Scholars and observers from disciplines as disparate as sociology, economics, and management science agree that a transformation has occurred — knowledge is at center stage.1 Knowledge is information combined with experience, context, interpretation, and reflection.
When companies downsize, managers need to consider how to bolster their employees’ morale in order to maintain productivity and engender flexibility. The authors propose a four-stage approach — gleaned from interviews and surveys — that will mitigate worker mistrust and disempowerment and will, they say, help build a better company.
Strategy in many companies seems to have gone astray, and the author has identified the reason: Managers are focusing on it in isolation instead of establishing the preconditions to successful strategy innovation. Only those companies that are constantly able to reinvent themselves will survive. The author shows how to improve strategy making and create wealth through a pluralistic process, collaboration across industries and market experimentation.
Why do companies frequently make bad investment decisions and continue to blunder, even after the weaknesses in their capital budgeting analyses are evident? Because, say the authors, they don’t integrate capital budgeting into their overall strategy. To address this, the authors present a framework for dynamic capital budgeting that can help managers make intelligent investment decisions with a long-term strategy in mind.
Commitment and competence are embedded in how each employee thinks about and does his or her work and in how a company is organized to accomplish work. This intellectual capital is, according to the author, a firm’s only appreciable asset. He outlines three ways to build employee commitment and five tools for increasing competence in a firm, site, business and plant.
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The experiences of an Italian copper-products company yield lessons for firms engaged in global mergers and acquisitions.
Increased global competition means that industry and government must work together to ensure that manufacturers have support networks of transportation, telecommunications, services, and knowledge centers.