Amazon is at the Head of an Outbreak of Good Sense
Last week, after a long period of stupidity from the corporate world, three astonishingly sensible things passed over my screen all at once. Two of them came from small companies, but the third came...
View ArticleRoaring Ahead: Three Strategies That Kept a Car Dealership Ahead of...
Long before Google began separating cars from their drivers, the internet was paving the way for abolishing auto dealerships. Like other service-driven retailers—remember Borders and Circuit City? —...
View ArticleVoicemail’s Message for the Office Phone: ‘It’s Over’
A few weeks ago JPMorgan scrapped voicemail. Now anyone trying to attract the attention of its retail bankers has to email, text or call their mobiles instead. As practically no one leaves messages on...
View ArticleFiguring out the Rules of the Road for Incentive Compensation
It’s difficult to design an incentive compensation program that rewards employees for driving organizational success—rather than inspiring them to game the system. But for Erik Day, the dilemma is that...
View ArticleBox and Its Lessons for Ambitious Technology Start-Ups
What does the future hold for unicorns? There are now 131 private tech companies valued at $1bn or more – a threshold that has earned them the “unicorn” label – according to research provider CB...
View ArticleNon-Trivial Pursuits: How CFO Mark Bouckley Reignited his Passion for Business
In 2012, Mark Bouckley served as the CFO of a footwear company and earlier this year signed on as the CFO of a retail business. But much of what he did in-between those postings bore marginal...
View ArticleVolkswagen’s Deception Is a Warning to Every Company
The most dangerous three-word phrase in business is: “Everyone does it.” However conventional it is to bend the industry’s regulations, however great an advantage your rivals gain, however much...
View ArticleMulti-Tasking: How to Survive in the 21st Century
Forget invisibility or flight: the superpower we all want is the ability to do several things at once. Unlike other superpowers, however, being able to multitask is now widely regarded as a basic...
View ArticleNot So Secret Ingredient: Three Recipes that Boosted Sonic’s Brand
At first glimpse, it would be easy to mistake Sonic Corp. for a restaurant relic, a service business that drove right into a time warp. After all, drive-in restaurants—with carhops on roller skates...
View ArticleThe Pitfalls of the Microsoft and Apple ‘Frenemy’ Pact
If you were surprised when a senior Microsoft executive took the stage at Apple’s latest product launch last week, you need to brace yourself for more of the same. The spread of digital platforms, the...
View ArticleLeaders Who Want to Grow Need to Learn Benefits of Staying Small
Setting up a company is hard. You need to come up with a business plan, find investment, sort out legal and regulatory issues and then find enough customers or clients to pay the bills. And that is...
View ArticleTransformation Is Crucial When Digital Disruption Is the Norm
Memories of the last tech bubble, when big companies worried about being “dotcommed” by internet start-ups that wanted to take their trade, have faded. Instead businesses now fear being “Uber-ed”. From...
View ArticleThree Ways to Reduce Employee Turnover—Without Raising Pay
Unless a new hire’s long-term plans happen to include a career in Roller Derby, a job at one of Sonic’s drive-in restaurants—where carhops on roller skates race to deliver tater tots and limeades to...
View ArticleTo Catch a Spy: 3 Strategies to Unmask Snoops
You’d think the top executive at a marketing and design firm would be happy to receive calls from prospective customers—and at the rate of two a month. But he’s not. Quite the opposite, exactly. “This...
View ArticleAirlines Reach for WiFi in the Sky
Forget champagne, fully flat beds and onboard showers. For airlines’ business travelers, the must-have facility these days is WiFi. In the past few years, European airlines have been rushing to install...
View ArticleStart-ups aim at banks’ income streams
The aim seems to be to inflict death by a thousand cuts. Banks and financial institutions are huge whales – sprawling businesses built over decades that make them seemingly impenetrable to the...
View ArticleRalph Lauren on the importance of a name
When the FT first interviewed Ralph Lauren in 1989, he laid down a maxim that every designer who puts his or her name on a garment should commit to memory. “You have to be very, very careful with...
View ArticleA New Kind of Virtual Scam: Three Strategies to Fend Off Fraud
E-commerce companies no longer have to worry about battling traditional fraud —exclusively, that is. Now such service businesses also have to take up arms against “fast fraud.” That’s the phrase used...
View ArticleWhy Making Smaller Deals is an Acquired Taste
You may have missed the headlines about the latest deal involving Q2 Holdings. There’s a reason for that: there weren’t many. Big-money agglomerations involving brand-name companies like AB InBev (and...
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Seven Strategies to Create a World-Class Finance Function
Like seemingly every company today, you want to “transform” your finance function. But how to do it? Luckily for you, a new PricewaterhouseCoopers report describes eight “differentiating focus areas...
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