As adapting to globalization becomes increasingly necessary, business customers are pressuring suppliers to accept global-pricing contracts. By exploring why customers want GPCs, under what circumstances the contracts are likely to profit suppliers, and how to successfully implement contracts, the authors identify preparation as the key to success.
Many manufacturers today are concerned with the inefficient manufacturing and delivery practices of their company’s suppliers. Before pointing a finger accusingly at their suppliers, however, perhaps they should examine their own policies and procedures. Any manufacturer can learn this lesson from U.S.
How can a company continually generate new knowledge and pump it throughout its network? Success, say the authors, depends less on its IT infrastructure than on the social system in which its people operate. Focusing on Nucor Corp.’s success in the 1980s and 1990s, the authors explain how all companies can maximize knowledge sharing by setting stretch goals, providing incentives, cultivating empowerment, and encouraging experimentation.
Today’s workforce is increasingly made up of volunteers — at least in spirit if not in fact. How will the traditional management tasks of motivating and directing employees change in the face of that new reality? The authors answer this question by examining an example of an economic enterprise that acts in many ways like a voluntary organization: the open-source software movement.
Companies such as Lego, British Petroleum, Baxter, Virgin and Unilever are reversing the law of diminishing returns by redefining their businesses and then practicing a powerful kind of customer focus. The author reveals six vital components for successful strategy based on customer focus, urging managers to leave behind transactional, linear thinking for a focus on increasing returns.
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Consumers make Internet buying decisions on the basis of trust. How much trust your Web site needs to deliver depends on the nature of your products, competitive pressure from new infomediaries and your ability to innovate.
How do General Electric, Hewlett-Packard and Johnson & Johnson keep a steady stream of leaders moving up? By focusing on the five essentials of leadership development.