Peak craft is here! We are moving from craft beer taking share from traditional beers to more intense competition within the craft beer segment. There is also certain fatigue in the craft beer consumer group that leads to somewhat less experimentation. In the future three formats will strive. First, professional brew pubs (e.g. Stone) providing a superior localized experience and avaiaiblity in retail. Second, the Sam Adams / New Belgium / Goose Island, or in the case of Canada Mill Street, kind of larger brewers who are able to build a certain following aable to win the skew fight on distribution shelves. Third, a whole bunch of smaller brewers who might not survive in the long run, but who keep emerging with the barriers to entry being remaining low (this group will however remain small)

Last Monday, January 29, 2018,  after years of being bandied about by hi-tech executives, futurists, management consultants, and business schools the term “disruption” officially became mainstream in the business world.  It was this day when a group of three big companies including Berkshire-Hathaway (B-H) the legendary Warren Buffett orchestrated multinational conglomerate holding company, global investment banking heavyweight JP Morgan Chase (JPM), and the mammoth of all disruptors, Amazon, announced that they would become allies with the goal to “disrupt” the healthcare industry, one of the largest, most complex industries in the US.  What happened next?  A number of prominent US healthcare industry incumbents including, United Healthcare (the 6th largest company in the US) and CVS Phar

According to Canadian Minister of International Trade Chrystia Freeland, the decision by a slight majority of British voters to separate themselves from the European Union, and all its economic benefits, will actually be a good thing for Canadian trade because it will help Ottawa finally close the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) negotiated with the European Union years ago. “CETA ratification is on a much faster track. We’re anticipating that CETA will be signed in the fall and will be ratified early next year,” Freeland told Bloomberg as the global economy reeled from the unexpected Brexit decision in late June, adding, “There has been absolutely no interest — none at all — from any of our European counterparts in reopening CETA in any way.” Now, it is never too early to

The global airline industry is one of the most popular industries to be showcased in Business School classrooms. This is not any different in my case. A couple of years ago I co-authored a case study on AirAsia X, the long-haul extension of the very successful budget airline startup AirAsia from Malaysia. It was a classic case where the incumbents failed to provide a service for an underserved segment. Now in the airplane-manufacturing world it is interesting to see that a few years back, when the A380 was introduced the two main global competitors EADS and Boeing saw the world as evolving very differently when it came to future air-travel. Given the level of maturity of the industry, the concentration and consolidation within it, and it's profitability, common management theory would sugg

Forthcoming: MIT Sloan Management Review article. Intellectual property (IP) protection is the Number ONE challenge for multinational corporations operating in China. To learn about how companies successfully manage the China IP protection challenge we conducted in-depth field research in 57 of the most successful multinational corporations. We identified nine highly effective IP protection practices, which together form a dynamic “Web of IP Protection.” We found that the “Web” allows a corporation to a) expand faster within China and across other emerging markets b) outperform local and foreign competitors and c) improve local and global innovativeness. To learn more about how to build your own line of defense against property theft read the forthcomging full article in MIT Sloan MR. (exp

Today, I am please to anounce the launch of the hassle factor website! The research for this important new meassure has taken more than 6 1/2 years. We will add more data waves for the years 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 by September 2018.  Check out the following link and navigate through the site: www.hasslefactor.info  

In late 2013, we published a study on how travel hassles affect firms' foreign investment decisions in the Journal of International Business Studies. While we captured some of the air-pollution effects in our health risk measure, the issue is becoming much more critical. Firms now struggle not only to deploy expatriates in places like Beijing, New Delhi or Mexico City with substantial air pollution there are fewer and fewer managers who actually want to spend time in these places. This of course affects the depth of their firms’ business activities in these countries. In The discussion is picking up steam. CNN recently published a study on the 10 most hated cities in the world. Similarly, The Globe and Mail in an article published on April 9 just pointed to the air pollution hassle. But al

China HR Trends Fiducia Consulting HK