My only experience with AT&T is as a customer. But even as an outsider I can tell that the company has huge organizational silos (albeit with a workforce that finally understands customer-friendliness). Every transaction for each of my multiple AT&T services appears to require interfacing with a completely separate information system and likely business unit that often has no record of what’s happening in the other accounts. For examples: I get three bills. When I ask for one bill I am told, “All your services have different cycles and that would be a mess.” After moving to a new residence, I returned the U-verse device (which enables TV, wireless internet and the land line connection) from my former address to the AT&T wireless store, where I was told, “We don’t accept U-verse returns here. You have to go to the UPS store.” In…
Three root causes of failed strategic planning
Is your strategic planning designed to fuel growth? Unknowingly and all too often, the answer for leadership teams is “No.” When strategic plans, effectively executed, fail to drive growth a number of root causes are usually at work. Leaders view strategic planning as the process for achieving next year’s revenue goals. Every organization needs a process for resource allocation to achieve annual financial targets. But when you start strategic planning as that exercise, you end up with largely incremental improvements that get quickly copied by competitors. True strategic planning is a design process in which you assess the strength of your business models in light of a changing external environment and identify: New business model experiments Innovations to existing business models, not merely incremental improvements Strategies to strengthen the competency, process, technology and solution platforms that your business models leverage. All markets get…
A new basis of competition demands new business models
Joe Vanden Plas, of Madison’s InBusiness, summarized my keynote address kicking off WTN‘s highly informative FUSION 2012. FUSION is the annual Midwest conference to deepen understanding of the business implications and key success factors associated with new information technology. I’ll blog about what I learned at the conference next seek. For now, read my take on how the information age has transformed the economy and its implications for C-suite leaders and IT professionals. Thanks Joe! Joe’s summary article In their preoccupation with today’s challenged economic environment, business executives might not have noticed that the nature of competition is changing, but failure to adapt could put an organization on the critical list. So says former Madisonian Kay Plantes, a principal with the San Diego-based Plantes Company who still works in Wisconsin. Plantes, delivering the March 8 keynote at the 2012 Fusion CEO-CIO Symposium, said…
Big pharma faces big business model questions
To pick the best vacation spot for hiking in February, I look at climate patterns. In the world of business, external trends help suggest the most attractive market spaces. Arrive before the crowds, and you’ll have the best experience, a principle as true for industry convergence as it is for hiking. Nevertheless, leaders too often stay stuck in current market spaces by failing to challenge historic answers to the vital business model strategy question, “What business are we in?” They get left behind as their industry converges with others, with pharmaceutical companies the latest example. As scientists’ understanding of cellular and molecular mechanisms deepened, pharmaceutical manufacturers added biologics to their offerings by evolving their internal R&D approaches and acquiring or partnering with biotech drug discovery start-ups. But with a few exceptions, drug companies’ core business remains developing and selling drugs that treat specific…
Use new information technologies to transform your business models
The newest information technologies on the block – social, mobile, cloud and data analytics – can and should do more than boost your organization’s efficiency. Far more than past IT innovations, these new technologies can positively transform your organization – where it competes, why it wins and how it operates. Smart leaders understand this. Meet one in this blog. As a young but experienced telecommunications industry professional, Nancy Peckham founded Madison, Wisconsin-based Valicom in 1991 to help companies reduce telecommunication costs. Valicom’s value promise for its direct services is very powerful: “We average 30.4% savings in telecom expenses across our client base,” according to CEO Peckham. Her company produces this savings by helping clients better manage the complex supply chain associated with providing their workforces with wired and wireless voice and data communications, internet connections, and wireless services. As device options and mobile…