Cost Leadership for Caustic Readership

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Business Case   Cost Management   CRM   Risk Management   Stakeholder Management   Strategy  

Many sardonically joke that politicians are the best leaders money can buy. Although this is a somewhat critical overgeneralization, there can be a great deal of expense associated with being a leader. We’re all cost-conscious these days though, and those of us with any sort of track record in information technology have experienced firsthand the ups and downs that have transpired in a very short time. To achieve business leadership, however--particularly in today’s economy--we need to have competitive advantage direction from people dedicated to the principles of cost leadership.

Commonly attributed to larger companies having grander resources and thereby broader market scope and greater potential for lowering costs and reducing overhead, cost leadership is a concept championed by company strategist Michael Porter as a successful tactic for companies employing a combination of approaches designed to improve efficiency and reduce customer prices. Not just another tactic promoting cost reduction efforts, cost leadership strategy focuses attention on the ability a company has to create and distribute products that are competitive yet produced with less cost--the argument being that while one can reduce expenses in making customer deliverables, the quality of the deliverables should not be compromised to the point where they are no longer market viable. Cost …

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