Left unchecked, subconscious biases will undermine strategic decision making. Here’s how to counter them and improve corporate performance.

In order to remain relevant and effective, businesses need some way to monitor both the execution of their strategic plan and the changing environment in which they do business. With these management tools providing input in real time, organizations can quickly adjust course as circumstances present new opportunities or threats. A simple model made up of “Four Ps” can help companies create this advantage. These Ps are Perceptions, Performance, Purpose, and Process.

Although it is surprisingly hard to create good ones, they help you ask the right questions and prepare for the unexpected. That is hugely valuable.

As the Initial Public Offering (IPO) market gains momentum, more organizations are evaluating the option of becoming a publicly traded company, and the processes associated with an IPO. Going public certainly represents a significant event and major achievement for any company. With all of its rewards, however, an IPO can be complicated, time-consuming, and involve a high degree of risk. The process requires an extraordinary level of management knowledge, skill, and commitment.

This publication will assist you through the IPO process by providing practical, working knowledge of the IPO stages. Comprehensive in scope, it addresses both pre- and post-IPO considerations, so you remain well informed and prepared at every stage. Along with key information on the requirements and regulations of a successful offering, this publication also includes helpful tools, such as a timetable for going public, a sample due diligence checklist, and a discussion of the different securities exchange listing requirements.

The vultures are circling. ‘Strategy, as we knew it, is dead,’ proclaims Walt Shill, head of Accenture’s North American consulting practice. A January 25 Wall Street Journal article quotes him explaining, ‘Corporate clients decided that increased flexibility and accelerated decision-making are much more important than simply predicting the future.’ A recent white paper from the Boston Consulting Group hung similar crepe. In its research on global powerhouses the firm found some saying they don’t ‘do strategy’ any more.

So… Is it time to consign all your three-ring binders of strategic plans to a funeral pyre, maybe heaping the corporate planner onto the blaze for good measure? Well, yes—and no.

Three distinct types of agility—strategic, portfolio, and operational—help companies compete. Each of them has its own sources and dangers.

Dave Schappell, founder and CEO of TeachStreet, talks about his company’s transition from a free to a paid service, and shares five tips that may help other startups make the leap as well.

Moving into adjacent markets is a common step among companies that have grown as much as they can in their home markets and wish to sustain high growth rates. However, many companies underestimate the difficulties involved, and the historical record is littered with cases of otherwise successful companies failing in adjacent markets. We explore the questions that companies considering adjacent entry need to ask and show what they should do to ensure success in making this promising but difficult step.

Plotting the structure of industries across markets and geographies reveals a startling and increasing inequality in size and performance among even the largest companies.

What emerges is a “power curve” pattern characterized by a short “head,” comprising a few companies with extremely large incomes, and quickly dropping off to a long “tail” of significantly smaller competitors.

These power curves can be a useful diagnostic tool for understanding the structural dynamics of an industry and a company’s role and options in its evolution.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com and author of Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, introduces a lesson on how to rally employees around a unified plan from Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

As products evolve into commodities, services become more important. But companies that play this new game must understand its rules.

BCG has developed an analytical framework—the Global Advantage Diamond—for assessing a company’s current market position and devising strategies to achieve global competitive advantage. The Global Advantage Diamond differs from previous global-strategy models in its focus on all four aspects of global advantage: market access to reach new markets and segments, resource access to maximize competitive advantage, local adaptation to meet the full range of needs of RDE customers, and network coordination to capitalize on the business’s global reach.

We analyze the optimal strategy of a high-quality incumbent that faces a low-quality ad-sponsored competitor. In addition to competing through adjustments of tactical variables such as price or the number of ads a product carries, we allow the incumbent to consider changes in its business model. We consider four alternative business models—a subscription-based model; an ad-sponsored model; a mixed model in which the incumbent offers a product that is both subscription-based and ad-sponsored; and a dual model in which the incumbent offers two products, one based on the ad-sponsored model and the other based on the mixed-business model. We show that the optimal response to an ad-sponsored rival often entails business model reconfigurations. We also find that when there is an ad-sponsored entrant, the incumbent is more likely to prefer to compete through the subscription-based or the ad-sponsored model, rather than the mixed or the dual model, because of cannibalization and endogenous vertical differentiation concerns. We discuss how our study helps improve our understanding of notions of strategy, business model, and tactics in the field of strategy.

Twelve strategies to shape a company’s destiny.

Traditional strategy becomes limited when variables are constantly shifting. Organizations with an adaptive advantage achieve superior outcomes by continuously reshaping the enterprise through a process of managed evolution. Readiness, responsiveness, and resilience are necessary for surviving turbulence, but a recursive approach—in which better strategies evolve iteratively in response to change—is essential for sustainable advantage. Choosing the best style of adaptive strategy depends on the rate and predictability of change in the industry and the degree of change it necessitates for the enterprise.

In this interactive presentation, McKinsey director Lowell Bryan talks about the origins of the portfolio-of-initiatives framework. Developed to address the need for strategy in a more fluid, less predictable environment, this approach treats strategies as actions that require continual monitoring and evaluation.

Though often missing, a formal operations strategy can guide the crucial decisions that build competitive advantage.

Identifying and assessing growth options are complex, critical processes. Even more critical, and intricate, is the measurement of risk associated with each option. These authors provide a robust framework that will enable managers and their firms to choose those growth options that have the best chance of succeeding.

In this interactive presentation—one in a series of multimedia frameworks—Steve Coley, a director emeritus in McKinsey’s Chicago office, describes the three horizons framework. Based on research into how companies sustain growth, this approach illustrates how to manage for current performance while maximizing future opportunities for growth.

Can 'Complexity Theory' explain why strategies and change programs seldom deliver the results that were intended? Does it mean that we should leave everything to chance and abandon any attempts to shape our organizations for the future? In this article Dr Jean Boulton and Dr Peter Allen, from Cranfield's Complex Systems Management Centre, explain how this 'new science' can be used by managers to rethink their approaches to strategy and change management.

How should a corporation decide whether to buy, sell, or keep a business unit? In the late 1980s, McKinsey developed its market-activated corporate strategy (MACS) framework, which answered that question in a surprising way. The obvious considerations—the attractiveness of the industry in which the unit competes and its competitiveness within that industry—are both relevant, but the acid test is which company can extract the greatest value from the business. If the present owner should be that company, it probably ought to keep even a mediocre or poorly performing unit.

Drivers such as globalization, deregulation, or technological change, just to mention a few, are profoundly changing the competitive game. Scholars and practitioners agree that the fastest-growing firms in this new environment appear to have taken advantage of these structural changes to compete "differently" and innovate in their business models. However, there is not yet agreement on what are the distinctive features of superior business models. This dispute may have arisen, in part, because of a lack of a clear distinction between the notions of strategy, business model, and tactics. HBS professor Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Joan Enric Ricart present an integrative framework to distinguish and relate the concepts of business model, strategy, and tactics.

Irrational thinking doesn’t just affect individual economic decisions; it affects corporate strategic planning as well. These results highlight the practices of companies that have made successful strategic decisions—and also reveal what the same companies have gotten wrong.

Past success can become tomorrow's liability. But instead of throwing out the old and taking a bold leap into the new, leaders in uncertain times should focus on creating conditions for internally generated growth. Columbia's Rita Gunther McGrath presents a portfolio of opportunities that managers can employ, including a questionnaire to help you pinpoint the greatest sources of uncertainty in the business, and thereby focus your investments in learning accordingly.

Buffeted by years of offshoring, formidable Asian competitors and a global economic downturn, some companies are finding ways to make manufacturing in the U.S. a competitive advantage.