To improve manufacturing operations, don’t forget to fix the organizational issues that can hinder performance. These guidelines can help your company choose the optimal manufacturing setup, based on such factors as your industry, markets, customers, products, internal capabilities, competitive position, and overall strategy. Also included: tactics for managing the inevitable tradeoffs.

Ever since Bruce Henderson introduced the growth-share matrix, corporate portfolio management has been a big part of the CEO agenda. But a recent BCG survey, conducted with Freiberg University in Germany, reveals a major gap between the effort companies put into portfolio management and its impact on corporate decision-making.

Editor's Note: includes and excellent overview of CPM including history and common criticisms.

Why do organizations get blindsided by market transformations that could have been anticipated? After all, scenario planning has been a widely used strategic management tool for decades and most managers are familiar with the process of considering how they would operate in alternative futures. The reason most organizations get surprised by game-changing events, in my experience, is not that their planning methods are bad. The problem is that many firms undertake strategic planning processes like scenario development without seeing them as a unique opportunity for learning about and exploring the future. In some cases this is because management lacks sufficient appreciation for the uncertainty and ambiguity their organizations face. More often, however, management is fully aware of the uncertainty of their situation but is seemingly powerless to prepare to adapt to new business realities, especially unpleasant ones.

The fundamental success of a strategy depends on three critical factors: a firm’s alignment with the external environment, a realistic internal view of its core competencies and sustainable competitive advantages, and careful implementation and monitoring. This article discusses the role of finance in strategic planning, decision making, formulation, implementation, and monitoring.

Editor's Note: I don't think this article really adds any new learning value or even does a good job meeting it's stated objective. I include it however, because it does provide a decent high-level look at strategic planning and the role of finance in the balanced scorecard for those who are weak on either of those concepts.

Companies are increasingly finding themselves part of—or competing against—highly networked systems of partners, customers, and suppliers. These systems are able to innovate rapidly, leapfrog the experience curve, and quickly attain market leadership. They require a different kind of management—one that allows some decisions to emerge from interactions among players.

In a new book, Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy, Joan Magretta distills Porter's core concepts and frameworks into a concise guide for business practitioners. In this excerpt, Porter discusses common strategy mistakes.

Hundreds of schools of thought exist on strategy, but none is universally applicable. The Strategy Chessboard helps articulate clear choices in strategic approaches so you can make the right moves at the right times in the right situations.

Bad strategy abounds, says UCLA management professor Richard Rumelt. Senior executives who can spot it stand a much better chance of creating good strategies.

Indirect competition is a kind of competition that is easy to miss. Here are five types of indirect competition to consider.

In times of great uncertainty, strategic planning must shift from a bureaucratic, linear process to a more targeted approach that is both analytic and creative.

Companies have been feverishly pursuing growth and global expansion—and in the process setting themselves up for failure.

Ten timeless tests can help you kick the tires on your strategy, and kick up the level of strategic dialogue throughout your company.

Growing turbulence in the global economy is forcing many companies to revisit their corporate strategy. But unless they also redesign their corporate strategy process to focus it more explicitly on value creation, they are unlikely to generate superior shareholder value. This report (the tenth in BCG’s Value Creators series) introduces a comprehensive approach to corporate strategy that supplements the traditional focus on business and portfolio strategy with a new strategic focus on a company’s financial policies and investors’ priorities and goals.

Celebrating a “must-read” concept, based on data from thousands of companies: Information flow and decision rights are integral parts of the strategic process.

The article details the latest insights on what changes organizations can take to have the greatest impact on executing their strategies to achieve results. The HBR article demonstrates the importance of decision rights and information flow in driving effectiveness and how enterprises succeed or fail at execution depending on whether they focus on these power drivers or, instead, focus solely on “structural reorganization.”

There are two things you can do to mitigate the element of surprise when it comes to your business model being disrupted, in addition to keeping a constant vigil on the external social, economic and market forces out of your control that can potentially disrupt your business.

First, you can assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to your current business model. Go through each of the nine elements, and evaluate them as objectively as you can. Second, you could become the disruptive innovator.

Corporations constantly struggle to get the right fit in their R&D organization. It should neither be too global nor too focused, and at the same time it must fit into the company’s overall strategy. It’s a combination that can be hard for managers to come to grips with. This article shares the insights from a study undertaken by Arthur D. Little of the link between business strategy and R&D organization and shows through a concrete example how these insights can be applied.

It took 9 years of research and practice 4,000-plus writing hours, 28,456 Post-it notes, 77 forum discussions, 287 Skype calls, 1360 comments, and 137,757 online views for over 470 contributors from nearly 50 countries to arrive at these nine elements of any business model and arrange them into the visual "Business Model Canvas"

The firms that have enjoyed years or even decades of life with no or weak competitors have created barriers that inhibit or prevent competitors from entering and becoming serious customer options. Here are some twelve routes to real barriers the last six of which involve the brand.

Your business model has to specify not just how your company intends to make money but also why a customer would want to give it any, says Mark W. Johnson.

To profit from technology, companies need to change their strategy and begin selling the embodiment of that technology at the ever-shifting point of modular decoupling.

Answers to the future growth of your business depend on your ability to ask the right questions. These are the fundamental questions that underlie the core of your intention.

Bridging the gap between vision and action.

Business strategy is at an evolutionary crossroads. It’s time to resolve the long-standing tension between the inherent identity of your organization and the fleeting nature of your competitive advantage.

It's a 100-segment world. How can you stay a step ahead?