The term “best practice” is a misleading one. “Best” is too often perceived as a universal. The reality is that an organization’s success and/or failure is determined by a number of factors, including the current context, competitive landscape, customer value drivers, internal culture and so on. So when we use the concept of best practice to develop our strategy, we’re assuming all of the aforementioned factors will be the same as the… READ MORE

An article entitled “As Big Boxes Shrink, They Also Rethink,” was published this week in the Wall Street Journal describing the move by retailers to downsize stores. Perhaps the need to rethink wouldn’t be so significant now if they had taken the time to actually think in the first place. One of the surest signs of a strategy-less organization is the reactive firefighting that goes on. Before they opened their own retail stores for which… READ MORE