Harvard professor Francis Aguilar created a paradigm for getting the big picture in his 1967 book, “Scanning the Business Environment” that endures to this day. Not being skilled in acronyms, he called it ETPS, which was subsequently rearranged to PEST for pronounceability and later augmented with a couple new components, bringing us to the modern […]
Building on the early work of Art Schneiderman, Robert Kaplan and David Norton developed a tool for strategic management that they called the Balanced Scorecard in a 1992 Harvard Business Review article. Their approach represents a fundamental change in performance management. Prior approaches to measuring success in a company arose from financial departments. These managers […]
In this installment of the Viral Octopus knowledge series, we are going to talk about a powerful business management theory for understanding the competitive environment that a particular business faces. Michael Porter developed his theory of Porter’s “Five Forces” analysis at Harvard Business School and published it in 1979. Since then it has exploded in […]
In this installment of the Viral Octopus knowledge series, we are going to talk about the Ansoff Matrix. This popular tool for assessing the options and risk inherent in various growth strategies is also called the product/market expansion grid. Applied mathematician and business management theorist H. Igor Ansoff spent his teenage years in the nascent […]