The recent scandal over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email address and host server for all of her email correspondence while serving as Secretary of State certainly provided fodder for political pundits. But the scandal also highlights an important strategic issue for organizations – the rise of consumer-friendly cloud technologies that have the ability to make work more efficient, but exist outside the control of corporate IT departments.

On your last major in-store shopping outing, how often did you pull out your phone? Did an earlier email or online search lead you there? If you’re like the vast majority of shoppers, you probably tapped into digital channels before and/or during your shopping experience. Today there is no one, predictable path for consumers’ interaction with a brand.

My father had a certain expectation of the workplace – he expected to be able to leave the house every morning, work uninterrupted throughout the day and be home in time for dinner, the evening news and Rukeyser’s Wall $treet Week. For many of us – and I’m guessing nearly everyone reading this article – it feels like there’s no such thing as a balance between work and life. When it comes to your career, you’re either all in or all out.

Crises, be they natural or man-made are an ever present threat to business. So what are companies doing to prepare for disruptions, not just those that can be addressed through disaster planning and business continuity strategies, but those truly unknown scenarios that it seems only the most resilient organizations survive?

Every good strategic leader works hard to design a business strategy that creatively serves the needs of customers in the face of tough competitors and delivers enterprise value. Business school core courses have been shaped and consulting firms created to…

Thanks for stopping by HighPoint Associates’ new HighLights blog. My colleagues and I will be using this space to share our views on the day’s biggest business issues and the critical challenges our customers face. We’ll also spend time discussing disruption, highlighting the new approaches companies are taking to solving their business challenges.

Mention strategy development and most CEOs grit their teeth, imagining months of analysis led by corps of consultants, often with significant cost and a result that doesn’t match where the company and its senior team really sees itself going. Sadly,…

A wave of changing technologies continues to bombard companies at an accelerating rate. Emerging and expanding technologies such as the cloud, big data, business analytics and intelligence, and HTML5, all will have enormous implications for how companies deploy, use and…

It’s a classic command from top management. Need to reduce overhead? Just cut 10 percent. How can a company successfully reduce costs and overhead, and keep it cut? Look no further than a process developed almost four decades ago: the…

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…