A version of this article appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of strategy+business. It appeared to be a routine day at the cookie factory in Mar del Plata, Argentina — a facility operated by PepsiCo ...

The Dow Chemical Company bet its future on the acquisition of Rohm & Haas. Announced in July 2008, the deal was an audacious move; not only would it take all of Dow’s financial resources to acquire ...

Leadership is not just for leaders anymore. Top companies are beginning to understand that sustaining peak performance requires a firm-wide commitment to developing leaders that is tightly aligned to ...

A global electronics manufacturer seemed to live in a perpetual state of re-organization. Introducing a new line of communication devices for the Asian market required reorienting its sales, marketing ...

Eric was convinced that sacrificing his personal time would get him recognized by his bosses. Instead, he started missing deadlines and found that he was no longer getting staffed on the prestigious ...

In the early 1990s, a young Mademoiselle editor named Kate Brosnahan and her soon-to-be-husband, Andy Spade, launched a company they called Kate Spade Handbags. Like most startups, this one didn’t ...

With an introduction by Ram Charan. The heart of a company’s business model should be game-changing innovation. This is not just the invention of new products and services, but the ability to ...

Everybody knows that big corporations, by nature, maneuver like battleships. Held back by their own inertia and current business strategies, they cannot turn quickly when the competitive environment ...

A version of this article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of strategy+business. We’ve been thinking a lot about teams lately. As more companies release formal policies around hybrid and remote work, ...

McDonald has dedicated his career to exploring innovation-related challenges and their solutions. His early research on startups drew the attention of Harvard’s Clayton Christensen, who became a ...

The concept of presence of mind, as a tool for strategy, comes from one of the original writers on that subject: the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz. In his classic book On War, published in 1832 ...

In an increasingly digital world, data is a key asset for companies, allowing organizations to understand their own — and their consumers’ — behaviors in novel and more complete ways. The downside, of ...