Can business do well by doing good - A Guide To Sustainability: Accenture Outlook:

October 2010 Today, there probably isn’t a company anywhere in the world that does not at least acknowledge the importance of sustainability—of doing business in an environmentally and socially responsible way. Indeed, for many companies, sustainability is now as much of a strategic priority as such traditional business concerns as technology, talent and customers. The commitment to sustainability has weathered the storm of the downturn well; in some cases, it has even been strengthened by it. Meanwhile, an emerging body of research suggests that sustainable business practices correlate closely with high performance. On an operational level, however, sustainability is not yet seamlessly woven into the fabric of business. Executives still must make, almost daily, difficult trade-offs between practices that meet short-term business needs and those that will contribute to sustaining the needs of future generations.

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How to turn data into a strategic asset - a creative view: Accentures

Chances are, there are data gold mines buried among your company's most basic operations that could help you outperform the competition. Take Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company. A thorough examination of seven years' worth of ticket sales data allowed the RSC to sell more to existing customers and identify new audiences. Using analytics to look at names, addresses, performances attended and prices paid for tickets, the company developed a marketing program that increased the number of regular attendees at its showcase Stratford-upon-Avon location by more than 70 percent.

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Why Focusing on Finding “The Next Big Thing” Doesn't Work - The Media Brief UK

You want innovation? You can’t handle innovation. Seriously though, once they’re established, most companies are geared toward stability, not disrupting their own operations. Newspaper and magazine companies are no different. And print media had no real impetus to change radically until recently. Newspapers and magazines took the challenge from television and radio in its stride – but it took the combined impact of multi-channel television, video games and the internet to challenge print media’s dominance. But if you thought the last five years were disruptive, brace yourself for the next five.

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So When Do You Stop The Ideas - WorkAwesome

So you’re about to launch. You’ve done a great job planning and executing this project. And you’re almost ready to unveil your baby to the world. And this is when people start coming up with new ideas and suggestions. Often it’s a major decision maker such as your boss who thinks a new feature or two is needed. Do you rework everything? How do you consider everyone’s feedback and respectfully decline the advice? That all depends on many factors. In the end, you need to decide what’s the gain. And some of that advice comes from someone you can’t ignore.

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Getting the Best Out of Your People - Stop Telling Them to Get Outside the Box, Instead Tell Them About The Constraints..

A CEO friend of ours recently complained about the difficulty of keeping creativity alive in his business during this difficult period. He had previously cut back on "discretionary" spending—such as development of new products and marketing plans—in order to survive the Great Recession, and he hasn't yet seen his company's revenues bounce back enough to invest heavily in future growth. We told him he was nuts—that creativity is even more important in times when sales are harder to come by and customers are less loyal. We also told him that two separate research studies (one by Bain, the other by Booz Allen) showed long ago that market share gains made during bad times are more likely to stick than those made during growth periods. Despite our scolding, he still felt he couldn't afford to invest more resources to foster creativity, and simply had to get more from what little resources he had. So, could we help him or not?

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