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wake-up call for Big Pharma article, pharmaceutical industry faces cost pressures, Strategic Thinking

December 2011 

A wake-up call for Big Pharma

Lower profit margins suggest a need for new business models.

Recent Thinking

The Archive

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

  • August 2004 

    Making a market in knowledge

    For companies and their employees alike, knowledge is power—and profit.

  • February 2004 

    A new look at diversification

    In basic materials, only diversified companies approach an efficient portfolio’s risk–return performance, since they can exploit negative correlations among the business cycles of different commodities.

2003

  • August 2003 

    What transformation means for the defense industry

    Warfare will surely be transformed. But how, and by whom?

  • June 2003 

    The value in organization

    CEOs must now be more architect than general: the job is to design working environments where thousands of people know what to do, cooperate to get it done, and experience it as personally fulfilling.

  • May 2003 

    Hidden flaws in strategy

    Can insights from behavioral economics explain why good executives back bad strategies?

    Includes: Audio

  • May 2003 

    Strategic minds at work

    Companies that embrace strategies based on high ethical standards are more likely to succeed.

2002

  • December 2002 

    Edging into Web services

    Automating the flow of information among companies is costly and complex. Web services, argues John Hagel, promise to make it cheap and easy.

  • November 2002 

    How to win in a financial crisis

    When is a good time to make strategic advances? During a crisis, of course.

  • June 2002 

    Are you too focused?

    As successful companies mature, they must diversify to survive—and they can dramatically improve their shareholder returns as they do. The only questions are when and how.

  • June 2002 

    Just-in-time strategy for a turbulent world

    Uncertainty and rising levels of risk make it impossible for companies to determine the future. But a portfolio-of-initiatives approach to strategy can help ensure that companies take full advantage of their best opportunities without taking unnecessary risks.

  • June 2002 

    Learning to love recessions

    Most companies battened down the hatches during the recession of the early ’90s. But the more successful competitors pressed their advantages.

  • June 2002 

    Loosening up: How process networks unlock the power of specialization

    Cutting-edge companies are swapping their tightly coupled processes for loosely coupled ones—making themselves not only more flexible but also more profitable.

  • June 2002 

    Strategy in crisis

    The past is no longer a guide to the future. To meet the challenges of discontinuity and to perform like markets, a corporation must learn to change as rapidly as they do.

  • June 2002 

    Tired of strategic planning?

    Many companies get little value from their annual strategic-planning process. It should be redesigned to support real-time strategy making and to encourage ’creative accidents.’

  • May 2002 

    What makes your stock price go up and down

    Identifying and understanding important individual investors can help corporate executives predict the direction of share prices.

2001

  • November 2001 

    Making the most of uncertainty

    In extremely uncertain environments, shaping strategies may deliver higher returns, with lower risk, than they do in less uncertain times.

  • August 2001 

    Beyond the unbundled corporation

    A new business model may forever change the way companies compete.

  • August 2001 

    The race to the bottom

    When industries deregulate, their managers face unfamiliar challenges. Price wars are often the unfortunate—and unnecessary—result.

    Includes: Audio

  • February 2001 

    The winner-takes-all economy

    Across industries and nations, a select few companies are creating almost all of the new shareholder value. Atomization is driving their success.

2000

  • June 2000 

    Bringing discipline to strategy

    Are you making three very big—and often very bad—assumptions? Don’t assess uncertainty unless you are willing to abandon your favorite formulas. Bets and options may be more important than positioning choices.

  • June 2000 

    Delivering value to customers

    In many cases the customer—not the competition—is the key to a company's prospects.

  • June 2000 

    Gaining advantage over competitors

    You can outstrip your competitors in myriad ways, many of which call for you to rewrite the standard "rules" of your industry

  • June 2000 

    Games managers should play

    Game theory can help managers make better strategic decisions when facing the uncertainty of competitive conduct. If you don't change your game to gain advantage, one of your competitors will.

  • June 2000 

    McKinsey on strategy

    Each article in McKinsey on Strategy presents an important perspective on a single aspect of strategy. Taken together, they represent a formidable body of knowledge, distilled from the experience of thousands of McKinsey consultants, about the art and science of business strategy.

  • June 2000 

    On the origin of strategies

    Evolution across a population is nature's trick for mastering uncertainty. Businesses can use it too.

  • June 2000 

    Spider versus spider

    Are "webs" a new strategy for the information age?

  • June 2000 

    Strategy at the edge of chaos

    "Fishbowl" economics once provided the basis of corporate strategy, but no longer. New theories show that markets are "complex adaptive systems." Can managers be more than blind players in an evolutionary business game?

  • June 2000 

    Strategy under uncertainty

    The traditional approach to strategy requires precise predictions and thus often leads executives to underestimate uncertainty. This can be downright dangerous. A four-level framework can help.

  • June 2000 

    The new infomediaries

    Developing and marketing consumer profiles in the information age is a growth industry built on trust.

  • June 2000 

    The real power of real options

    Change the way you create value: The case for applying options thinking to any strategic situation.

  • June 2000 

    Thinking strategically

    A company should make sure that it is the best possible owner of each of its business units—not simply hold on to units that are strong in themselves.

  • June 2000 

    Unbundling the corporation

    The forces that fractured the computer industry are bearing down on all industries. In the face of changing interaction costs and the new economics of electronic networks, companies must ask themselves the most basic of all questions: what business are we in?

  • May 2000 

    Best practice does not equal best strategy

    Benchmarking is an important way to improve operational efficiency, but it is not a tool for strategic decision making. When competitors all try to play exactly the same game, declining margins are bound to follow.

1999

  • February 1999 

    Turning capabilities into advantages

    Operational excellence is not the whole story. Successful companies need privileged assets, growth-enabling skills, and special relationships too. How to bundle them into a competitive edge.

1998

  • August 1998 

    A case for corporate freedom

    Market forces have pushed many countries toward economic freedom. Have our organizations kept pace?

  • February 1998 

    Best practice and beyond: Knowledge strategies

    Value created by knowledge is often not captured. Five accounts of knowledge strategies.

  • February 1998 

    Industrial venture capitalism: Sharing ownership to create value

    The idea is this: share ownership of assets with the managers responsible for generating value from them. Then create greater transparency between markets and these owners. And make sure intervention is both difficult and expensive.

  • February 1998 

    The new economics of organization

    In their purest forms, markets motivate and hierarchies coordinate. Have we learned to combine the best of both? Two challenges for the corporations of the future: entrepreneurialism and knowledge.

1997

  • May 1997 

    The atomization of markets

    "Petropreneurs" have created almost all the market value in the past five years, and deal-making skills have become more important than scale or technology. Is it time the majors did something radical?

  • February 1997 

    A revolution in interaction

    A new study of interactions reveals how pervasive they are. As they increase in number, answers to fundamental questions about intergration, scale, and scope will change. But what will happen when workers can carry out their jobs in half the time?

  • February 1997 

    Is your core competence a mirage?

    Managers now consider just about everything a potential competence. Are you measurably better, can you sustain the difference, and does it matter? Building a core competence: three options.

  • February 1997 

    Net Gain: Expanding markets through virtual communities

    Virtual communities will fundamentally change how companies develop, price, and promote their products. Marketers that “get it” will encourage community members to communicate with them and each other. The purpose of advertising will shift from building awareness to selling. There will be new levels of loyalty and disloyalty.

1995

  • November 1995 

    The beginning of system dynamics

    Modeling afforded a number of insights about why high-technology companies fail. It is much harder to change decision-making procedures than we realized when system dynamics started. Whether in school or mangement education, the focus will be on "generic structures."

  • February 1995 

    Technology and evolution: Escaping the Red Queen effect

    The same laws may govern the evolution of organisms and organizations. “Rugged fitness” landscapes determine the rate of innovation. Breaking your company into “patches” to balance order and chaos.

1994

  • February 1994 

    Positive feedbacks in the economy

    An important new theory about how small chance events early in the history of an industry or technology can tilt, forever, its competitive balance.

1993

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