Articles

Line managers are increasingly assuming responsibility for planning, building, and running information systems that affect their operations. This is forcing organizations to evaluate how they allocate IT decision-making responsibilities. This paper describes a conceptual framework and an intervention process that can help firms devise and implement an effective IT management architecture. The authors illustrate their methods with real world examples.

Do you consider distribution and inventory costs when you design products? Can you keep your customers informed of when their orders will arrive? Do you know what kind of inventory-control systems your dealers use? If not, you've succumbed to the pitfalls of inventory management. You're not alone. Manufacturers have been concentrating on quality of incoming materials and outgoing products, but they haven't been paying as much attention to the costs associated with transporting and storing them. Lee and Billington describe fourteen pitfalls of supply-chain management and some corresponding opportunities. The more complex your network of suppliers, manufacturers and distributors, the more likely you can gain operational efficiencies by attending to inventory.

What happens if an applicant for a job in your firm has a disability -- is blind or infected with HIV or epileptic? Will you know how to treat that applicant without discrimination? The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed to make sure that the 15 million disabled people not already covered by antidiscrimination legislation would be assessed for jobs on their skills and abilities, not on their disabilities. This article will help you begin to plan for the day that applicant walks in your door.

In recent years, businesses have rushed to adopt an empowerment approach to service delivery in which employees face customers "free of rulebooks," encouraged to do whatever is necessary to satisfy them. But that approach may not be right for everyone. Bowen and Lawler look at the benefits and costs of empowering employees, the range of management practices that empower employees to varying degrees, and key business characteristics that affect the choice of approaches. Managers need to make sure that there is a good fit between their organizational needs and their approach to frontline employees.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 marked the end of the old contest between capitalism and communism; the integration of the European Common Market on 1 January 1993 will mark the beginning of a new economic contest. At that moment, for the first time in more than a century, the United States will become the second largest economy in the world. Japan, Europe, the United States -- who will own the twenty-first century? This article is adapted from Thurow's book, "Head to Head: Coming Economic Battles among Japan, Europe, and America" (William Morrow, 1992).

Good decision making required more than knowledge of facts, concepts, and relationships. It also requires metaknowledge -- an understanding of the limits of our knowledge. Unfortunately, we tend to have a deeply rooted overconfidence in our beliefs and judgments. Because metaknowledge is not recognized or rewarded in practice, nor instilled during formal education, overconfidence has remained a hidden flaw in managerial decision making. This paper examines the costs, causes, and remedies for overconfidence. It also acknowledges that, although overconfidence distorts decision making, it can serve a purpose during decision implementation.

Many articles exhort service firm managers to empower workers and first-line supervisors, exploit technology, focus on the customer, and, above all, provide outstanding service. This article proposes a framework to help you evaluate your company's competitive standing in each of these areas. It discusses four types of companies on a continuum, from the company that is simply "available for service" to the firm that delivers world class service. The authors focus on operations, the function that controls the service encounter, and apply the manufacturing strategy paradigm to services as a means of implementing change.

It's a marketer's dream -- the ability to develop interactive relationships with individual customers. Technology, in the form of the database, is making this dream a reality. Now companies can keep track of customer preferences and tailor advertising and promotions to those needs. For instance, a grocery store system could note that you recently purchased a sample size of dishwashing detergent and could offer you a coupon to buy the large size. Blattberg and Deighton explore the impact of this development on marketing practice and give practical advice on designing a marketing database and staffing an interactive marketing department. They also address customer fears and the public debate over marketing and privacy.

How well do upper-level managers manage their own managers? Not very well, argue Longenecker and Gioia, after interviewing 261 managers in eighteen organizations. These people felt they needed more guidance, clearer feedback, more carefully established goals, more discussion of their management styles, and more useful performance appraisals, among other things. At a time when many companies are eliminating whole layers of management, and careers are derailed for mediocre performance, managers are understandably anxious about how to improve their performance, and whether anyone's noticing when they do. The authors describe ten myths of managing managers and provide senior managers with a list of ten recommendations for changing their behavior and, ultimately, improving their organization's overall performance.

It has long been a marketing axiom that customers buy bundles of satisfaction, not products. It follows, then, that they'll respond to certain combinations of products and services -- air conditioners with free installation, combinations of software packages, or season tickets with parking privileges. The difficulty is in devising the bundles that both appeal to consumers and give cost or demand enhancing benefits to the producers. Eppen, Hanson, and Martin argue that the best approach is to treat bundles not as marketing gimmicks but as new products. They offer seven guidelines for creating competitive bundles and a framework for implementing them.