Resource Fluidity

For years, companies have focused on eliminating redundancy in sourcing to reduce fixed costs and promote efficiency. Greater efficiency, however, came at the expense of diminished flexibility and effectiveness—a tradeoff the pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions have made painfully clear.

Consumer-product and retail companies looking to jump into the fast lane of modern shopping will need to overhaul their operations to master the seven building blocks of an effective omnichannel supply chain.

There are no crystal balls, but companies can get a lot smarter about envisioning future scenarios and knowing when to act on them.

The pandemic shifted many professionals to work at home. As we emerge from the crisis and companies shift to hybrid work arrangements, they should reconsider the size, location, and design of offices.

As companies plan for a changing business climate, getting the right talent into a select number of business-critical jobs is key to outperforming the competition.

In the authors’ experience a fact of corporate life is that management all too often ignores future uncertainty. And, even if vaguely uncomfortable with this situation, it is unfamiliar with, or even skeptical about, ways to address it. Yet paradoxically the increasing pace of change on many dimensions makes this an ever more critical issue for effective strategic planning.

As leaders grapple with how to return their teams to the office, they face an additional challenge when discussing hybridity: What they think is a single discussion is in fact three different discussions in disguise, each with different objectives. It’s a bit like trying to declare a winner among three teams that are each playing a different sport.

Manufacturers and retailers can improve joint business planning to help each other thrive amid mounting challenges in a postpandemic world.

The building of multiple alternative scenarios is justified in a reality dominated by uncertainty and a fast pace of change. If the future was predictable, we wouldn’t have this need to develop and explore scenarios, being the strategic planning and decisions based on a univocal and extrapolation-based forecast.

One of the most common mistakes made by founders and product developers is building something that they thought people would want, only to find out that their assumptions were wrong.

Given ongoing challenges of disruption, some S&OP processes may be constrained while other elements are proven essential to planning with agility. One of the key benefits of S&OP is collaboration across functional areas of the organization. Anaplan and Tata Steel discuss the importance of aligning strategy and execution to increase revenue for the business while leveraging S&OP to navigate uncertainty.

Some parts of the sharing economy took a big hit during the pandemic. But businesses sharing with other businesses is poised to be an incredibly lucrative model for the future.

Most innovation managers know that few of their initiatives will succeed, so they keep multiple projects running at the same time and create processes for quickly separating winners from losers. One popular way to make decisions about what stays and what goes is the use of stage gates. Yet, even with stage gates, firms struggle to kill bad projects. The authors undertook a decade-long review of the product development portfolio at former handset maker Sony Ericsson. They found that that the conventional use of stage gates can actually be part of the problem, impeding project discontinuation in counterintuitive ways.

Over the past 12 months, the COVID-19 crisis has forced business leaders to double down on cost management, ensure liquidity, and scrutinize budgets. Apart from prompting short-term contingency measures—such as cutting back on marketing budgets or IT projects—the lockdowns have spurred cost reductions. Just consider the dramatically lower spending on travel that has accompanied the shift from physical meetings and events to virtual ones.

Many organizations find themselves in a perpetual state of crisis and rely on company “heroes” to put out the fires. While many people love the feeling of saving the day, it shouldn’t be a way of life. If you’ve wondered why your organization performs well in a crisis but struggles otherwise, it may be time to pause and ask why. Your heroes may actually be revealing that you have a deeper problem. The author offers four ways to move away from a culture of perpetual crisis. First, understand that heroism is not a sign of commitment, but rather that it’s time to make changes in your organization. Second, make sure the way you’re allocating resources is realistic. Third, get better at cross-functional coordination. And finally, reward teams, not just individuals.

Sometimes the best way to tackle an ambitious project is to throw away the original blueprint, a CEO writes.

Creating value is about exceeding expectations. For any business decision, we must understand the expectations of the decision-maker, and provide a path to exceed those expectations. For leaders and managers seeking approval from their colleagues in the finance function for new projects and initiatives, this is an increasingly urgent priority, because organizations are looking ever more closely at the ‘business impact’ of their resourcing decisions. 

Bijan Moallemi is CEO of Mosaic, the first strategic finance platform that transforms the way business gets done.

As the business environment has changed, we have seen S&OP adapt to become a centralized business process that enables coordinating decision making. With this, a Product Review or Portfolio Review has become a critical step in mature or vanguard organizations to better understand and manage product offerings and inventory.