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Description

When it comes to improving business performance, managers have no shortage of tools and techniques from which to choose.

But what really works? What’s critical, and what’s optional? Two business professors and a former McKinsey consultant set out to answer those questions.

In a groundbreaking, five-year study that involved more than 50 academics and consultants, the authors analyzed 200 management techniques employed by 160 companies over 10 years.

Their findings at a high level? Business basics really matter. In this article, the authors outline the management practices that are imperative for sustained superior financial performance–their “4+2 formula” for business success.

They provide examples of companies that achieved varying degrees of success depending on whether they applied the formula, and they suggest ways that other companies can achieve excellence. Without exception, the companies that outperformed their industry peers excelled in what the authors call the four primary management practices: strategy, execution, culture, and structure.

And they supplemented their great skill in those areas with a mastery of any two of four secondary management practices: talent, leadership, innovation, and mergers and partnerships.

A company that consistently follows this 4+2 formula has a better than 90% chance of sustaining superior performance, according to the authors.

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Book Description

ISBN-156720273X

As the dominant paradigm of economic activity is shifting to a focus on creating customer value, it is becoming increasingly clear that companies must be able to formulate business strategies, product and service strategies and internal operating strategies that accelerate the creation and delivery of customer value.

The ability to create value has become the primary source of sustainable competitive strength. With this book, Ulwick introduces a strategy formulation theory and process that allows firms to create strategies that consistently produce breakthrough results.

The application of advanced modeling and pattern detection techniques commonly reserved for physics and the behavioral sciences is used in both the design of the theory and in the process it initiates; its application can result in strategies and solutions that delivery up to ten times more value than those created with traditional methods.

It is a process that can be broadly applied across an organization and a wide range of subjects or missions.

Ulwick describes Outcome-Based Logic, which can transform organizational dynamics and the way an organization approaches the process of strategy formulation, and proposes a Universal Strategy Formulation Model which defines the four essential elements of strategy creation: desired outcomes, constraints, the desired competitive position, and solutions.

Using this model, it becomes possible for an organization to first choose its desired competitive position and then work to uncover the strategy or solution that will enable it to occupy that position.

The book also introduces a process called the Customer-Driven Mission Achievement Process (CD-MAP), now successfully used by many large companies to formulate and assess strategies at every organizational level of their organizations.