It’s not enough to be the best at your business anymore. No matter how great your product or esteemed your expertise, to earn business today your customers want to feel that you are a “Trusted Advisor.” In his more than…

Getting good help represents a Board-level headache. Reading the financial press, it may seem that CXOs come and go with the frequency of jetliners at O’Hare International. While executive churn does not merit that comparison, C-suite turnover is commonplace, with…

Ben Bidlack’s approach to investing in brand strategy is robustly simple. Effective brands engage their internal and external audiences, transforming them into ardent fans. If brand religion is the goal, Bidlack’s approach to brand building is anything but mystical. He…

Turnaround artists are both respected and feared in the management field. You often learn a company is in trouble when the turnaround artist arrives. Everybody in the company expects a shakeup. Send out the resumes, the sheriff just rode into…

What does “Lean Manufacturing” mean? What does it take to implement Lean Manufacturing? And is “Lean Manufacturing” necessarily “mean manufacturing” as critics of this zero waste approach to making things have suggested? In this article, InSights talks with Joachim Fischer,…

The CEO develops strategy,the Board approves it.Well, not quite.Not any more anyway. Why? Corporate directors have long had the responsibility of seeking to assure the long-term viability of the companies they serve, specifically to maximize long-term value. While this standard…

Consumer-focused companies, such as retailers and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, experience good times and bad times. Yet some companies seem to consistently outperform their peers regardless of economic conditions. Recognizing this anomaly, HighPoint InSights posed the following question to…

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have gotten a bad reputation, as have CRM, HR and data warehouse projects. Most CFOs will tell you that large-scale IT projects always cost more than budgeted, seldom deliver on their promises, and often falter…

Strategic sourcing is not just another term for “beat up your suppliers.” In fact, when fully and properly deployed, the goal of strategic sourcing is competitive advantage first, cost considerations second. Yet in many corporations, strategic sourcing simply equates to…

When corporate executives hear the term “strategy-making,” many of them reach for the aspirin. Strategy-making conjures images of massive data analysis efforts, indecipherable PowerPoint decks, and money spent on people who at the end of the day don’t typically get…