Articles

Why does the outsourcing of IT frequently fail to produce the expected cost savings or other benefits? Perhaps because managers don't carefully select which IT activities to outsource. The authors examined sixty-two sourcing decisions at forty organizations through interviews with senior business executives, CIOs, consultants, and vendor account managers. From their data, they developed a set of frameworks to clarify sourcing options and aid managers in deciding which IT functions to contract out and which to retain in-house.

Positioning products in a complex market can be one of a company's most difficult decisions. In determining whether to combine or maintain separate product lines, Hewlett-Packard used an approach it calls strategic market modeling (SMM) to design "what if" scenarios and run simulations to predict market behavior. SMM combines demographic, user needs, and competitive perception data into a database for testing alternative positioning strategies. The author describes HP's development of SMM and the lessons learned.

The international data highway will transform business education, although not necessarily its traditional supplier, the business school. Will the business school remain insulated from the knowledge revolution? Will it play a leadership role? Will it wither away? Two scenarios, one based on assumptions about education and the other on assumptions about research, are intended to help business schools and their stakeholders recognize the inevitability of change and envision what this new world might look like.

Many firms commonly place expatriate women in positions abroad, yet know little about the women's job adjustment and performance. The authors have studied in depth the factors that help and hinder foreign women in one particularly difficult environment -- Japan -- and found that, while women can be successful and bring some advantages to the assignment, they face special challenges. Based on the findings from their study, the authors suggest how firms can increase the effectiveness of foreign women in assignments abroad.

How can a corporate executive balance social and economic pressures when social activists and corporate investors are the same people? This is the quandary Amoco Corporation faced when investors repeatedly filed proxy resolutions requesting adoption of the Valdez Principles, ten environmental principles developed by the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES). The author describes the evolution of the relationship between CERES and Amoco. He shows how Amoco responded strategically to investor activism with corporate activism. He also discusses the three factors determining a company's response to investor activism: the firm's culture, the power and influence of the group filing the resolution, and the political climate in which the resolution is filed. Ultimately, responding to investor activism becomes an important aspect of integrating political strategy into competitive strategy.

Executives today face many difficult, potentially explosive situations in which they must make decisions that can help or harm their firms, themselves, and others. How can they improve the ethical quality of their decisions? How can they ensure that their decisions will not backfire? The authors discuss three types of theories -- theories about the world, theories about other people, and theories about ourselves -- that will help executives understand how they make the judgments on which they base their decisions. By understanding those theories, they can learn how to make better, more ethical decisions.

Using a historical method, the authors try to determine why pioneeers fail and early leaders succeed.

As original equipment manufacturers reevaluate whether to make or buy parts for their products under conditions of intense competition, small to medium-size manufacturers that specialize in producing well-defined types of products have a unique opportunity to become world-class competitors. The authors present a prescriptive approach for staying or becoming a successful parts supplier. They follow a printed circuit board manufacturer, Hadco Corporation, along the four different paths suggested by the strategic supplier typology they developed from a survey of 200 New Hampshire manufacturers.

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In their Fall 1995 article, the authors discussed the four elements necessary to establish a behavioral context that rejuvenates a company's employees -- discipline, support, trust, and stretch. In this sequel, they trace the common threads in successful companies' transformation processes -- simplification, integration, and regeneration. In an extensive study, they discovered that carefully phased or sequenced processes were more effective than sudden frenzied commitment to the latest management fad. Along with a phased approach, the successful companies recognized that the real challenge in transformation was to change people's attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors. Only when managers committed to the long-term effort required to establish the four characteristics necessary for a new behavioral environment were they able to create companies that could renew themselves.