strategy+business Fall 2016

In his classic short story collection Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino imagines being alive at the Big Bang, with everything in the universe packed into a single point. Sometimes, the global entertainment and media landscape feels that way. Even as events such as the Brexit vote divide the world politically, people on every continent are more interconnected than ever. Moreover, every aspect of this industry has been struck by major technological change. Thus, if you’re a senior media or entertainment industry executive, and you learned your trade in the broadcast or early Internet era, you are constantly engaged in rearguard actions against your own past assumptions. Hence the array of articles on the entertainment and media industry in this issue. They were developed by the strategy+business team (led by executive editor Daniel Gross)…

Outlook 2016-20 The media conglomerates we have known and loved (and sometimes hated) in our lifetimes are, by definition, legacy institutions. The mix of businesses assembled to create today’s multibillion-dollar empires are the result of decisions media moguls began making more than 50 years ago. Back then, newspapers were profitable, vertically integrated operations (many newspaper companies owned paper mills); televisions were black and white; and the @symbol was a rarely used feature on manual typewriters. What made perfect sense to a young Rupert Murdoch sitting in Melbourne in 1952, when he took over the family newspaper business, may not make sense to the older mogul today. For that matter, what made sense to a (slightly) younger Ev Williams or Jack Dorsey just five years ago doesn’t necessarily work anymore. One moment…

High blood pressure now affects more than 20 percent of the adult population around the world. Complications from the condition account for 9.4 million deaths a year, according to the World Health Organization. The number of people with diabetes surged globally from 108 million in 1980 to 422 million in 2014. The rise in these and other chronic conditions is creating a need for healthcare on an epic scale. And it comes at a time when the overall demand for healthcare is growing, as a result of the Affordable Care Act in the U.S. and rising incomes in some emerging economies. These circumstances have created growth markets for pharmaceutical and life-sciences companies. Yet new opportunities have also brought challenges. The competitive landscape for pharma companies around the world is changing rapidly,…

YOUNG PROFS “When people feel they lack resources relative to others, they experience a sense of financial deprivation. Anyone can feel poor, regardless of his or her financial reality.” Why are people who feel poor less likely to use coupons than people who feel wealthy? Why do our opinions of how others should be punished for ethical transgressions vary by how well off we perceive ourselves to be? Something happens when people take stock of their financial status and don’t like what they see. If they haven’t lived up to their own expectations or think their peers are better off, individuals facing money troubles — both real and perceived — form judgments based on these feelings. As Eesha Sharma, an assistant professor of business administration at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth,…

For nearly 50 years, “strategy” has been a business of promoting universal prescriptions based on what appears to explain the success of a few revered companies. At first glance, this practice makes perfect sense. Why not draw lessons from those who seem to have figured it all out? In reality, though, the approach has the deadly effect of separating the true owners of a company’s strategy (the prescription promoters) from those implementing it (management). No doubt, the promoters work hard to win management’s acceptance of their concept. But when the inevitable bumps in the road appear, the strategy concept is ditched, often with management saying it doesn’t work and its promoters blaming poor implementation. In the 1960s and 1970s, the hot concepts were the experience curve, the growth-share matrix, and SWOT…

The Capable Deal Maker The U.S. banking industry has largely sat out the impressive surge in M&A activity of the last few years. Total deal volume hit a record US$2.3 trillion in 2015 — up 64 percent over 2014. But banks accounted for just 3 percent of the total value, despite the fact that they account for 9.3 percent of total market capitalization. That’s about to change: We believe the pace of M&A in U.S. banking will accelerate sharply in 2016. The market structure of U.S. banking is obsolete, and the industry’s profitability has been weak for nearly a decade. Regulatory and competitive pressures are making it hard for most banks to grow revenues and profits. The convergence of these trends makes it imperative that banks consolidate to gain scale and lower…