Articles

About Our Articles

At Easton, we believe that the development and application of innovative ideas lead to the highest value for clients. These articles represent Easton’s thinking on some of the critical issues facing senior executives.

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High Performance Companies
The Holy Grail of American public companies is meeting investor demands for growth and earnings consistency. An Easton Consultants initiative has identified and profiled companies among the Fortune 200 that have excelled at meeting this goal.

The E-Marketplace Investment: Avoiding a $15 Million Mistake
Many companies are joining and investing in e-marketplaces, but few understand the opportunities–and the risks–the investment entails. Easton has some thoughts about how e-marketplaces can integrate with your corporate strategy… and some warnings about inflated expectations.

How High Tech Firms Find Replacement Technology
Even new economy innovators struggle to keep new technologies from slipping through the cracks. Easton uncovered three models for preventing this problem: corporate technology development, technology incubators, and venture funds. Each demands a different level of corporate involvement and comfort with portfolio risk.

Avoiding the New Economy Backlash
Wall street has recently punished dot.com and other high tech companies, causing corporate executives nationwide to curtail technology spending and revert back to traditional ways of doing business. But maybe the dot.coms had some things right after all…

Information Overload
Electronic commerce has dropped the cost of reproducing and distributing information near zero, creating wonderful opportunities for businesses to make well-informed decisions. But these businesses are also choked with documents, e-mails, and datasets. What has happened, and what can companies do to make better use of the data they really need?

One-to-One Pricing in the New Economy
For most businesses, pricing has long been relatively static and undifferentiated. But, as the new economy rapidly replaces the old, pricing – thanks to ever-expanding electronic commerce technology – is becoming one of the most dynamic and important links in the value chain for outperforming the competition.

Marketing Levers
For too many business, electronic commerce only means on-line sales. However, those who think more broadly and creatively about using the Internet are finding many sources of comparative advantage in business functions from product conception and design, to prospecting, to customer retention.

The Erosion of Comparative Advantage (Part I)
Product invention, design, warehousing, the creation of new materials, development of support functions – all of these activities created value that could be leveraged over the production of many units or the delivery of more service. The power of many of these is diminishing as their absolute cost declines.

The Erosion of Comparative Advantage (Part II)
Comparative advantage has often been scale driven, like plant size, experience, market share. But, as we argued in Part I, the traditional power of scale is diminishing in many businesses. Today, you need to look at response time, intellectual renewal and electronic commerce to find advantage.

Uncovering Profitability
“Why aren’t we as profitable as our competitors?” By finding the fundamental drivers to competitive superiority in your business, you can determine the steps-and costs-for improving performance.

Linking Strategy to What Customers Value
Blanket customer first strategies mask the subtle differences among customers and the trade-offs they make when they purchase. And it’s these differences that often provide the essential clues in the search for the key sources of comparative advantage.

Growing and Winning
Have you been spending too much of the last few years rationalizing or re-engineering? It’s time to turn your focus on winning and growing once again. Competitive strategy rooted in the economics of your business can be the blueprint for that sustained growth.

Organizing Corporate Development Activities for Acquisitions and Ventures
In times of rapid and accelerated change, the allocating and reallocating of corporate assets to achieve optimum stockholder results is difficult. To manage the task of business evolution or diversification, six choices are available that provide the proper balance of corporate activities needed to meet stockholders’ requirements.