A four-year study of Japanese business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce initiatives reveals the innovative ways Japanese corporations exploit traditional aspects of Japanese business and consumer retailing — specifically, the consumer’s preference for paying with cash and the willingness of corporations to form cooperative alliances (the keiretsu model) — to further develop the
Executives who carefully cultivate financial market and business cycle literacy are likely to manage their companies better than those who do not.
Sellers have a view of their industry that their customers lack. But by sharing their unique knowledge, they can win loyalty and improve their pricing power.
Deal making and salesmanship are giving way to creativity and invention as the driving leadership ethos in corporate America.
As customer power grows, innovative companies are moving beyond traditional push marketing and customer relationship management to become full proponents of the customer agenda.
advertisement
In a world of commoditized products, companies are turning to service offerings for growth. The key to success involves redefining markets in terms of customer activities and outcomes, not products and services.
Growth is not perpetual, and its continued pursuit can be costly, especially for large, mature companies. Instead, say the authors, smart managers should acknowledge the natural limits of their company‘s path to growth and consider viable alternatives.
The past decade has seen a virtual explosion of information about customers and their preferences. Many companies have the ability to gauge customers’ willingness to pay for their products and can determine with some accuracy the effect of price changes on sales volumes.
Outsourcing can be more than a tool for cutting costs and improving organizational focus. Increasingly, it is a means of acquiring new capabilities and bringing about fundamental strategic and structural change.
Theory-focused planning helps executives pursue ventures so cutting-edge that no road maps exist. The key is learning from strategic experiments.
advertisement
Many corporate boards adopt a “one size fits all” approach to governance. Instead, they should consider fulfilling the role most needed at any given time.
To better manage technology, a generalist must know it well enough and challenge it often enough to truly understand its potential risks and rewards.
Knowledge management is creating processes not just for learning and retaining what is important but also for avoiding or unlearning what is not.
Most management advice urges companies to undertake frequent and radical change in order to stay competitive. But, says the author, such advice is overprescribed, and those that continue to heed it risk initiative overload, organizational chaos and employee burnout.
The ability to generate an emotional response is the key to any leader’s success. Moses got his people’s undivided attention by putting the fear of a wrathful God in them.
advertisement
Japan’s economy has been in the doldrums for so long that many Japanese seem to have adopted a resigned attitude ofSho ga nai (“That’s life”) toward it. But Japan, of course, can become competitive again, provided its political and corporate leaders take on four difficult but essential tasks.T
It’s not the size of the budget but how it is used that determines success or failure of the enterprise.
A conventional wisdom about teams is that they tend to perform better when members exchange knowledge freely among themselves and outsiders. Another widely accepted notion is that diversity among team members leads to better performance because of the range of viewpoints and experience of the different individuals.
Repricing underwater stock options won't help you hold onto top executives, but it can reduce turnover among lower-level employees. So report Mary Ellen Carter and Luann J. Lynch, who have spent five years studying the controversial practice.
A global survey reveals that focusing explicitly on value is a catalyst that both instigates and manages change.