can destroy competitors and shake up entire industries. Just look at Dell, Toyota, and Wal-Mart. But fewer than 10% of large companies have made serious attempts to achieve operational innovation. Why? One reason, contends the author, is that business culture undervalues operations--they're not as sexy as deals or acquisitions. In addition, many executives who rose through the ranks of finance or sales aren't familiar with operations--and they aren't interested in learning more. Finally, because no one holds the title Vice President of Operational Innovation, it doesn't have a natural home in the organization, so it's easily overlooked. Fortunately, all of these barriers can be overcome. This article offers practical advice on how to develop operational innovations, such as looking for role models outside your industry to emulate and identifying--and then defying--constraining assumptions about how work should be done. The author also discusses the best way to implement operational innovations. For instance, because they are disruptive by nature, projects should be concentrated in those activities with the greatest impact on enterprise strategic goals. Operational innovation may feel unglamorous or unfamiliar to many executives, but it is the only lasting basis for superior performance. Executives who understand how operational innovation happens--and who understand the barriers that prevent it from happening--can add to their strategic arsenal one of the most powerful competitive weapons in existence. In an economy that has overdosed on hype and in which customers rule as never before, operational innovation offers a meaningful and sustainable way to get ahead--and stay ahead--of the pack.     

Be nice to your innovators: Employee treatment and corporate innovation performance

This paper investigates the effect that employee treatment schemes have on corporate innovation performance. We find that firms with better employee treatment schemes produce more and better patents through improving employee satisfaction and teamwork. Additional tests suggest that our main findings cannot be attributed to job security, unionization, reverse causality, and omitted variables. We also find that firms with better employee treatment schemes produce patents that enhance market valuation and facilitate better future operating performance. Collectively, our findings show that treating employees well benefits firms and shareholders, for well treated employees are encouraged to create intellectual property.     

聚焦自助服务热点实现技术应用创新——2010年银行自助设备建设与发展研讨会在京召开

近年来,随着银行经营理念的转变,各种增值业务、中间业务得到快速发展,自助设备的需求量不断增加,其功能也不断扩充,自助设备的建设与发展已经成为业内关注的焦点.2010年4月23～24日,由中国金融电脑杂志社主办,广电运通金融电子股份有限公司(以下简称"广电运通公司")协办的2010年银行自助设备建设与发展研讨会在北京召开.     

Make your enemies your allies

Rivalries in the workplace can be destructive to both personal career growth and group success. Many attempts to reverse rivalries fail because of the complex way emotion and reason operate in the building of trust. Using a method called the 3Rs, an effective leader can turn a rival into a collaborator, setting the stage for a healthy work life while driving fresh thinking within an organization. Step 1 of the method is redirection, shifting a rival's negative emotions away from the adversarial relationship. This creates an opening for Step 2, reciprocity, through which a relationship can be established. Here, the essential principle is to give before you ask--offering a rival something of clear benefit and "priming the pump" for a future return that requires little effort on the rival's part. Step 3, rationality, sets expectations of the new relationship so that efforts made using the previous steps don't come off as disingenuous. A rival is encouraged to see collaborative opportunities from a reasoned standpoint. A key advantage of the 3Rs is that the method can work to reverse all kinds of rivalries, including those with subordinates, peers, and superiors.     

When your contract manufacturer becomes your competitor

PC maker Lenovo started out as a distributor of equipment made by IBM and other companies; now it has formed a joint venture with IBM and will eventually affix its own logo to its computers. Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) started out manufacturing vehicles for Volkswagen and GM; now it's preparing to sell its own cars in China, Europe, and North America. Lenovo and SAIC represent a host of formerly anonymous makers of brand-name products that are breaking out of their defined roles and pushing the brands themselves aside. In this article, the authors explore the double-edged relationships original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) forge with their contract manufacturers (CMs). On the one hand, an OEM can reduce its labor costs, free up capital, and improve worker productivity by outsourcing all the manufacturing of a product. The company can then concentrate on value-adding activities--research and development, product design, and marketing, for instance. On the other hand, an OEM that retains a contract manufacturer may find itself immersed in a melodrama replete with promiscuity (the ambitious CM pursues liaisons with other OEMs), infidelity (the OEM's retailers and distributors shift their business to the upstart CM), and betrayal (the brazen CM transmits the OEM's intellectual property to the OEM's rivals or keeps it for itself when the contract is up). OEMs cannot simply terminate their outsourcing arrangements--they need contract manufacturers in order to keep specializing, adding value, and staying competitive. But OEMs can manage these relationships so that they don't become weak or the CMs too strong. Doing so requires modesty about revealing trade secrets; caution about whom one consorts with; and a judicious degree of intimacy, loyalty, and generosity toward partners and customers.     

Manage your energy, not your time

As the demands of the workplace keep rising, many people respond by putting in ever longer hours, which inevitably leads to burnout that costs both the organization and the employee. Meanwhile, people take for granted what fuels their capacity to work--their energy. Increasing that capacity is the best way to get more done faster and better. Time is a finite resource, but energy is different. It has four wellsprings--the body, emotions, mind, and spirit--and in each, it can be systematically expanded and renewed. In this article, Schwartz, founder of the Energy Project, describes how to establish rituals that will build energy in the four key dimensions. For instance, harnessing the body's ultradian rhythms by taking intermittent breaks restores physical energy. Rejecting the role of a victim and instead viewing events through three hopeful lenses defuses energy-draining negative emotions. Avoiding the constant distractions that technology has introduced increases mental energy. And participating in activities that give you a sense of meaning and purpose boosts the energy of the spirit. The new workday rituals succeed only if leaders support their adoption, but when that happens, the results can be powerful. A group of Wachovia Bank employees who went through an energy management program outperformed a control group on important financial metrics like loans generated, and they reported substantially improved customer relationships, productivity, and personal satisfaction. These findings corroborated anecdotal evidence gathered about the effectiveness of this approach at other companies, including Ernst & Young, Sony, and Deutsche Bank. When organizations invest in all dimensions of their employees' lives, individuals respond by bringing all their energy wholeheartedly to work -and both companies and their people grow in value.     

See your brands through your customers' eyes.

Subaru markets an L.L. Bean Outback station wagon. Dell stamps Microsoft and Intel logos on its computers. Such inter-weaving of different companies' brands is now commonplace. But one of the central tools of brand management-portfolio mapping--has not kept pace with changes in the marketplace. Most conventional brand maps include only those brands owned by a company, arranged along organizational lines with little regard for how the brands influence customer perceptions. In this article, the authors present a new mapping tool--the brand portfolio molecule--that reveals the way brands appear to customers. The brand portfolio molecule includes all the brands that factor into a consumer's decision to buy, whether or not the company owns them. The first step in creating a brand portfolio molecule is to determine which brands should or should not be included. The second step is to classify each brand by asking five key questions: 1) How important is this brand to customers' purchase decisions about the brand you're mapping? 2) Is its influence positive or negative? 3) What market position does this brand occupy relative to the other brands in the portfolio? 4) How does this brand connect to the other brands in the portfolio? 5) How much control do you have over this brand? The last step is to map the molecule using a 3-D modeling program or by hand with pen and paper. Individual brands take the form of atoms, and they're clustered in ways that reflect how customers see them. The usefulness of the tool lies in its ability to show the many forces that influence a customer's buying decision--and to provide a powerful new way to think about brand strategy.     

发现财务价值之路

在全球经济真正复苏的前夜,企业需要彻底的蜕变。这种蜕变将以企业价值增长为核心,而如何权衡回报、增长、风险三者之间的关系,成为摆在所有CFO面前的考题。无论是中石油式大司库,还是烟台万华式财务云,答案不同,但目标唯一。中国企业的财务管理似乎正处在最好的时代和最坏的时代:一方面,经济全球化的快速发展、高新技术的迅猛推进与CFO阶层的日渐崛起等因素,为企业财务管理水平的提升带来妙不可言的助益;另一方面,始于     

Match your sales force structure to your business life cycle

Although companies devote considerable time and money to managing their sales forces, few focus much thought on how the structure of the sales force needs to change over the life cycle of a product or a business. However, the organization and goals of a sales operation have to evolve as businesses start up, grow, mature, and decline if a company wants to keep winning the race for customers. Specifically, firms must consider and alter four factors over time: the differing roles that internal salespeople and external selling partners should play, the size of the sales force, its degree of specialization, and how salespeople apportion their efforts among different customers, products, and activities. These variables are critical because they determine how quickly sales forces respond to market opportunities, they influence sales reps' performance, and they affect companies' revenues, costs, and profitability. In this article, the authors use timeseries data and cases to explain how, at each stage, firms can best tackle the relevant issues and get the most out of their sales forces. During start-up, smart companies focus on how big their sales staff should be and on whether they can depend upon selling partners. In the growth phase, they concentrate on getting the sales force's degree of specialization and size right. When businesses hit maturity, companies should better allocate existing resources and hire more general-purpose salespeople. Finally, as organizations go into decline, wise sales leaders reduce sales force size and use partners to keep the business afloat for as long as possible.     

Reclaim your job

Ask most managers what gets in the way of their success, and you'll hear the familiar litany of complaints: Not enough time. Limited resources. No clear sense of how their work fits into the grand corporate scheme. These are, for the most part, excuses. What really gets in the way of managers' success is fear of making their own decisions and acting accordingly. Managers must overcome the psychological desire to be indispensable. In this article, the authors demonstrate how managers can become more productive by learning to manage demands, generate resources, and recognize and exploit alternatives. To win the support they want, managers must develop a long-term strategy and pursue their goals slowly, steadily, and strategically. To expand the range of opportunities, for their companies and themselves, managers must scan the environment for possible obstacles and search for ways around them. Fully 90% of the executives the authors have studied over the past few years wasted their time and frittered away their productivity, despite having well-defined projects, goals, and the necessary knowledge to get their jobs done. Such managers remain trapped in inefficiency because they assume they do not have enough personal discretion or control. They forget how to take initiative--the most essential quality of any truly successful manager. Effective managers, by contrast, are purposeful corporate entrepreneurs who take charge of their jobs by developing trust in their own judgment and adopting long-term, big-picture views to fulfill personal goals that match those of the organization.     

了解你的客户

在澳大利亚,身份窃贼的数量正在以每月3倍的速度迅速增长,而每年身份窃贼所造成的损失更是高达10亿～50亿澳元,其中很大一部分损失都由银行承担。但