A sales manager recently spoke about an embarrassing scene that unfolded before an important client meeting. "Two teams from our firm were waiting in the lobby when the client walked in, and the groups didn't recognize each other. What a contradiction of our promise to provide integrated solutions! We looked like the Keystone Kops."
Operating ethically and operating profitably are no longer mutually exclusive concepts. Leading companies are "walking the walk," balancing the goal of achieving profitability with gaining social and environmental advantages.
As a company's supply chain grows, so does its exposure to risk. Experts recommend that companies periodically audit their supply chains to identify vulnerable links, but the value that such audits actually deliver is up for debate, for a variety of reasons.
Shining today, gone tomorrow? For every Apple, there is an Atari, for every Fuji a Polaroid, and for every Netflix a Blockbuster. It's harder to stay on top than to get there. How can you avoid the seemingly inevitable and become an "evergreen" corporation?
In early November, Amazon repriced 55 percent of its best-selling office/school products and 45 percent of its best-selling toys/games from one day to the next.
Four years into California's historic drought, a $1bn desalination plant is being built by Poseidon Water. The Carlsbad Desalination Project, 12 years in the making, will convert up to 56 million gallons of seawater daily into drinking water for San Diego County. It's the state's first major desalination plant and it could be an answer to the drought, which plagues much of the Western US.
The potential of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics to perform tasks once reserved for humans is no longer reserved for spectacular demonstrations by the likes of IBM's Watson, Rethink Robotics' Baxter, DeepMind, or Google's driverless car.
If there had been any doubt as to how quickly the global economic landscape - and the market perceptions of it - can change, it would have been erased by events during August and September 2015. Concerns about the Chinese economy and fretting over the next move by the U.S. Federal Reserve triggered massive global market volatility in stocks, commodity prices, and exchange rates. And that turmoil underscored a critical imperative: leaders of companies operating around the world need to move beyond old views and conventional wisdom as they set global strategies.