Don’t Reengineer. Reimagine. Reimagining your business means creating many of the conditions of a startup—the sense of freedom, flexibility, and creativity—but at the scale and with the discipline of a large enterprise

Published: May 28, 2013 / Summer 2013 / Issue 71

Don’t Reengineer. Reimagine.

To realize the digital potential of your business, bring the dynamics of a startup to scale.

by Jeff Schumacher, Simon MacGibbon, and Sean Collins

What does it mean to become digital? Companies in all industries are building online businesses, enabling new customer experiences, experimenting with “big data,” and seeking advantage in a digitally enabled business environment. They have tried reengineering their practices; they have set up new technological platforms for customer engagement and back-office efficiency. But these efforts have not yet had the impact that they should. Instead of reengineering, they need reimagining. They need to conceive of their business freshly, in line with the capabilities that digital and business technologies can give them, connecting to customers in ways that have not been possible before.

Reimagining your business means creating many of the conditions of a startup—the sense of freedom, flexibility, and creativity—but at the scale and with the discipline of a large enterprise. You bring together cross-functional teams who can ideate, bring to life, and execute a truly digital user experience. You take a customer-centric approach to everything your company does—including innovation, user experience (UX) design, marketing, promotions, sales, operations, and customer service. You convey a distinctive brand identity and emotional connection that’s present in storefronts, websites, smartphones, connected devices such as high-tech fitness wristbands—and forms of interaction still being conceived. You use big data and analytics in all their forms to deploy insights from customers in real time, designing and marketing products and services that respond instantly after sensing and analyzing what people do online (and off). Reimagining your business also means continually measuring and testing the impact of these products and services, and learning from the results. Read more of this post

Hidden for a century, ‘fake’ is actually a Van Gogh

Hidden for a century, ‘fake’ is actually a Van Gogh

10:49pm EDT

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – A French landscape painting stored in an attic and kept from public view for a century because it was considered a fake is the work of Dutch master Vincent Van Gogh, a museum said on Monday citing new research. “Sunset at Montmajour”, which shows twisted holly oaks and a distant ruin bathed in the light of the setting sun, was painted in 1888 when Van Gogh was living in Arles, in the south of France. The work, owned by a private collector, will go on show at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam later this month for a year. Museum director Axel Rueger described the discovery of a new work by Van Gogh as “a once in a lifetime experience” as the painting was unveiled at a press conference on Monday. Read more of this post

Learn Willpower With a Sniff and a Nibble; How researchers are helping overweight kids train their brains to resist temptation

September 9, 2013, 7:18 p.m. ET

Overweight Kids Learn Willpower With a Sniff and a Nibble

How researchers are helping overweight kids train their brains to resist temptation

BONNIE ROCHMAN

A recent research program is testing an intriguing hypothesis: Can overweight children be taught to eat less by putting their favorite dishes right in front of them?

Kerri Boutelle, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at University of California, San Diego’s School of Medicine, calls her willpower-enhancing technique “cue exposure.” The aim is to train the brain of overweight and obese children to reduce the desire to eat when they’re not actually hungry. And since many impulses to eat come from triggers in our environment, such as getting an urge to snack while watching TV, interrupting such automatic responses can help children cut down on mindless eating. Read more of this post

Tennis lessons on winning–in business and life

Tennis lessons on winning–in business and life

By Patricia Sellers September 9, 2013: 11:09 AM ET

Serena Wiliams’ US Open victory reminds us that winning–in sports or business or life–comes down to a few rules. Tennis legend Billie Jean King sums up how to win.

“Pressure is a privilege. Champions adjust.” Watching Serena Williams score her fifth US Open women’s singles title last evening, I couldn’t stop thinking of Billie Jean King’s advice on winning. During the first two sets of Sunday’s nearly three-hour thriller vs. Victoria Azarenka, Williams could hardly get out of her own way, committing double faults and unforced errors as nasty wind gusts visibly rattled her. How does a champion adjust—and pull out the victory? Here’s wisdom that King, who won the women’s singles title at the US Open four times 40 years ago, shared in an interview that I did with her in June at Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women conference in London. King’s advice is as applicable to business–and life–as it is to tennis: Read more of this post

McKinsey Clients Shrugged at Scandals, Ignored Greed

McKinsey Clients Shrugged at Scandals, Ignored Greed

McKinsey & Co., the global fix-it firm for companies and governments, labored in Tanzania in the late 1960s and charged fees so high that they merited a line item in the country’s budget, according to “The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business.” Hard-core capitalists might consider McKinsey’s big bills and say hooray for the free market. Demand a price the market will bear and all that. Astonishingly, author Duff McDonald considers this and other dazzling examples of McKinsey’s greed and concludes that “in large part” the firm’s people aren’t motivated by money. They aren’t? McDonald, a contributing editor at Fortune and the New York Observer, has put together an instructive history of McKinsey, but on key points he leaves us scratching our heads. He says it’s an “open question” whether McKinsey has transformed the way businesses are managed, but a page later allows that McKinsey “has certainly made the world a more efficient, rational and objective place.” Nearly 200 pages into the book he wonders about McKinsey’s boast of having smart guys who can fix any client problem even as the firm suffers high-visibility failures, such as its ill-fated advice on the restructuring of General Motors Co. (GM) in the 1980s. “Is it a con?” he asks. The maddening answer: “Maybe.” Read more of this post

New life in the idea of the big company; Companies are still bent on increasing their size – for good reason

September 9, 2013 4:55 pm

New life in the idea of the big company

By Andrew Hill

Companies are still bent on increasing their size – for good reason

The life and career of Ronald Coase, whodied last week aged 102, spanned the century in which modern management developed. That is appropriate, because Coase contributed immeasurably to our understanding of the potential and limits of the basic management unit that is the modern company. Even so, a few thinkers are taking a chisel to the solid foundations he laid. Author John Hagel has blogged that it is time to reassess Coase’s view of the corporate world and come up with “a new rationale . . . to drive institutional success”. In “The Nature of the Firm”, the 1937 paper that helped earn Coase his Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, he sought to penetrate the corporate “black box” and define why companies are needed. In brief, it is because by co-ordinating activity internally, they avoid the high transaction costs that would apply if everybody did business directly with one another in the “perfect” market beloved of “blackboard economists”. Read more of this post

Build it like Rockefeller; “Most small businesses are job replacements at best. They’re doing nothing to move the needle of the economy.”

Build it like Rockefeller

September 9, 2013

Adam Courtenay

Businesses can learn a lot from ‘history’s greatest entrepreneur’. If entrepreneurs around the world could claim a guru it might well be the man they call “the growth guy”, the founder of the US-based Entrepreneurs’ Organisation, Verne Harnish. Harnish is the chief executive of Gazelles Inc, an education and coaching company in the US which specialises in educating entrepreneurs on how to grow their businesses and how to manage the difficulties of growth. Harnish represents something you’re unlikely to find in Australia: an SME evangelist who champions the right of mid-cap companies to grow sans bureaucracy in a laissez faire economy with few constraints.  He will be preaching his growth strategy – and the pitfalls of hyper growth – across Australia over the next two weeks. Harnish says he doesn’t represent the little company and he is definitely not interested in corporate behemoths – his mandate is the fast-growing “gazelles”. Australians like to think of small business as the backbone of the economy, but not Harnish. “Most small businesses are job replacements at best,” he says. “They’re doing nothing to move the needle of the economy.”  Read more of this post