MIT Sloan Management Review

If we are living in the New Economy of the new millennium, why are U.S. labor laws mired in the New Deal of the 1930s? Employers are well aware that the anomalies exist and are increasing daily. It’s the legislators who are shirking the mind-boggling chore of modernization.
Two recent government rulings are illustrative: The National [...]

A major paper manufacturing company built a $500 million plant. Unlike some companies, it had been quite careful about the plant’s environmental requirements. It had painstakingly evaluated its obligations and had installed new environmental controls. The company’s environmental manager had worked with the project manager to get the needed permits in time and to be [...]

In 1997, U.S. federal agents launched a series of no-warning searches at the offices of Columbia/HCA, the largest for-profit health care provider in the United States, looking for evidence of improper charges billed to the federal government’s Medicare program. The chairman’s public comment that “government investigations are matter-of-fact in health care” sat poorly with the [...]

Many companies spend significant time and effort developing a mission statement — complete with vision, values, goals, and strategies. Ask managers whether their firm’s mission statement lives in the company day-to-day or whether it lies neglected in someone’s desk drawer. In too many instances, the truthful answer is: “The vision is more rhetoric than real.”
This [...]

How could a team of decent, hardworking, normally law-abiding managers find themselves facing fines, jail time, the loss of their jobs, and ultimately the loss of the company they managed? In making executive decisions, these managers were not deliberately trying to evade the intent of the law, defraud anyone, harm the environment, or act in [...]

More than fifty years ago, economist Joseph Schumpeter described the dynamic pattern in which innovative upstarts unseat established firms through a process he called “creative destruction.”1 While most twentieth century economists have focused on competition under conditions of static equilibrium, Schumpeter insisted that disequilibrium was the driving force of capitalism. The theme of creative destruction [...]

If you ask most Americans what they know about the Endangered Species Act (ESA), they will likely respond, “the spotted owl.” This Pacific Northwest controversy epitomizes the conflict between jobs and the environment that the ESA has come to symbolize. To protect the spotted owl, large tracts of federal lands were withheld from logging, the [...]

After studying IT management practices in various companies, the authors identify three assets important for using IT as a competitive tool. The human asset is an IT staff that consistently addresses business opportunities; the technology asset is sharable technical platforms and databases; the relationship asset implies the risk and responsibility sharing between the IT and business staffs. The authors discuss the interdependencies among the three assets, using many examples from their study, and offer ways to formulate an action plan based on a company’s position relative to its competition.

Corporations concerned about the efficiency of traditional methods of marketing communications have adopted a range of alternative media to target audiences. One such medium is commercial sponsorship, which has grown significantly in recent years. By sponsoring an event or providing a budget for an event’s broadcast, a sponsor can generate audience awareness while simultaneously creating [...]

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. [...]