"CEOs can't wait to read Sunny Bindra's articles every week."

Nov 26, 2012
This board has only one thing left to do: resign

“Hewlett-Packard’s $9.7 billion acquisition of Autonomy seemed like a bad idea long before Tuesday’s allegations of an accounting scandal made clear it was a deal that should never have happened. It’s the latest in a cavalcade of costly blunders at HP. The Silicon Valley pioneer has squandered billions of dollars on ill-advised acquisitions, compounding the […]

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Nov 05, 2012
How ready is your business for the social era?

1. The organization behaves like a community, not a hierarchy. 2. Management does not “broadcast” directives but is open and listens to employees. 3. Communications aren’t codified, rigid and ritualistic but flexible and spontaneous. 4. Obedience is not a highly valued quality. Innovation is. 5. Information is open. Management is transparent. 6. The company does […]

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Oct 29, 2012
Why Newsweek may be the first of many casualties

“…the overwhelming majority of my media consumption these days is digital, and magazines in general are beginning to seem a bit slow and uninspired. I go to the airport newsstand because I know I’ll be asked to turn my electronic devices off — and even then, more often than not, I end up buying nothing. […]

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Oct 08, 2012
Apple’s maps debacle – a bridge too far?

“Whether it was a looming deadline, an understaffed development team, or missing information, Apple–despite being a company that has historically exceled at delighting its end users–wasn’t able to deliver on its customer requirements with Apple Maps. And this particular case illustrates the outcomes that can result when companies choose to embark on strategies that are […]

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Sep 24, 2012
The social media phenomenon isn’t about technology. It’s about people

“While delivering my washing to our local dry cleaner this morning, I realised the reason why I always go back to that specific dry cleaner: it is a result of an intimate relationship that has developed between me and the owners over a period of time. The owners know me by name and the name […]

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Sep 03, 2012
Corporate values: a belief system, or a cynical calculation?

“We need to be able to trust pharmaceutical companies. We expect banks to be run and populated by honest people, to keep our money safe, and to give us our money back when we need it. We want oil companies to have a strong culture of engineering professionalism and commitment to health and safety. If […]

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Sep 02, 2012
The BBC leaves Bush House. So what?

The BBC World Service has left Bush House. So what? The British broadcaster announced last month that it was leaving its venerable studios at Bush House, to move to the more modern premises across London that house the rest of its news operations. What could be wrong with that? Nothing. And everything. What is this […]

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Aug 27, 2012
Would scrapping commissions make your salesforce sell more?

“Some things in life we know are true. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. A body in motion will remain in motion unless acted on by an outside force. And the best way to motivate salespeople is by offering them commissions. But what if we’re wrong, at least about that […]

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Aug 13, 2012
If your brand isn’t digital these days, what is it?

“I wonder what the ROI of bankrupt is? And yet, if you have ever given a speech, a webinar, or a class on social media marketing, I can almost guarantee you have received this question: “But how do we measure the ROI of this stuff?” Look, I’m a true-blue ROI guy.  Frankly, money is one […]

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Aug 12, 2012
Businesses, please stop these sly, self-serving practices

I don’t get it. I just don’t. It should be blindingly obvious to every owner of every business that it runs primarily on just one thing: the goodwill of its customers. If customers obtain value from you, they keep buying. If they keep buying, you keep making a profit. If you keep making a profit, […]

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Jul 16, 2012
A very important strategic question to ask yourself

“I remember a time in the middle of 1985…I was in my office with Intel’s chairman and CEO, Gordon Moore, and we were discussing our quandary. Our mood was downbeat. I looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance, then I turned to back to […]

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Jun 11, 2012
How a famous company failed to spot strategic upheaval

“RIM’s woebegone story is the stuff of science-fiction epic. A technology juggernaut that emerged from a sleepy Canadian backwater, RIM came to dominate the smartphone industry in a few years. Its BlackBerry managed to become an indispensable tool of the global elite in Davos and Washington D.C. as well as a status symbol to tweens […]

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May 27, 2012
The danger of running before you’ve learned to walk

Tesco is the United Kingdom’s most dominant retailer. For a couple of decades now, the supermarket chain has been all-powerful, accounting for one in eight pounds that Britons spend in shops and commanding 30% market share, in addition to being the nation’s largest private employer. And Tesco is not merely a grocer these days; it […]

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May 14, 2012
Sony’s insular culture just didn’t see it coming

“…Sony, which once defined Japan’s technological prowess, wowed the world with the Walkman and the Trinitron TV and shocked Hollywood with bold acquisitions like Columbia Pictures, is now in the fight of its life. In fact, it is in a fight for its life – a development that exemplifies the stunning decline of Japan’s industrialized […]

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May 07, 2012
Manage the essence, not the message

The biggest problem with the reputation industry, however, is its central conceit: that the way to deal with potential threats to your reputation is to work harder at managing your reputation. The opposite is more likely: the best strategy may be to think less about managing your reputation and concentrate more on producing the best […]

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Apr 23, 2012
Your business is centered on customers? I don’t believe you…

“I’ve been living in the Thank You Economy since a day sometime around 1995, when a customer came into my dad’s liquor store and said, “I just bought a bottle of Lindemans Chardonnay for $5.99, but I got your $4.99 coupon (later) in the mail. Can you honor it? I’ve got the receipt.” The store […]

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Mar 26, 2012
The enemies of innovation are usually found inside the company

1. The Victims (“Can you believe what they want us to do now? And of course we have no time to do it. I don’t get paid enough for this. The boss is clueless.” 2. The Non-Believers (“Why should we work so hard on this? Even if we come up with a good idea, the […]

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Mar 12, 2012
In business, as in soccer, strategies require time to play out

“Our strategy requires time to play out. It is a strategy designed to build sustainable long-term value for our constituents, beginning with serving our customers best. The performance metrics that matter to us are not the typical Wall Street trailing financial output indicators. Instead, they are the metrics that reflect industry thought leadership, high customer […]

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Feb 27, 2012
It’s time to think “What-if”

“A tumultuous 12 months that saw revolutions in the Middle East, a worsening debt crisis in Europe and a tsunami in Japan has set the tone for corporate activity in 2012. Caution, flexibility, nimbleness and deep knowledge of host countries are more important than ever, executives and their advisers said at the World Economic Forum’s […]

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Feb 06, 2012
Yes, CEOs: you WILL need to understand and engage with social media

“As I jogged down Wall Street in New York in October through the barricades, police horses, and thousands of activists, something became clear. The masses had self-organized and social media had added yet another social movement to its résumé. At the same time, something else became clear to me. Much higher than street level, in […]

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Dec 19, 2011
You should enter high-growth industries – right?

“Managers often mistakenly assume that a high-growth industry will be an attractive one. Wrong. Growth is no guarantee that the industry will be profitable. For example, growth might put suppliers in the driver’s seat, driving up the industry’s costs and limiting profitability. Or, combined with low entry barriers, growth might attract new rivals, thereby increasing […]

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Dec 12, 2011
The modern problem of corporate fluff

“As a simple example of fluff in strategy work, here is a quote from a major retail bank’s internal strategy memoranda:”Our fundamental strategy is one of customer-centric intermediation.” The Sunday word “intermediation” means that company accepts deposits and then lends them to others. In other words, it is a bank. The buzz phrase “customer-centric” could […]

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Dec 05, 2011
If it’s just about you, nothing will outlast you

“The I.B.M. lesson, Mr. Palmisano said, is never become wedded to what you make, but to the values the corporation stands for. After all, I.B.M. started out making clocks, scales, punched card tabulators, and cheese slicers (“the world’s fastest at the time,” he noted). “The history of business is a bone pile of companies that […]

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Nov 07, 2011
Consumers, not corporates, are now driving tech innovation

“The rise of tablets and smartphones also reflects a big shift in the world of technology itself. For years many of the most exciting advances in personal computing have come from the armed forces, large research centres or big businesses that focused mainly on corporate customers. Sometimes these breakthroughs found their way to consumers after […]

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Oct 10, 2011
Thinking like a customer could have saved Kodak

“In the mid-1990s I paid several visits to Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, New York, and the cultural mindset was – with hindsight – on full display. Various executives told me how wonderful silver halide was. Professional photographers could not do without it, nor could Hollywood. Digital was for amateurs. And even they would always want […]

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Sep 19, 2011
Here’s a little secret about sustained product success

“We’re always searching for that secret formula, that magic pixie dust to sprinkle over our products, services, books, causes, brands, blogs to bring them to life and make them Super Successful. Most marketing-related buzzwords gain traction by promising pixie dust results if applied to whatever it is we make, do, sell. “Add more Social!”. “Just […]

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Sep 12, 2011
These days, strategy is about placing a series of small bets

“When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago. …  There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you […]

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Aug 29, 2011
Are all your leaders from one ‘tribe?’ Trouble will soon follow…

“(Research in Motion) is run by a ‘good ole’ boy’ network from Southern Ontario. Though I actually believe there can be advantages in this close-knit, trust-based social ecosystem, it is unacceptable in this day and age that a global brand should have the vast majority of its citizens derived from a section of a small […]

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