Articles

In recent years, a "postcompany" school of business experts has argued that leaps in information technology have made possible a new world of seamless collaboration among businesses, one that will bring enormous gains in efficiency and flexibility. Indeed, the experts counsel, executives should look for opportunities to tear down the "walls" around their organizations, merging their companies into amorphous "enterprise networks" or "business webs." The author concedes that the universal IT infrastructure that has been developed over the past decade does create pressures to homogenize business processes and organizations. But he warns that it is dangerous for companies to assume that the "death of distance" brought about by new communications technologies will mean the death of the company. New technologies will never conquer cutthroat competition, and managers need to be wary of alliances, outsourcing contracts and specialization initiatives that foreclose opportunities for advantage and put long-term profitability at risk. Companies will always need the walls they have so carefully erected over the years to protect their advantages.

Can innovative partnerships increase store traffic and improve the retail revenue stream?

Tapping traditional Asian values can instill cross-cultural managerial capabilities.

For the past couple of decades, companies have focused on creating strong leaders of business units and influential heads of functions & #8212; men and women responsible for achieving results in one corner of an organization. But they have not paid as much attention to a more important challenge: developing leaders who see the enterprise as a whole and act for its greater good. And that perspective has become increasingly necessary as companies seek to provide not just products but broad-based customer solutions. The author explores the three key questions that companies must answer in order to link strategy to leadership development: What are the key elements of the enterprise leader’s job? Why is learning to lead at the enterprise level such a difficult challenge? And what can companies do to identify and develop enterprise leaders? He illustrates his points with examples from PricewaterhouseCoopers, Canada’s RBC Financial Group, IBM and others.

Measuring learning instead of short-term results is key.

Offshoring, the increasingly common practice among U.S. and European companies of migrating business processes overseas to India, the Philippines, Ireland, China and elsewhere, is often seen as a negative phenomenon that suppresses domestic job markets. On the contrary, says the author, offshoring is a critical component of next-generation business design, a dynamic process of continually identifying how to deliver superior value to customers and shareholders. Companies such as General Electric, Intel, J.P. Morgan Chase, Allstate, Prudential, Dell, Cisco and Motorola have all adopted it in some form as they shift their managerial frames of reference toward the requirements of the global-network era. Companies would do well, the author advises, to think rationally -- not emotionally -- about offshoring's relevant issues: What are their core competencies? What form of governance is optimal? How will work will be distributed and integrated?

By one informed estimate from the late 1990s, three-quarters of the Fortune 100's total market capitalization was represented by intangible assets, such as patents, copyrights and trademarks. In this environment, cautions the author, IP management cannot be left to technology managers or corporate legal staff alone -- it must be a matter of concern for functional and business-unit leaders as well as a corporation's most senior officers. To realize the full value of their companies' intellectual property, top executives must seek answers to the following questions: How can the company use intellectual property rights to gain and sustain competitive advantage? How do IP rights affect the industry's structure? What options do IP rights offer vis-à-vis competitors? How can IP rights grant incumbency advantage and establish barriers to entry? How can IP rights help the company gain vertical power along the value chain? What organizational design accommodates an IP strategy most effectively? The author explores each question, drawing on such company examples as Nokia, Motorola, Novo Nordisk and Leo Pharma, in the process helping lead intellectual property rights out of their shadowy existence in patent and legal departments.

How can companies ensure that their data warehouse delivers as promised?

Markets develop according to the specific paths by which innovations in a given field occur.

Consumer-centered product design is an emerging best practice in many industries, particularly those characterized by practical products that hold no emotional appeal; or in which competition is based on increasingly less profitable attempts to cut cost or improve performance; or in which once distinctive products are becoming commoditized; or in which there is little room left for product innovation. Among the best practitioners, design is understood to be a core activity conferring competitive advantage by bringing to light the emotional meaning products and services have, or could have, for consumers and extracting the high value of such emotional connections. The authors discuss how companies such as Master Lock, Procter & ; Gamble, BMW and Cambridge SoundWorks have employed design research -- including the use of multidisciplinary teams and a variety of ethnographic and psychophysiological techniques -- to build organizationwide identification with the customers' needs and aspirations, keeping everyone's eyes on the same prize.