How can a company successfully attack an established market leader? How can it find new ways to compete that everyone else has missed? By breaking the rules of the game in its industry to find new sources of innovation, says this author. In a study of thirty successful attackers, he identified five ways that they think about and develop a new game plan.

Because companies’ relationships with employees, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders have changed, traditional accounting-based performance-measurement systems are obsolete. They lack the focus to evaluate intangibles — service, innovation, employee relations and flexibility. Companies that take a stakeholder approach to performance measurement can first capture strategic-planning issues, then can leverage their strategic-planning choices to create an optimal design for performance-measurement systems.

Do temporary events lead to permanent changes in market positions? For example, will the confrontation with Greenpeace at the Brent Spar oil rig in the summer of 1995 permanently damage Royal Dutch Shell’s image and market standing? Do market share positions gradually build over time or are they conquered in short spurts?
Hysteresis is a phenomenon [...]

How to best extract value from information technology (IT) resources is a major challenge facing both business and IT managers, particularly as they turn their focus from searching for the competitive benefits of strategic information systems and striving for benefits beyond process reengineering. At the same time, managers are beginning to synthesize lessons from nearly [...]

The quality of listening has an impact on the quality of service. Firms intent on improving service need to listen continuously to three types of customers: external customers who have experienced the firm’s service; competitors’ customers who the firm would like to make its own; and internal customers (employees) who depend on internal services to [...]

Creating a business-driven IT infrastructure requires that executives thoroughly understand their firm’s strategic context. By formulating a series of business and IT maxims — short simple statements of the business’s positions — managers can identify the IT infrastructure service suited to their company. Organizational, political, cultural, and reward system issues, as well as a lack of IT leadership, may form implementation barriers.

Variability in orders along the supply chain can plague companies trying to eliminate excess inventory, forecast product demand or just improve efficiency. Four factors create a bullwhip effect that distorts demand information. To counteract the distortion, companies need to avoid multiple demand-forecast updates, break order batches, stabilize prices and eliminate gaming in shortage situations. This seminal article shows how supply and demand get out of sync and what to do about it.