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.
The conversation, of which we publish only a [...]

The authors track a strategic decision in a Fortune 500 corporation, identify political obstacles that overshadowed the process, and highlight turning points in the strategy’s direction. The unfolding Techno story provides a close look at the implications for organizing team-based processes and managing the politics of technological change.

Gray market goods — brand name products sold through unauthorized channels — are an increasing threat to multinational companies. The authors present a framework to help select the right approach to coordinating price-setting decisions on the basis of a subsidiary’s local resources and the complexity of a product’s market. Examples of price coordination methods are provided.

During the past decade, Japan’s major source of competitive advantage in the global automotive industry has been its ability to bring new, high-quality products rapidly to market. Simultaneously designing a product and its manufacturing system (often referred to as concurrent or simultaneous engineering of overlapping tasks) is generally seen as the salient characteristic of this [...]

I come from an environment where, if you see a snake, you kill it. At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is go hire a consultant on snakes. Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you discuss it for a couple of years. The most likely course of [...]

Supplier-customer relationships in the United States are changing rapidly. Where once contracts were short-term, arm’s-length relationships, now contracts have increasingly become long term. More and more, suppliers must provide customers with detailed information about their processes, and customers talk of “partnerships” with their suppliers.
Such close relationships between customers and suppliers have had beneficial effects on [...]

Interactions between retailers and their suppliers have often been adversarial, with each trying to gain at the expense of the other. But this long-established pattern is rapidly giving way to cooperation, with both sides working together to streamline the distribution channel system. Examples of channel partnerships cover the full spectrum of contemporary retailing. Perhaps most [...]