During the past several years, the business community has been fascinated by a debate over the functioning of capital markets and the need for market reform. Contributing to the debate are a variety of academics, investors, financial commentators, and government policymakers who, through published reports and research, are challenging the conventional wisdom of market efficiency [...]

In 1994, U.S. health care expenditures approached $1 trillion, of which private businesses paid a substantial portion. While the debates on regulatory measures to contain these costs have not been resolved, the market has responded decisively to pressures from increased health care spending, evidenced by the broad shift to managed care. This trend has moved [...]

Just a few years ago, business process reengineering seemed to be the answer to many managers’ prayers. Managers everywhere faced huge gaps between the performance of their organizations and their best competitors. The gaps were so large that they seemed unbridgeable by tried-and-true methods like incremental improvement and total quality management. Something more was needed, [...]

Breezy Services Company, a medium-sized service provider, was in trouble.1 New entrants threatened its domination of particular market segments, and competitors attacked its customer base. Its business practices and information systems infrastructure were decades old, and there was little hope of enhancing the company’s existing (or legacy) systems to support innovative products or services. And, [...]

Major business reengineering efforts represent an organization’s commitment of millions of dollars for redesigning internal organizational processes, changing fundamental product delivery and customer service procedures, and often reexamining and repositioning corporate strategy. These efforts are inevitably accompanied by millions of dollars for replacing the information infrastructure and developing new application code to support the new [...]

In the 1970s, Theodore Levitt presented a “production-line approach to service” as the remedy for the sector’s problems of inefficient operations and dissatisfied customers. He argued that the secrets of the production-line approach could be discovered, quite simply, by looking at the world of manufacturing. Industrial practices such as the simplification of tasks and the [...]

Marketing was easier when the economy was expanding and consumer disposable income was growing. For three decades after World War II, marketing strategies generally were built around the development of growth markets. Satisfying customers was important, but never as important as it has become in the nineties, with the competitive pressures of largely static markets. [...]