BCG’s Competing for Advantage

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The Global Advantage Diamond from BCG looks useful to diagnose competitive advantage in rapidly developing economies (RDEs). It maps four issues – market access, resource access, local adaptation and network coordination – to produce a diamond map relative strengths of you and competitors. From your starting position, you can identify where you need to get to on each dimension, and thus set strategic priorities. Local firms, it is claimed, are stronger on resource access and local coordination, while multinational challengers are ...

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Seize Advantage in a Downturn

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More (mostly) helpful advice re the downturn from HBR is Seize the advantage in a downturn in which David Rhodes and Daniel Stelter of BCG offer thoughts to stabilize your business and find opportunities … but beware!

Good to see the Boston Consulting Group encourage us to focus on the core business (as we should have been doing in the first place), protect product development, look at competitors’ weaknesses etc. – and ...

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‘Backshoring’ no big trend

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When Dell decided some years ago to bring back home much of its customer support after complaints about service quality, it seemed perhaps to indicate limits to the off-shoring era. Other firms have followed, suggesting a new trend of ‘back-shoring’ customer support to the US and Europe. strategy+business, though, in Is Backshoring the New Offshoring? point out that the scale of this reversal is not very significant. In fact, with increasing profit pressures arising from the worsening economic conditions, ...

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How knowledge matters at E.ON and P&G

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How does knowledge matter? is the theme of the SMS conference, and there have been some great contributions. The CEO of power producer e.on explained very clearly how the company is building, capturing and sharing knowledge amongst many ‘communities of practice’ to enable them to build business and performance. Then David Steed, former CIO of Proctor & Gamble put this very succinctly in a discussion at the 2008 SMS conference. Asked ‘how does knowledge matter’ he emphasized the importance of ...

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Why has Amazon.com been so unsuccessful?

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The SMS conference reminds me of a long-standing puzzle. We have known for decades that investors value growth in earnings – because they either get rising dividends or a rising stock price they can sell on. Profitability – return on sales or on assets – is only of interest insofar as it enables future earnings growth. So how come the strategy field is obsessed with ‘explaining’ why some firms are more profitable than others, when investors aren’t interested and management does ...

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