...Breakthrough innovations in operationsnot just steady innprovement-can destroy competitors and shake up industries.Such advances don't have to be as rare as they are. 84 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW Deep Change How *^ Operational Innovation Can Transform Your Company by Michael Hammer I N 199T, Progressive Insurance, an automobile insurer based in Mayfield Village, Ohio, had approximately $1.3 billion in sales. By 2002, that figure had grown to $9.5 billion. What fashionable strategies did Progressive employ to achieve sevenfold growth in just over a decade? Was it positioned in a high-growth industry? Hardly. Auto insurance is a mature, ioo-year-o!d industry that grows with GDP. Did it diversify into new businesses? No, Progressive's business was and is overwhelmingly concentrated in consumer auto insurance. Did it go global? Again, no. Progressive operates only in the United States. Neither did it grow through acquisitions or clever marketing schemes. For years. Progressive did little advertising, and some of its campaigns were notably unsuccessful. It didn't unveil a slew of new products. Nor did it grow at the expense of its margins, even when it set low prices. The proof is Progressive's combined ratio (expenses plus claims payouts, divided by premiums), the measure of APRIL 2004 85 How Operational Innovation Can Transform Your Company financial performance in the insurance industry. Most auto insurers have combined...
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...www.hbrreprints.org TOOL KIT Companies routinely exaggerate the attractiveness of foreign markets, and that can lead to expensive mistakes. Here’s a more rational approach to evaluating global opportunities. Distance Still Matters The Hard Reality of Global Expansion by Pankaj Ghemawat • Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article: 1 Article Summary The Idea in Brief—the core idea The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work 2 Distance Still Matters: The Hard Reality of Global Expansion 12 Further Reading A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further exploration of the article’s ideas and applications Reprint R0108K TOOL KIT Distance Still Matters The Hard Reality of Global Expansion The Idea in Brief Why did U.S. media giant Star TV lose $500 million trying to deliver TV programming to Asia? Like many companies, it was so dazzled by the foreign market’s immensity that it ignored the difficulties of pioneering new territories. For example, it assumed—wrongly—that Asian viewers wanted English-language programming. How to avoid this fate—and select the right targets for your firm’s global expansion? Look beyond a country’s sales potential (as expressed by national wealth or propensity to consume)—and analyze the probable impact of distance. But don’t focus only on distance’s geographical dimension. Consider three other dimensions as well: cultural factors (religion, race, social norms, language); administrative factors...
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...www.hbrreprints.org TOOL KIT Companies routinely exaggerate the attractiveness of foreign markets, and that can lead to expensive mistakes. Here’s a more rational approach to evaluating global opportunities. Distance Still Matters The Hard Reality of Global Expansion by Pankaj Ghemawat • Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article: 1 Article Summary The Idea in Brief—the core idea The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work 2 Distance Still Matters: The Hard Reality of Global Expansion 12 Further Reading A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further exploration of the article’s ideas and applications Reprint R0108K TOOL KIT Distance Still Matters The Hard Reality of Global Expansion The Idea in Brief Why did U.S. media giant Star TV lose $500 million trying to deliver TV programming to Asia? Like many companies, it was so dazzled by the foreign market’s immensity that it ignored the difficulties of pioneering new territories. For example, it assumed—wrongly—that Asian viewers wanted English-language programming. How to avoid this fate—and select the right targets for your firm’s global expansion? Look beyond a country’s sales potential (as expressed by national wealth or propensity to consume)—and analyze the probable impact of distance. But don’t focus only on distance’s geographical dimension. Consider three other dimensions as well: cultural factors (religion, race, social norms, language); administrative factors...
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...Begin Reading Table of Contents Photos Newsletters Copyright Page In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. For Isabella and Calista Stone When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. —Jeff Bezos, commencement speech at Princeton University, May 30, 2010 Prologue In the early 1970s, an industrious advertising executive named Julie Ray became fascinated with an unconventional public-school program for gifted children in Houston, Texas. Her son was among the first students enrolled in what would later be called the Vanguard program, which stoked creativity and independence in its students and nurtured expansive, outside-the-box thinking. Ray grew so enamored with the curriculum and the community of enthusiastic teachers and parents that she set out to research similar schools around the state with an eye toward writing a book about...
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