Several years ago at IBM Credit Corporation, arriving at a quote for computer financing involved five business functions and, on average, took seven days — even though customers and sales representatives were anxiously awaiting the outcome. Now, coming up with a quote takes six hours, largely because one person handles the entire deal from start [...]

The success stories of total quality management (TQM) are well known. They include such companies as Xerox, Allen-Bradley, Motorola, Marriott, Harley-Davidson, Ford, and Hewlett-Packard. These companies committed themselves wholeheartedly to TQM; they made fundamental changes in their management practices and philosophies and improved product quality and company performance.
But more often, companies that have tried to [...]

The opening sentence and central thesis of Paul Adler and Robert Cole’s article are difficult to disagree with — “A consensus is emerging that the hallmark of tomorrow’s most effective organizations will be their capacity to learn” [see “Designed for Learning: A Tale of Two Auto Plants,” Spring 1993, reprint 3436]. In these times of [...]

The author presents strategies for negotiating with people from other cultures in a framework based on each party’s level of familiarity with the other’s culture and the extent to which they can explicitly coordinate their strategies. These factors determine the subset of strategies that are realistically feasible for an individual manager. Part 2 (HBSP product number xxxx) (Reprint 3537 in the Spring 1994 issue) describes a methodology for choosing among these strategies.

Among recent innovations in financial management, the concept of the corporate bank ranks high for a number of prominent companies that have changed their attitude toward finance from basically reactive to decidedly proactive. The corporate bank has altered the status of their finance teams from largely staff to nearly line and has facilitated a new [...]

During the past decade, articles and books on the virtues and potential of information technology (IT) and information systems (IS) to provide new sources of advantage for business operations have besieged managers.1 Indeed, the operative phrase today is “IT changes the way we do business.” These publications either have developed intuitively appealing prescriptive frameworks that [...]

The machine tool business is an exemplar of beleaguered U.S. high-technology industries. In the early 1980s, most machine tool companies responded to the recession by slashing output. This left the door open for foreign machine tool builders to establish a strong presence in the U.S. market by bringing in cheaper, standardized products, most of which [...]

The controller’s work has become too specialized. Analyzing an organization’s financial records and balance sheet, although important, does not provide management with an accurate assessment of the firm’s capabilities. In an increasingly turbulent environment, in which organizations are becoming more dependent on external constituencies for resources, the role and activities of the controller need to [...]