Tag: Strategy

As Marks and Spencer goes "back to basics", its story is a paradigm of what happened to British business in the last decade. Was the company's problem that it changed too little - or that it changed too much?

Companies that trade under the family name of their founder have become increasingly rare in recent years, but firms are still concerned with their brand name. It has important functions and sends signals to customers and investors about the firm's reputation.

If stock-picking fails to beat the index, why should picking companies? It won’t, unless mergers carefully match the firms involved.

Efficient markets make money for market participants, but not for market makers. That is something the enthusiastic promoters of B2B exchanges have yet to understand.

The mobile phone spectrum auctions are part of a long tradition of governments deriving revenue from allocating scarce resources. In this case, no juster tax has ever been imposed.

Step forward, corporate personality of the century.

Whose interests are served by waves of mergers and demergers?

A network industry which fundamentally changed the way we live, followed by a speculative bubble: but how much would you have made if you’d got in right at the start with Great Western Railways?

Regulated businesses face almost all of the strategy issues which confront conventional firms, and some additional ones that are specific to their own environment. As deregulation spreads across Europe, the gap between those firms which handle these specific issues effectively and those which respond to regulation and regulatory changes with hostility, complacency or defeatism will widen rapidly.

Regardless of what something seems to be worth, I should never pay more for something than it would cost me to replace it. On this basis, mobile phone companies look expensive.