How can you tell if your company is fit for growth? Here is a simple, three-question diagnostic:

1. Do you have clear priorities, focused on strategic growth, that drive your investments?
2. Do your costs line up with those priorities? In other words, do you deploy your resources toward them efficiently and effectively?
3. Is your organization set up to enable you to achieve those priorities?

Source: Is Your Company Fit … [ Read more ]

Subjects: Management Questions, Strategy Questions

• What is unique about the target company´s capabilities system? How does this company create value for customers?
• How does the acquired company´s capabilities system differ from our own?
• If we are buying the company for its product and service portfolio (a leverage deal), are we sure that those products and services will thrive within our current capabilities system?
• If we are acquiring the target company for its capabilities

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Subject: Mergers and Acquisitions Questions

1. How willing are customers to continue to pay for further improvements in performance that historically merited attractive price premiums? One of the key tipping points in a market occurs when a company, in Christensen’s language, overshoots a given market tier by providing them performance that they can’t use. Your television remote control probably serves as a daily reminder of overshooting. Each of those buttons can

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Subject: Strategy Questions

1. What are the boundaries of the corporation-which businesses should be part of the corporate portfolio and what is the underlying logic?
2. How should resources-and capital, in particular-be allocated to the different businesses?
3. How can the goals and actions of the individual business units be aligned with the interests of the corporation as a whole and with the interests of its shareholders?
4. What is the real operating value of

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Subjects: Management Questions, Strategy Questions

To determine how well an organization exhibits respect, leaders can ask the following types of questions:

• Recognition respect: Do we know who our customers are? Does our market research treat customers simply as numbers or does it reveal their values, wants, and needs? Do we understand the cultural context?
• Evaluation respect: Which customers can we best serve? Are these our current market segments? How can we treat

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Subject: Customer Questions

• What does success look like in this scenario?
• In what markets will we play and which customers will we serve?
• How will we serve those customers?
• What capabilities will we need to have in place?
• Which actions should we prioritize? Which ones are robust across all scenarios and which are contingent depending on how the future unfolds?
• How would we know if this scenario were going to come true (in

… [ Read more ]

Subject: Strategy Questions

The Harvard Business Review pulled together a list of questions that CEOs and boards can ask each other to try to bring their mutual goals more in line with each other.

1. Where should we place our primary focus – shareholders, stakeholders or society at large?
2. What is long-term shareholder value really about and how is it created?
3. Can we influence who our shareholders are?
4. What is our responsibility

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Subject: Corporate Governance Questions

• What should our business model look like in three to five years as the implications of our business strategy play out?
• What balance do we need on the spectrum of centralization vs. a distributed network of business entities? How should we be structured to best support our business strategy: by geography, product, function, customer-or a hybrid arrangement?
• Do we have the right organization design in place to

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Subjects: Management Questions, Organization Questions

1. How are you going to handle the problem for the customer? Think about an immediate solution, delivered with the right attitude and a sense of urgency that will restore the customer´s confidence in you.Photo: Gene Selkov/Flickr (Creative Commons)
2. Why did it happen? Do an analysis to determine why this happened.
3. Has it happened before? If it has happened before, why did it happen again? Do an analysis

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Subject: Customer Questions

• Who is responsible for developing and maintaining our cross-functional approach to cybersecurity? To what extent are business leaders (as opposed to IT or risk executives) owning this issue?
• Which information assets are most critical, and what is the “value at stake” in the event of a breach? What promises-implicit or explicit-have we made to our customers and partners to protect their information?
• What roles do cybersecurity and

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Subject: IT Questions