IN THE PRESS, managers trumpet the success of new technologies. But all too often the private answer to “How is the new equipment working?” is “Badly.” Managers lament that their experience is living proof of Murphy’s famous Law: “Whatever can go wrong, will.” Yet the introduction of new technology is essential for long-term survival. Several [...]

DOES THIS SOUND familiar? A large retail company (or bank or fast food chain) designs its customer contact positions to be filled by people who are willing, at least temporarily, to work for wages marginally above statutory minimums. It simplifies the jobs, reducing them to a series of repetitive, boring tasks that require minimal training. [...]

UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER expectations is a prerequisite for delivering superior service; customers compare perceptions with expectations when judging a firm’s service.1 However, the nature of customer service expectations and how they are formed has remained ambiguous. Researchers have defined customer service expectations in a variety of ways but with no conceptual framework to link different types [...]

Another area in which U.S. firms have often lagged behind their overseas competitors is in exploiting the potential for continuous improvement in the quality and reliability of their products and processes. The cumulative effect of successive incremental improvements and modification to established products and processes can be very large and may outpace efforts to achieve [...]

Business negotiations law is increasingly infused with ethical considerations. The author outlines the basic elements of legal fraud, illustrating the evolving concepts with numerous cases in which negotiators have been penalized for what some consider merely unethical behavior.