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A new, easy-to-use procedure can help marketers determine customers' willingness to pay.

Whether you’re a startup taking on industry giants or a giant moving into markets dominated by powerful incumbents, how do you compete with opponents that have size, strength and history on their side? To prevent opponents from bringing their full strength into play, successful challengers use what authors David B. Yoffie and Mary Kwak of Harvard Business School call judo strategy. Judo strategists avoid head-to-head struggles and other trials of strength, which they are likely to lose. Instead, by relying on speed, agility and creative thinking, they develop strategies that make it difficult for stronger rivals to compete. Judo strategy is most effective when three core principles & #8212; movement, balance and leverage & #8212; are used in combination. But at different stages of competition, a single principle may play a particularly important role. In the early days of a business, for example, before the contours of the competitive landscape have been fully defined, movement typically takes center stage. The authors use Palm Computing (now Palm Inc.) to illustrate judo strategy’s core principle of movement at work. The company dominated the handheld computing market less than a year after shipping its first electronic organizer in early 1996, despite competition from the most powerful software company in the world. Microsoft marshaled masses of money, manpower and marketing muscle behind its own handheld operating system. But year after year, Palm remained far ahead. By mastering the principles of judo strategy and learning to implement them through specific techniques, other companies can emulate the way Palm competed with a stronger opponent. The authors came to that conclusion after studying companies as varied as Juniper Networks, Intuit, Frontier Airlines and Charles Schwab. They caution, however, that judo strategy is not a rigid formula to be followed step by step. Depending on the nature of their competition, companies will combine and implement the principles in different ways. But the basic tenets hold: Stay out of competitors’ sights by deliberately acting harmless (like a puppy dog), define the competitive space to establish the game, and follow through fast to build a big lead before competitors learn how to respond.

All companies would like to offer custom products that delight their customers. For many, the challenges seem overwhelming, and they settle for manufacturing standard products in bulk, guided by long-term forecasts. Because demand is rarely forecast correctly, companies miss potential sales and must pay to store and manage excess product. In an effort to purge inventory, they offer discounts and other incentives. Profits erode, and the companies lose sight of what customers really want. Some companies attempt to offset those effects by optimizing pieces of the value chain. They create island solutions, such as lean factories, believing that such initiatives will make them more responsive. The authors argue that those efforts ultimately fail because they are not customer- centered. Citing results from their research, sponsored by the 3DayCar Programme at Cardiff Business School in Wales and the International Motor Vehicle Program at MIT, they show that island solutions sometimes backfire because they degrade other parts of the value chain. Instead, they urge companies to aim for a true build-to-order strategy, in which managers systematically improve the value chain’s flexibility in three areas: process, product and volume. Because the emphasis at each stage is on how to meet customer demands efficiently, optimization becomes more holistic and ultimately more profitable. To improve process flexibility, companies can link customer requirements directly to production, synchronizing customer-oriented production schedules in real time with suppliers. To improve product flexibility, they can push customization closer to the customer and can use common support structures to reduce the impact of product variety. To improve volume flexibility, the authors suggest ways companies can reduce reliance on full capacity or use differentiated pricing to reward customers for ordering products well in advance. The authors urge managers not to settle for halfhearted transitions to build to order. They recommend two critical first steps: First, understand key aspects of customer demand; second, adjust all processes accordingly. Only then can companies truly implement responsiveness across the value chain.

Although myriad organizational mechanisms exist for integrating geographically dispersed operations, the most effective tool is assembling and nurturing cross-border teams comprised of many nationalities. The resulting diversity can yield significant synergies and produce collective wisdom superior to that of any individual -- each member bringing a unique cognitive lens to the group. However, mastering the management of a global business team calls for confronting several unique challenges that tend to exacerbate the more common problems faced by all teams, point out authors Govindarajan, director of the Center for Global Leadership at Dartmouth College's Tuck School, and Gupta, a professor of strategy and global e-business at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. Of the 70 global business teams studied by the authors, about one-third of the teams rated their performances as largely unsuccessful. How can companies reverse the generally weak performance of faltering global teams? The authors' survey of 58 senior executives from five U.S. and four European multinational organizations reveals some hard-earned insights that may benefit your cross-border endeavors. When global business teams fail, it is often due to a lack of trust among team members. As a result, executives guiding global teams must institute processes that emphasize the cultivation of trust. Also high on the list of culpable factors are the hindrances to communication caused by geographical, cultural and language differences. Even in the case of teams whose members speak the same language, differences in semantics, accents, tone, pitch and dialects can be impediments. To mitigate the corrosive effects of these cross-cultural impediments, executives are advised to carefully craft a cross-border team's charter, composition and process -- with each aspect equally emphasized. The authors elaborate on how these work holistically to increase the odds that your global business teams will become high-performing sources of invaluable multinational experience leading to competitive advantage.

New research shows that among today’s numerous strategic alliances, the most successful are in companies with a department specifically assigned to overseeing alliances. Management professors Jeffrey H. Dyer, Prashant Kale and Harbir Singh came to that conclusion after conducting an in-depth study of 200 corporations and their 1,572 alliances. The number of strategic alliances has increased dramatically over the past decade, with more than 20,000 reported during the last two years alone. On average, the top 500 global companies each participate in 60 major strategic alliances. Fraught with risk, almost half fail. The authors set out to discover why some companies manage alliances effectively when others fail. They found that organizations such as Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Eli Lilly & ; Co. and Parke Davis, which excel at generating value from alliances, have a dedicated strategic-alliance function. Companies with a dedicated function were better at solving problems related to the four key alliance-management elements & #8212; knowledge management, external visibility, internal coordination and accountability. A dedicated function, the authors show, acts as a focal point for learning and for leveraging feedback from prior and ongoing alliances. It systematically establishes processes to articulate, document, codify and share alliance know-how. The authors found that one benefit of creating an alliance function was that it compelled companies to create metrics for evaluating the performance of all their alliances. And regular evaluations alerted senior managers to intervene when a particular alliance was struggling. Many companies with dedicated alliance functions report codifying alliance-management knowledge. They create guidelines to help with specific aspects of the alliance life cycle, such as partner selection or alliance negotiation. Some companies establish training programs, both formal ones and informal ones & #8212; such as roundtables that let managers of various alliances share their experience. When done properly, dedicated alliance functions offer internal legitimacy to alliances, assist in setting strategic priorities and draw on resources across the company. That is why, the authors advise, the function cannot be buried within a particular division or be relegated to low-level support within business development.