RGM

Does your company have the strategic backbone to dominate its market? Only companies that strive for "unfair" competitive advantage make it to the top. How to compete in unforgiving markets? Bursting with bold battle strategies and crafty campaigns, this Harvard Business Review OnPoint collection provides your playbook.

For more information, click here.

• Posted: Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Melody Campbell, Small Business Guru, cites the McGrath/MacMillan Harvard Business Review article Discovering New Points of Differentiation in her posting Consumption Chain:
"MacMillan and McGrath list a set of questions to ask about your business:

How do people become aware of their need for your product or service?
How do consumers find your offering?
How do consumers make their final selection?
How do customers order and purchse your product or service?
What happens when your product or service is delivered?
How is your product installed?
How is your product or service paid for?
How is your product stored?
How is your product moved around?
What is the customer really wanting your product for?
What do customers need help with when they use your product?
What about returns and exchanges?
How is your product repaired or serviced?
What happens when your product is disposed of or no longer used?

To read the entire blog article, go to the Small Business Guru blog.

• Posted: Friday, November 03, 2006

In the November issue in an article entitled Before you measure quality, define it, Rita McGrath is cited as follows:

...[McGrath] is the co-author of MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth, and an Associate Professor at the Columbia Business School, specializing in innovation, strategy and corporate growth. McGrath says quality is not being perfect on every dimension of everything and quality for its own sake is not valuable.

More to the point, says McGrath, customer satisfaction doesn't bear a direct linear relationship to purchasing propensity – instead, "it's a curve with a vast 'zone of indifference' between poor quality and great quality." All too many manufacturers get stuck traveling along that zone, she says, providing products that are better than acceptable, but not getting to "wow."

"When customers are looking for 'quality' all too often they are happy enough with good enough; when manufacturers go on a quality kick, it is all too easy to overshoot the needs of customers and invest heavily in quality that adds nothing to the bottom line," says McGrath.

Thus, says McGrath, rule #1 for investing in quality is to think through how a particular quality investment will do one or both of two things:

Improve a key performance metric that drives your own operational efficiency or productivity; or

Improve a key aspect of your offering that customers will notice and pay more for, either through margins or volume.

With respect to customers, McGrath says you can think of quality in terms of three questions:

Is your performance so poor that customers experience strong negative feelings? In that case, an investment is probably worthwhile.

Is your performance "good enough" because improving it won’t drive customers to buy more? In that case, why bother, unless it saves you time or money.

Is there something you could improve with a quality initiative that would elicit a "wow" reaction from the customer? In this case, it is worth seriously considering.

To read the entire article, go to www.TheManufacturer.com.

• Posted: Friday, November 03, 2006

Extracting Value from Corporate Venturing written by Rita McGrath and her colleagues, Professors Thomas Keil and Taina Tukiainen of Finland, appears in the Fall 2006 MIT Sloan Review.

To read the article, click here.

• Posted: Friday, October 27, 2006

Rita Gunther McGrath is quoted in the NJ.com article entitled Surviving a Merger by Joseph R. Perone:

"It is natural to go through an emotional sequence of events when confronted with a big change such as a merger," said Rita Gunther McGrath, an associate professor at Columbia Business School and a resident of Princeton Junction. "A typical pattern is to feel shock, then denial that anything will really change, then sadness, sometimes anger and eventually acceptance and bargaining."

For the complete story, click here.

• Posted: Thursday, June 08, 2006

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