Ask organisations to list the essential ingredients of a Key Account implementation and Key Account Plans will always feature on the list as an imperative part of Key Account Management (KAM). 

Perhaps one of the biggest issues to rise to prominence in the opening years of the 21st Century has been ‘sustainability’. The growing concern with the environment, in particular the possibility of climate change through global warming, has led to a focus on how human and economic activity has the potential to adversely impact the long-term sustainability of the planet.

Being in the business of providing learning and development courses, it isn’t really surprising that, here at Cranfield Executive Development, we believe that you should never stop learning.

Building on our recent blog on ‘Designing a customer-centric culture that empowers’. It is worth exploring a checklist for implementing a customer-centric culture. Culture is all around us, influencing our ideas, customs and social behaviour, and culture exists within an organisation whether we are conscious of it or not. Despite its importance, managers rarely address the elements of organisational culture, or reflect on how culture can be designed to enable a system that creates superior...

Culture is all around us, influencing our ideas, customs and social behaviour, and culture exists within an organisation whether we are conscious of it or not. Despite its importance, managers rarely address the elements of organisational culture, or reflect on how culture can be designed to enable a system that creates superior value for their customers.

The question: ‘what makes a good leader?’ is one that businesses and education experts have been attempting to answer for many years, but no one has yet hit on a consistently winning formula.

Planning for success can be daunting for organisations that recognise they need to focus on managing a portfolio of fewer (but larger and more powerful) strategic customers. Today, having a strong KAM capability is essential – and yet many organisations get the basics wrong, failing to achieve the results they planned for.

There has been much discussion recently about the challenges of operating in what some have called a ‘VUCA’ world. VUCA is the acronym for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous – the four elements that have become the hallmarks of today’s business environment.

Failure happens. For a myriad different reasons, things go wrong. And at an organisational level, the consequences will range from embarrassing to catastrophic. It is, simply, unrealistic to expect things never to go wrong.

What will be the outcome of Brexit?  We still don’t know and some of the repercussions will run on for years. So what can we do about it? All we can do is what the government is trying to do, that is once we have some certainty we need to execute fast.