Articles

Managers don't need any more vague advice about paying better attention to customers. They need the practical, step-by-step methods described in this article. In 1990, a medical equipment manufacturer needed to redesign one of its products to beat an aggressive competitor. It used a method called the "House of Quality," which related market research information directly to product design, thereby helping the company focus effectively on the most important product benefits. The new design revolutionized the product and was a phenomenal success. Here's how the company did it.

To decide whether to pursue a global strategy, you need to examine industry dynamics

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.