Business Strategy

A Bain & Company study surveyed 362 companies: 80% believed they delivered a superior experience to their customers. When the same question was put to the customers, only 8% agreed. That dizzying gap says almost everything that matters about customer satisfaction: the problem is rarely a failure to measure it—most companies are drowning in surveys,

The question we usually put to automation is almost always the wrong one. For any commercial operation, automating part of the work has been a given for years; what’s worth arguing over is what to automate, and what to leave well alone. Automating a process makes it faster and more rigid. That rigidity pays off

As long as an order arrives on time, no one thinks about the supply chain. It belongs to that category of infrastructure you notice only when it fails—like plumbing, whose existence becomes obvious the day the ceiling starts to drip. The rest of the time it runs in silence, and that silence is mistaken for

« We need to cut costs. » The moment pressure mounts, the order comes down—and with it the most tempting reflex, which is also the most expensive: the uniform blade, a flat percentage applied to every line of the budget. The blade has one flaw: it can’t tell the spending that keeps the business alive from the

In its analysis of post-mortems from companies that failed, CB Insights identified a number-one cause, ahead of running out of funding: no real need in the target market, cited in 42% of cases. The lesson reaches well beyond start-ups. When a market expansion fails, the cause is rarely poor execution; far more often, a demand

Strategic partnerships have a poor reputation for a documented reason: according to work published by the Harvard Business Review, 60% to 70% of alliances fail. Those breakups almost never stem from a technical or market problem; they come from misalignment—unspoken expectations never voiced, objectives that diverge, an imbalance one side eventually stops accepting. A partnership

Moving into international markets is a major strategic step for accelerating growth—but it’s also the one where the gap between your home market and the country you’re targeting is most often underestimated. From choosing markets to cultural adaptation, by way of logistics and regulation, every step demands a level of preparation that the excitement of