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| January 2008 |
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Fast Strategy: Staying ahead of the game How can you make sure your company not only keeps its edge over its competitors, but also seizes new opportunities? In a new book called Fast Strategy: How strategic agility will help you stay ahead of the game, INSEAD professor Yves Doz and co-author Mikko Kosonen, a former senior Nokia executive, say the best way to do this is by making the most of what they call ‘strategic agility’. “I personally experienced how Nokia, as a leading company, gradually lost some of its strategic sensitivity and resource fluidity as a result of successful growth,” Kosonen says. “In the early ‘90s it won over Ericsson and Motorola because of its strategic agility. But then over the years, some of these capabilities began to deteriorate and, when we tried to change, it became really difficult.” |
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A world in crisis? The US Federal Reserve unexpectedly cut interest rates by 75 basis points last week to 3.5 per cent, despite little economic data signalling recession. The rate cut, its biggest single-day move for more than 20 years, came ahead of a scheduled Fed meeting at the end of the month. Ilian Mihov, INSEAD Professor of Economics, says the Fed's move was necessary to bring stability to the markets. "When the financial sector goes down, it starts spiralling in such a way that it's very difficult to restore confidence and bring back the economy on track." |
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Relationship building: A key driver for securing repeat business A study of consulting firm Celerant has found that relationship building is key to bringing in repeat business which accounts for up to 70 per cent of its revenues each year. |
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Corporate responsibility: Are companies responding to social demands? Only one manager in about six is likely to view her company as a global corporate citizen with a responsibility to help solve social problems, as opposed to one stakeholder in three. This is one of the key findings of RESPONSE: Understanding and Responding to Social Demands on Corporate Responsibility, a study created and funded by the European Commission to study the gap in perceptions of social responsibility among companies and stakeholders. |
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Linking team diversity to extreme team performance During his time working at Vivendi Universal, Fabrice Cavarretta, a PhD candidate in Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, says “intuitively it felt that the company would either do extremely well or very badly. But it was not clear whether anyone could have predicted which way it would go. I became fascinated by Vivendi’s top management team’s composition, which was so homogeneous one could feel the situation turn out excessively well, or be a complete fiasco – one extreme or the other.” |
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Al Jazeera: Turning up the heat After celebrating its first year on air, the English service of Qatar-based TV station Al Jazeera − memorably denounced by former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as ‘terror TV’ − is aiming to turn up the heat on its rivals in the global 24-hour news broadcasting industry.
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