MIT Sloan Management Review

A global survey reveals that focusing explicitly on value is a catalyst that both instigates and manages change.

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

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.

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.

To sustain excellence, companies need dual strategies —one for the present and one for the future.

Every decade or two, a big idea in management thinking takes hold and becomes widely accepted. The next big idea must enable businesses to improve the hit rate of strategic initiatives and attain the level of renewal necessary for successful execution. Scientific research on complex adaptive systems has identified principles that apply to living things, from amoebae to organizations. Four principles relevant to strategic work at Royal Dutch/Shell are outlined.

How Allen Bradley Canada and its suppliers collaborated and learned from each other through shared resources and experiences.

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.

Simulation tools can help family and nonfamily business leaders link their thinking to their feelings, strategic plans to relationships, and issues of strategy and stewardship to ownership.

On October 28, 1994, the MIT Sloan School and Price Waterhouse cohosted a roundtable discussion among CEOs, PW partners, and Sloan faculty. Walter Kiechel, then managing editor of Fortune, moderated the discussion, which focused on the organization in the year 2020 — its size, structure, leadership, and mission.T