Monthly Archives: February 2016
R&B Special Feature: Four Ways To Gain Positions Of Power (INSEAD Knowledge)
Alexis Tsipras, the new left wing prime minister of Greece, is in a tight spot. Having spent much of his time trying to coerce the powerful countries of Europe into accepting Greece’s rejection of the agreements signed between the EU and the prior Greek government, he’s not getting any closer to achieving his goals. He cannot reduce Greece’s dependence on the “troika” and has been unable to rally allies to his cause. Greece is running out of money, and out of time.
The case of Greece reminded me of my recent paper with Assistant Professor Gokhan Ertug, The Power of the Weak (2014), which examined the strategies weak organisational players can employ to attenuate their dependence on the powerful. Greece is the weak, but has tried to negotiate from an illusory position of strength. Such an approach was unlikely to work. To understand why, I would like to revisit our analysis of how weak organisational members can reduce their dependence on the powerful.
R&B Special Feature: A Few Words On…Brand Leadership (Tuck School of Business)
Tuck marketing professor Peter Golder talks about industry pioneers, memory bias, and healthy paranoia.
Brand leadership is extremely important for firms because the academic literature supports the fact that brand leaders are going to be more profitable. There’s also a view that leading brands will be especially long lived.
I’m more in agreement with the first point. Leading brands are profitable, but much of my research shows that the belief of long lived brand leadership is overstated in many ways.
