Articles on corporate strategy from traditional sources—that is, from the major consulting and accounting firms—offer plenty of valuable advice on everything from organizational design to reaching new markets to creating innovative products. Unfortunately, they usually miss a major factor that can make or break a corporate strategy: sustainability. (more…)

“Many companies suffer from disproportionately high breakthrough project failure rates because they find it hard to balance execution discipline with flexibility to respond to changing technical and market realities. When executing on breakthrough projects, use detailed maturity checklists to establish flexible yet guard-railed execution paths.” -CEB Views (more…)

Wendy Jameson’s life slogan is “Fear Mediocrity: don’t be afraid to be bold”; a motto that Wendy and her partner in Colnatec, Scott Grimshaw (whom she met on Twitter), established. Wendy has always been an individual who stands out from the crowd and takes risks each and every day, the epitome of an (more…)

In the September issue of Harvard Business Review, authors Ram Nidumolu, C.K. Prahalad, and M.R. Rangaswami provide a framework for adopting sustainable practices to bring about technological and organizational innovations that will ultimately yield top-line and bottom-line returns, providing a competitive advantage when the recession ends. They feel that sustainable companies will emerge from the recession ahead of their competitors, who will face difficulties trying to catch up.

The authors argue that sustainability is not the drag on the bottom line that many executives perceive it to be, and that it can actually lower costs, and increase revenues. This is an indicator that business leaders will have to rethink business models, processes, technologies, and products.

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