Confronting Insurance Distribution Challenges and Opportunities Case studies on how two insurance companies facing superficially similar situations, can and should reach very different conclusions regarding what…
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Information Platforms: The Foundation of Strategy Development Support your strategic planning process by developing intelligent information gathering, analysis, and dissemination capabilities.
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Information Technology Annual Checkup A guide for managers to gain a better understanding of their IT organization (and information technology in general) in order to enhance the value…
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Alternative Insurance Markets The captive sub-segment of the P&C alternative market space and the opportunities for carriers in it.
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Agency Management Best Practices As a very unpredictable year draws to a close, and carriers look ahead to an uncertain 2010, the time is ripe for a review of core agency management…
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Insurance Regulatory Reform We examine the perspectives of various interested parties and venture some early opinions as to how insurance regulatory reform is likely to play out.
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The Great Consumer Reset: Repositioning Your Business to Win in the Post-Recession Era In the middle of the worst recession in over 60 years, what can companies do to avoid becoming another sad headline and, as importantly, to emerge…
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Credit Default Swaps: Useful Risk Management Tool or Financial WMD? Perhaps best known for their role in the downfalls of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and AIG, credit default swaps have been the subject of intense…
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The Re-Emergence of Private Label Private label products represent a dilemma for many consumer product companies. They are a competitive threat, but they also represent the brand…
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Behavioral Economics: A New Frontier for Insurance In this paper, we discuss how insurance companies can benefit from insights drawn from the field of behavioral economics.
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Five Cost Management Strategies Often Overlooked With no shortage of techniques available for managing and reducing costs, from activity value analysis to reengineering to automation, an outside…
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Is the World Still Flat? In his bestselling book "The World Is Flat", Thomas Friedman popularized the notion that the world is moving toward a globally integrated…
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Ernie Csiszar: A Perspective on Key Issues Facing P&C Industry In a 2009 interview with Ernie Csiszar, insurance industry director with Bridge Strategy Group, he provides his perspective on key issues facing the…
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Keeping Your "I" on Growth Planning Faced with the traumatic economic and geopolitical events, most companies have focused their business planning almost exclusively on driving…
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Real Options: Creating and Capturing the Option Value in Regulated Assets The fundamental insight is recognizing that faced with uncertainty, flexibility has value.
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Winning in the Partnership Era In the partnership era, as much as 60 percent of the value chain is outsourced to partners. Few companies have effectively managed the myriad of…
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Changing Channels to Market Channels tend to evolve over many years. Sometimes they evolve so slowly that companies fail to see the change and don't adapt their strategies based…
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Alliance Partnerships In recent years, as utilities focused on capital projects to meet projected load growth, managers of supply chains faced a two-front battle –…
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Managing Industrial Channels in Downturn Developing a systematic approach to channel optimization can protect margin without sacrificing the top line
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Commodity Price Volatility Over the next few months, more and more consumers will wake up to sharply higher electricity bills
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Energy Efficiency Several powerful forces have combined to create one of the utility industry's most complex challenges: responding to rapidly growing...
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Getting Channel Marketing Right More systematic approach to allocating marketing resources across sales channels drives top & bottom line value
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One Plan Many Pieces Taking risks in the planning process is an excellent way to reduce other more significant—and potentially costly— risks ..
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Rate Shock: A Matter of If, or When? Better communication will be required in an environment of volatile and rapidly increasing commodity prices.
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Winning Strategy Winning Culture Faced with the challenge of developing a long-term strategy and engaging his organization, the CEO of...
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"The Gulf Coast Restoration Effort" — SPARKS, September 2005 The industry is adopting elements of a new, distributed delivery model. Several utilities are working with customers, partners and regulators to…
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Freshening Up Strategic Planning: More Than Fill-in-the-Blanks A primary purposes of any strategy development process should be to inject fresh thinking into the business:
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"Realizing Promise Of Strategic Sourcing Claims" — National Underwriter, March 2005 "Strategic sourcing" is a cost-reduction method that many insurers have attempted to implement. While they have had successes in lowering…
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"Think Like a CFO, Part I" — Insurance & Technology, December 2004 After years of relative autonomy, senior IT executives at insurance companies are finding themselves increasingly under the thumb of tech-savvy CFOs…
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"Think Like a CFO, Part II: Formulating Answers" — Insurance & Technology, December 2004 In the first installment of this article, we argued that today's CFOs are more comfortable than their predecessors with technology and more inclined…
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Reconstruct Your Business Around Your Customers Despite all the positive changes internet technologies have brought to the business community, companies havehad little success in managing customer…
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Building a Solutions-Based Organization Building a Solutions-Based Organization
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Leadership Learning Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other
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KCPL Interconnects Enterprise More than a decade ago, KCPL started an initiative to improve customer service and enhance energy efficiency...
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Negawatt KCPL's Energy Efficiency forum was a catalyst for community conversation
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The Innovators The pace and magnitude of change facing the energy industry...
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GPE Great Strategy After a series of stumbles, Great Plains Energy has emerged as a model for the utility industry
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KCPL Embraces Scorecard Providing reliable service at a reasonable price should be the goal of all utilities...
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Balanced Scorecard A balanced scorecard is rolled as a key component of our winning culture
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