background preloader

Business Strategies & Theories

Facebook Twitter

The Number One Killer Of Corporate Innovation. Innovation is essential to keeping an organization alive--everyone knows that. Then why do so few companies innovate? Part of the answer is that it's very hard for people who are invested in the current business to truly embrace disruptive new ideas. Tom Peters talks about this when he says that innovation never happens vertically in a company. One of the fastest ways to kill a good idea is to take an exciting innovation discovered at the front line and move it up the chain by asking your boss, having them ask their boss, and so on.

When you run an idea up the chain of command, you almost never get the permission or the resources to innovate well. People at the top of the organizational pyramid are usually running the business using lagging indicators. In general, their focus is on defending present revenue streams. It's understandable. In our experience, you are usually better off moving forward after receiving just enough permission to experiment with and develop the innovation. 1. 2.

Management and Leadership

Tim Kastelle. Calculate Project ROI using NPV, IRR and Packback period. Calculating ROI for a project/task should consider both tangible and intangible benefits. Steps: Understand Benefits (Documented in the business case) - Review the business case to understand the project and the benefits it is expected to deliver. - Identify tangible and intangible benefits (Work with the project owner and convert intangible benefits to tangible factors). All most all intangible benefits can be converted to tangible factors with clear understanding of the benefit.

Example: Benefits like increasing employee morale (intangible) can be converted to be tangible as follows: Increase employee morale can increase employee retention, which can save new employee recruiting and training costs. Based on the employee turnover last year, HR dept can provide tangible figures like “Reduce Employee turnover by 5% and save $5000 in new recruiting costs. What is discount cash flow? Quality Insider | Quality Digest. Blue Ocean Strategy. Business Strategist: From Front-Line to Back-Office (w) » Balanced Scorecard. Be MECE (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive) | Powerful Problem Solving. A central tenet of analytical problem solving is your considering all the possible solutions to your problem exactly once; that is, your approach must be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (sometimes written as “mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive”)—or MECE (pronounced “me see”). MECE thinking is very popular with strategy consultancies, including the McKinsey, Bain, and BCG of the world.

In fact the case interview that these companies filter their applicants with are designed to test whether you can think in a MECE-way. It is understandable: MECE thinking is both efficient and elegant; so let’s look at what it means and how you become an effective MECE thinker. Mutually exclusive means “no overlaps” Two sets of elements are mutually exclusive when they don’t intersect: you cannot have an element belonging to both sets at the same time. Mutually exclusive thinking forces you to consider the details, seeing the individual tree as opposed to the forest. Related Posts: Multi-criteria decision analysis. Multiple-criteria decision-making or multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a sub-discipline of operations research that explicitly considers multiple criteria in decision-making environments.

Whether in our daily lives or in professional settings, there are typically multiple conflicting criteria that need to be evaluated in making decisions. Cost or price is usually one of the main criteria. Some measure of quality is typically another criterion that is in conflict with the cost. In purchasing a car, cost, comfort, safety, and fuel economy may be some of the main criteria we consider. Structuring complex problems well and considering multiple criteria explicitly leads to more informed and better decisions. Foundations, concepts, definitions[edit] MCDM or MCDA are well-known acronyms for multiple criteria decision making and multiple criteria decision analysis. MCDM is concerned with structuring and solving decision and planning problems involving multiple criteria. "max" Max = Arrow's impossibility theorem. In social choice theory, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, the General Possibility Theorem, or Arrow’s paradox, states that, when voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), no rank order voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting a specific set of criteria.

These criteria are called unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives. The theorem is often cited in discussions of election theory as it is further interpreted by the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem. The theorem is named after economist Kenneth Arrow, who demonstrated the theorem in his Ph.D. thesis and popularized it in his 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values.

The original paper was titled "A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare".[1] Statement of the theorem[edit] Non-dictatorship Unrestricted domain Independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) Let by -tuple. Analytic Hierarchy Process. A simple AHP hierarchy, with final priorities. The goal is to select the most suitable leader from a field of three candidates. The factors to be considered are experience, education, charisma, and age. According to the judgments of the decision makers, Dick is the strongest candidate, followed by Tom, then Harry. Their decision process is described in depth in an appendix to this article.

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is a structured technique for organizing and analyzing complex decisions, based on mathematics and psychology. It was developed by Thomas L. Saaty in the 1970s and has been extensively studied and refined since then. It has particular application in group decision making,[1] and is used around the world in a wide variety of decision situations, in fields such as government, business, industry, healthcare, and education. The AHP converts these evaluations to numerical values that can be processed and compared over the entire range of the problem.