Category: Strategy

At the start of a new year, it’s typical for business leaders to set SMART (Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely) goals to revitalize or transform their businesses. However, two broad trends have fundamentally changed the business environment, making SMART less effective than it used to be in setting goals.

Navy SEALS are the ultimate team. Through precision teamwork, they accomplish almost impossible feats, like safely hunting down Osama bin Laden at night in a foreign country. But while each SEAL is a formidable fighting machine, it’s the team that does the truly amazing things.

Reminding economic-development leaders of their potential role in bolstering the national economy, a leading think tank called Monday for a broad-based shift in practice—less promoting incentive-based corporate relocation in favor of a more diversified, market-based and localized approach.

One of Indiana’s largest commercial bakeries will build a $57 million manufacturing plant in Versailles, KY, which is just west of Lexington, starting this summer. More Than A Bakery, owned by Richmond Baking Co., will hire more than 300 workers at the plant, to be sited on 100 acres  in Woodford County.

The senior executives of Shell Global Solutions felt that they were experiencing extreme value leakage. They had 52 groups involved in developing and delivering 850 discrete products and services. One-hundred-and-ten account managers were delivering $150 million in revenue. By their estimates, it should have been a billion-dollar business. Four years later, after stopping the value leakage, they were at $750 million in revenue despite reducing their salesforce by 60%, down to 42 account managers. The average sale had increased a phenomenal 800%.

Two years into his CEO tenure, David Levin is leading a learning curve as McGraw-Hill Education transitions toward software-based products.

Spurred on by plummeting transportation and logistics costs, we are entering a third wave of globalization that will increase trade, change the way companies work, and improve the quality of life for millions of people across the world.

Spurred on by plummeting transportation and logistics costs, we are entering a third wave of globalization that will increase trade, change the way companies work, and improve the quality of life for millions of people across the world.

Public investment in Alaska’s chronically-underfunded ferry system is producing an economic impact at a rate greater than twice its cost, according to a new report. 

The San Francisco Bay Area enjoyed a windfall benefit of about $350 million from Super Bowl 50, the biggest sports and branding event in the world, according to projections compiled by the Global Business Travel Association and its research partner, Rockport Analytics.