A BANK. FORECLOSED on a loan and took control of a small piece of real estate. The .property was later found to be contaminated with hazardous wastes and, after a long-drawn-out court case, the bank was held liable for half a million dollars.

The manager of a large manufacturing conglomerate’s subsidiary was notified by the head [...]

SERVICE TECHNOLOGIES have radically reordered the power relationships, competitive environments, and leverageable opportunities in most industries — whether in services or manufacturing. In the process, they are obliterating long-held precepts about management itself and creating entirely new strategic, organizational, and control system options for achieving competitive advantage. What are some of the more important management [...]

SERVICE TECHNOLOGIES are not just revolutionizing internal organizational configurations. They are restructuring whole industries’—and nations’—entire competitive postures. Service technologies now provide sufficient scale economies, flexibility, efficiency, and specialization potentials that outside vendors can supply many important corporate functions at greatly enhanced value and lower cost. Thus many of these functions should often be outsourced. Strategically [...]

OVER THE PAST DECADE, senior managers in banking, insurance, health care, and other service industries have invested billions of dollars in computers and communication equipment—technology investments that promise to hone operations into an acute competitive weapon. But executives have been deluded; the payoffs have not been fully realized.

Recent studies by the American Quality & Productivity [...]