All insights
New business building — Sales growth — Strategy
Discovering business opportunities in South Korea
15 July 2020 — South Korea has been known as a rapidly growing prosperous economy, home to global conglomerates called chaebols. However, actual opportunities and challenges of the South Korean market remain unknown to most foreign companies. Here we discuss recent developments in the South Korean economy, and what they mean in terms of opportunities for market entry.
Strategy — Digitization — Turnaround and transformation
What is next for Korea after initial success in containing COVID-19 crisis
11 August 2020 — In this article, we analyze the success of Korean government’s immediate responses and make recommendations for Korean companies to leverage the crisis as an opportunity and fully utilize their potential.
Strategy — Turnaround and transformation
Crisis management in the age of extreme uncertainty
11 August 2020 — It is still too early to say who is right and wrong in the aftermath of COVID-19, but the pandemic provides a unique opportunity to analyze the dynamics that influence how nations respond to a common threat. In this article, we provide an in-depth analysis of how Vietnam handled the first wave of the pandemic and propose a framework for business leaders to draft a crisis response and enhance their organization’s resilience in a crisis.
Strategy — M&A and divestments — Sales growth — New business building
Increasing agility in decision-making to improve competitiveness
3 October 2018 — Corporations must increasingly be agile and timely decisions are critical to initiate changes. Complex organizational structures, management by consensus and unstructured decision-making processes hinder agility in decision-making.
Digitization — Sales growth
Digital B2B customer portals – leveraging B2C learnings in the B2B world
15 September 2017 — With the increasing importance of customer experience across industries, B2B companies can differentiate by borrowing from the B2C playbook and simplifying their customer interface, facilitating relationship management, and developing digital customer portals.
Turnaround and transformation
Building the skills of a Chief Transformation Officer
18 September 2017 — In a world of continuous change, companies should turn market pressure into a change capability that becomes a competitive advantage. Appointing a chief transformation officer to comprehensively lead change itself is a solution.
New business building — Sales growth — Productivity improvement
The untapped business opportunity in Southeast Asia – productivity improvement
30 March 2016 — Low productivity is the main challenge facing Southeast Asian economies. There is a macroeconomic imperative to boost productivity but implementation is difficult. In this article, we address automation, efficiency and human capital development as key new business development areas in the region.
Digitization
Indoor tracking and maps: The hype died, but the show is not over
6 March 2016 — Between 2013 and 2015 hype around indoor tracking built up. Yet today nobody seems to talk about indoor tracking or remember the apps. While the hype has died, work has continued in the shadows addressing both issues with tracking technology and indoor maps.
Turnaround and transformation
Strategies for driving the transformation in the software industry
16 March 2013 — Traditionally, software companies have been purely focusing on developing software and selling it to consumers or businesses. However, during the past five years, app stores and cloud computing have changed the industry logic. Software companies can no longer rely on plain software sales, as the business models have evolved to providing services and solutions.
Strategy — New business building
Succession planning in the context of a family business and why you need outside help
13 January 2016 — The subject of family owned business is important globally, and in particular in the Middle East, where it is further exacerbated by the fact that many of these types of businesses are first or second generation family-owned companies.
Sales growth — Financial performance
Optimizing sales managers’ role in digital sales transformations
23 May 2019 — B2B organizations undergoing sales transformations tend to focus on improving digital tools and training for salespeople with insufficient guidance for sales managers. In this article, we discuss typical challenges in managing sales and what it takes for sales managers to both support and succeed personally in digital transformations.
Financial performance
Improving decision-making by including uncertainty in budgets
14 April 2014 — Quantifying and estimating project and investment results are very important for financial planning, investment comparison and decision making purposes. However, business is always conducted in an uncertain environment while financial planning is commonly done using single-value revenue and cost-side estimates, which managers assess using rules of thumb. In this article, we present an approach where the best, base and the worst case scenarios are used to improve the estimates.