Articles

As companies are increasingly taking on the challenge of global sustainable development, they are forced to rethink the standard business plan based on increasing consumption of products. Drawing from case studies involving Gage Products, PPG Industries Inc. and Xerox Corp., the author shows that some companies are already building their business plans around services and a few key products, and that they are seeing benefits both to the bottom line and in customer retention and acquisition. The author identifies six keys to the new model: building on existing service strengths, redesigning contracts to redefine the basis of profit to create win-win situations when product consumption is reduced and services are improved, communicating the new business plan to current customers, changing sales incentives, acquiring new organizational skills to ensure a better understanding of consumption, and learning to highlight the potential benefits from taking steps to improve the environment.

Coaching increases performance, productivity and job satisfaction at all levels.

For several years now, marketers have been urged to embrace one-to-one marketing and to offer microsegmented consumers customized products and services through targeted outreach. While the "market of one" approach can pay off, says the author, it requires a significant upfront investment, including: implementing customer relationship management software applications; filtering, enhancing and cleaning customer data; and personalizing interactions (e-mail, billing, offers and so on). These activities take time and coordination of multiple parts of the organization (marketing, customer service, sales, information technology), which can be daunting for companies trying to react quickly to a changing environment. In addition, those systems have often produced disappointing results because their use was not well integrated with corporate strategy. Also, micro-marketing strategy, on its own, is too narrow. Companies still need to reach broad groups of people with messages that are not dependent on an individual's decision to open an envelope (whether virtual or physical), pick up the phone or click on a box. But broad-based, broadcast media is ineffective and expensive. Fortunately, there are alternative solutions, such as one-to-one targeting and the broadcasting of 30-second television spots. The author's research on trends in marketing spending and consumer attitudes about advertising reveals four strategies available to companies that want to reach broad groups of people without breaking their marketing budget. The strategies are liberally illustrated with examples of Nike, Microsoft, UBS, Delta, Sony, Procter & Gamble, Citibank, Nextel, Honda, Nokia and McDonald's, among others.

Conventional wisdom has it that most innovations eventually become commodities, bought on the basis of price and nothing else. Citing a quotation by a Columbia Business School professor that epitomizes that point of view -- "In the long run, everything is a toaster" -- the author uses the technological history of toast to persuasively undermine that notion. Drawing on the wisdom of economists Ronald Coase, Paul Samuelson, John Maynard Keynes and Adam Smith, he makes a historical case that commodity is not destiny, and uses brands such as Starbucks, Evian, Dasani, Scott Paper, Yahoo and Google, Hoover and Dyson to illustrate the point. The danger, he says, is that executives, entrepreneurs and investors may buy into the commodity designation far more often than they should, making the commodity ideology a self-fulfilling prophecy. Businesses that believe that today's breakthrough is tomorrow's toaster understandably fear rapidly diminishing returns from their innovation investments, and the economics of "good enough" innovation become good enough. The potential of ideas is inherently undervalued. Sustainable innovation opportunities are either missed or dismissed. Intense price competition, the author argues, may not signal the prolific presence of substitutable commodities but rather an arid absence of innovation. That signal, he says, should give a clear and present incentive for executives and entrepreneurs to innovate in order to differentiate; to identify hidden or untapped potential for new value creation.

Meetings are a central fact of organizational life. As a vehicle for communication, they can be extremely valuable mechanisms for disseminating vision, crafting strategic plans, and developing responses to challenges and opportunities. They can also be helpful for gathering ideas, brainstorming, and generating higher levels of employee involvement. But too many meetings are seen as a waste of time -- as a source of frustration rather than enlightenment. The authors explore some basic questions: How much time do people really spend in meetings? Are employees burning out from meeting overload? To what extent do people consider their time in meetings unproductive? And how can companies use meeting time better? To answer these questions, they look at a variety of sources: research and application literature; their own experiences working with clients; and data from two multinational studies of employees (including one that provided the basis of an article titled "'Not Another Meeting!' Are Meeting Time Demands Related to Employee Well-Being?" Journal of Applied Psychology 91, no. 1 (2006): 86-96, by Rogelberg, Leach, Warr and Burnfield). Based on these inquiries, they offer insights into the world of meetings and how organizations can use them more effectively.

Contrary to the beliefs of many managers, their companies' product and corporate brands cannot truly be managed, much less owned. That much has become clear in recent years as many well-known brands have seemed to take on lives of their own, changing in the minds of many even though management may think of them as immutable. In this article, the authors introduce the concept of a "brand manifold" in order to bring out two overlooked factors: first, that brands have multiple dimensions depending on who is valuing them, and second, that those dimensions change in space and time. Drawing on automotive industry examples such as Maybach, Morgan, and BMW's Mini, the authors demonstrate the importance of managing a brand's evolution so that the brand does not lose its roots in the past. The article goes on to highlight the importance of understanding that brands have a life and meaning independent of what their initiators intended -- as embodied by the thriving user community around Apple Computer's long-obsolete Newton handheld and evident in the influence of Harley-Davidson owners over many of the company's strategic decisions.

Raises and bonuses are both effective for motivating people, but which is better for eliciting top performance?

Using outside technologies to develop products and licensing intellectual property to external parties will carry a company only so far. The next frontier is to open the business model itself.

Responding to competitive pressures, a growing number of corporate managers are dismantling organizations and cultures that were built on selling particular products and replacing them with new structures designed to be more responsive to customer needs. The push to restructure around customers is more than a new management fad. It is supported by success stories at companies including IBM, Cummins India, Fidelity Investments and Imation. Companies transitioning from product-oriented to customer-centered organizations progress along a continuum. They begin with informal coordination to overcome the deficiencies of product or functional silos, adding integrating functions (such as key account managers and customer segment task forces) as needed. The market logic for becoming customer-focused is often compelling. In surveying 347 companies, the author found that companies that embraced this approach saw accountability for customer relationships improve, and information about customers was more readily shared. These companies were also easier to do business with, according to customers. However, the author found that transforming product-centered cultures can be difficult and that the potential benefits do not necessarily translate into superior performance.

A company's market value actually increases when its known rivals innovate.