Articles

It's not easy to negotiate cross-culturally. Not only do we tend to misunderstand the behavior of the other party, we often don't realize how deep behavior differences go. Americans have read that Japanese typically respond to direct questions with vague answers and silence. But that's only part of the story. This paper tells the rest. The authors explain how Japanese behavior is significantly tied to context. They describe the important cultural mechanisms that affect this context and offer suggestions for Americans who want to handle these situations more effectively.

Are there opportunities for MNCs in Africa? These authors suggest that multinationals move with caution, but for the firms willing to make serious, long-term commitments, the rewards are there. They provide some practical suggestions for marketing and structuring an African operation.

Individual products are the offspring of product platforms that are enhanced over time. Product families and their successive platforms are themselves the applied result of a firm's underlying core capabilities. In well-managed firms, such core capabilities tend to be of much longer duration and broader scope than single product families or individual products. The authors recommend a longer run focus on enhancing core capabilities, which includes identifying what they are and how they are applied and synthesized in new products.

How can managers of salesforces improve the performance of their sales personnel? These authors suggest that, in the specialized area of personal selling, a combination of transactional and transformational leadership will help them to achieve better results. They present ways to recruit leaders with transformational qualities and develop leadership skills in current employees.

Vertical integration is a risky strategy -- complex, expensive, and hard to reverse. Yet some companies jump into it without an adequate analysis of the risks. The authors have developed a framework to help managers decide when it's useful to vertically integrate and when it's not. They examine four common reasons to integrate and warn managers against a number of other, spurious reasons. Their primary advice: don't vertically integrate unless it is absolutely necessary to create or protect value.

CIOs seeking advice on new software process technologies can learn from other domains.

Many business analysts have attributed the loss of U.S. market share in the semiconductor industry to unfair Japanese practices, including trade barriers and "dumping" of goods in export markets. Egelhoff draws from a study of sample semiconductor firms to argue that the market share losses have also been influenced by the distinctly different competitive modes that U.S. and Japanese firms use. U.S. firms tend to compete by developing a unique business strategy; Japanese firms tend to compete by implementing not-so-unique strategies better than anyone else. He shows how these two competitive styles have implications for a range of business activities and for other global industries as well.

One of the most enduring ideas of organization theory is that an organization's structure and management process must "fit" its environment, in the same way that a particular horse might be more suited to one course than another. Ghoshal and Nohria show the continued relevance of this classic insight for the organization of multinational corporations. They offer a simple scheme to classify the environment and structure of MNCs. Then, based on data on forty-one large MNCs, they show how some combinations of environment and structure fir better than others. What drives fit is the principle of requisite complexity -- the complexity of a firm's structure must match the complexity of its environment. Though developed for MNCs, their argument can also apply to multidivisional firms that operate in different markets or business segments.

If you put a dog in a green room and give it electric shocks, it learns to steer clear of that room. But what if the green room is organizational change, and people are so afraid of past experiences with it that they won't try anything new? In this article, Schein unravels the key psychological elements that inhibit or promote change. His primary goal is to help organizations not only to change, but to change faster, in order to keep up with the rapidly shifting environment. He begins with abstract concepts of learning and then outlines a change management procedure that leaders can use to help their organizations change and, ultimately, to develop perpetually learning organizations. This paper is based on an invited address to the World Economic Forum, 6 February 1992, Davos, Switzerland.

Shouldn't quantitative analysis -- the results of which influence many managerial decisions -- be held to "total quality" and "zero defect" standards? The author suggests that managers become exacting consumers of quantitative analysis, demanding and creating the proper environment for a high-quality product without logical or methodological defects. He shows managers how they can become more effective users of analysis, he identifies the ingredients of a sound quantitative analysis methodology, and he recommends ways to improve the quality of analysis in organizations.