By Thomas H. Davenport and James E. Short
AT THE TURN of the century, Frederick Taylor revolutionized the workplace with his ideas on work organization, task decomposition, and job measurement. Taylor’s basic aim was to increase organizational productivity by applying to human labor the same engineering principles that had proven so successful in solving the technical problems in the work environment. The same [...]
By Leonard L. Berry, Valarie A. Zeithaml and A. Parasuraman
THE DOWNTOWN Chicago Marriott hotel had been open for fifteen years before its management determined that two-thirds of all guest calls to housekeeping were to request ironing boards. This discovery prompted the idea of simply placing irons and ironing boards in all of the hotel’s guest rooms, an idea that would cost $20,000. The hotel [...]
By David Aaker
BRAND EXTENSIONS have been the core of strategic growth for a variety of firms during the past decade. The power of such a strategy is evidenced by the sheer numbers. Each year from 1977 to 1984, 120 to 175 totally new brands were introduced into American supermarkets. In each of those years, approximately 40 percent [...]
