Companies that relate to customers well make customer retention a priority; use metrics, incentives and structure to produce the proper “configuration”

Companies see leadership ability as essential to organizational success, yet speeches and investments have often failed to create a pipeline of leaders. The authors have identified three pathologies at the root of many leadership-development failures, noting that companies that make leadership development a core business process can overcome the pathologies and prepare the individuals and teams they will need to take their organizations to greater heights.

A small but growing number of Fortune 500 enterprises are seeking to license their core technology assets to other companies - and the practitioners of strategic licensing are betting that any loss of market exclusivity will be more than offset by the financial and strategic benefits gained. Based on interviews with the pioneer practioners of this approach and on the benefits they now reap, the author feels that strategic-licensing initiatives are encouraging managers to rethink what it means to create and sustain competitive advantage in business.

The business story of the 1980s and ’90s was, in large measure, the story of commoditization. Globally, in one market after another, companies large and small learned techniques for producing high-quality goods and services at competitive prices, and found they could compete with the most powerful and seemingly entrenched incumbents. Companies that successfully emerged from [...]

I am shocked,shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” The disingenuousness of Captain Renault’s outrage in the movieCasablanca isn’t lost on the audience, who know that Renault knows exactly what has been going on in Rick’s Café. It’s only after being pressured to shut down the establishment that Renault feigns shock.
As the [...]

Open-source software development projects — Internet-based communities of software developers who voluntarily collaborate in order to develop software that they or their organizations need — have become an important economic and cultural phenomenon. Sourceforge.net, a major infrastructure provider and repository for such projects, lists more than 10,000 of them and more than 300,000 registered users. [...]

Disrupting a strongly anchored organizational identity can often be fatal, but the authors feel that escaping its restrictions is possible — through evolution (a gradual strategic and organizational change) and revolution (change bursting up through a companies‘ outer layers). The authors have developed an “identity audit” to recognize conflicts and initiate identity change in order to better adapt. By regularly assessing how well their identity fits with current business conditions, companies can rethink their identity before it becomes obsolete.

The authors describe six ways that supply-chain management can spur more creative thinking on growing a business and provide opportunities for redefining of the competitive landscape during the next decade. The authors predict more supplier integration and a proliferation of product customization, business complexity and uniquely defined customer relationships. Companies across the chain will find that value propositions deriving from supply-chain capabilities make cobranding and copositioning strategies critical.

Companies are increasingly rethinking the fundamental ways in which they generate ideas and bring them to market -- harnessing external ideas while leveraging their in-house R&D outside their current operations.

If they wish to achieve profitable, sustainable growth, suppliers seeking a larger share of their customers‘ wallets need a fine-grained, disciplined approach to getting, leveraging and documenting customer knowledge. Best-practice suppliers such as Bank of America Corp., SEGHERS, Technische Unie, KLM Cargo and Telindus follow a strategy predicated on rigorously estimating the current share of each customer‘s business, selecting and pursuing appropriate opportunities to increase that share, and carefully documenting the profitability of the efforts.

For purposeful action taking at work, managers must move beyond motivation, engaging their willpower and crossing a personal Rubicon to deep commitment. The researchers have studied companies such as ConocoPhillips, Lufthansa and Micro Mobility Systems of Switzerland and find that five strategies can help create the right environment. The authors feel managers should build a persistent organizational commitment on the foundation of personal ownership of and commitment to specific initiatives and goals.

For many product-oriented companies, establishing a corporate consultancy can be a good first step toward a more solutions-based orientation. As Ericsson, Shell and AT&T, among others, illustrate, the consulting unit can take a number of forms dictated by its key knowledge base and its relation to the product businesses‘ value chain. The challenge is to determine how similar the consulting unit should be to the parent company in identity, mission and structure.

Recommendations for reforming boards and redefining the role of directors must acknowledge that directors need sufficient information and the means to analyze it in order to monitor board actions. The author urges information be provided as detailed discounted-cash-flow (DCF) valuation models — forcing management to translate its vision into specific numbers that show how shareholder value will be created, and forcing boards to continually monitor and evaluate those numbers in light of ongoing financial performance and stock market valuation.