King-Size is a mail-order company specializing in apparel for big and tall men. The case describes their operations in some detail. Issues include appropriate marketing decisions and expansion strategy.
Provides an introduction to zero coupon bonds and stripping coupon bonds. Concerns the relationship between the spot curve, the strip curve, and the coupon curve.
A manager at the Bell Institute for Professional Development, has just finished developing the Profit Orientation Seminar and is about to train individuals to deliver it to over 50,000 Bell employees. She must consider the issuers of training and development, managing change and evaluating the success of the training program.
The director of marketing of a recently acquired trust company is faced with preparing a marketing plan for the upcoming fiscal year. Historically, the trust company has not had a marketing or sales function. The director faces some major challenges: establishing marketing's role in the trust company; helping the trust company be more accepted by the bank that acquired the company; helping the trust company move from its unprofitable start-up mode to a profitable operation. She wondered how to begin.
The new but now familiar techniques of corporate communication--focus groups, surveys, management-by-walking-around--can block organizational learning even as they help solve certain kinds of problems. These techniques do help gather simple, single-loop information. But they also promote defensive reasoning by encouraging employees to believe that their proper role is to criticize management while the proper role of management is to take action and fix whatever is wrong. Managers focus so earnestly on "positive" values--employee satisfaction, upbeat attitude, high morale--that it would strike them as destructive to make demands on employee self-awareness. Yet employees dig deeper and harder into the truth when the task of scrutinizing the organization includes looking at their own roles, responsibilities, and potential contributions to corrective action.
Collaboration in business is no longer confined to conventional two-company alliances, such as joint ventures or marketing accords. Today groups of companies are linking together for a common purpose. Consequently, a new form of competition is spreading across global markets: group vs. group. Call them networks, clusters, constellations, or virtual corporations, these groups consist of companies joined together in a larger overarching relationship. The individual companies in any group differ in size and focus, but they fulfill specific roles within their group. Furthermore, within the network or group, companies may be linked to one another through various kinds of alliances, ranging from the formality of an equity joint venture to the informality of a loose collaboration.
Is your company a rule maker or a rule follower? Does your company focus on catching up or on getting out in front? Do you spend the bulk of your time as a maintenance engineer preserving the status quo or as an architect designing the future? Difficult questions like these go unanswered not because senior managers are lazy--most are working harder than ever--but because they won't admit that they are less than fully in control of their companies' future. In this adaptation from their upcoming book, Hamel and Prahalad urge senior managers to look toward the future and ponder their ability to shape their companies in the years and decades to come. Creating the future, as Electronic Data Systems has done, for example, requires industry foresight. Since change is inevitable, managers must decide whether it will happen in a crisis atmosphere or in a calm and considered manner. Too often, profound thinking about the future occurs only when present success has been eroded.
More than ever, the public is looking to the nonprofit sector to address the pressing social problems that are hobbling the United States. As a result, all nonprofits face increased scrutiny from both benefactors and government regulators. To survive under this spotlight, a nonprofit needs a powerful and proactive board of directors to provide oversight. The board must assume the roles played in a business by owners and the market, ensuring that the nonprofit accomplishes its mission efficiently and devising its own system of measurement and control. Four questions help board members create such a system: 1) Are the organization's goals consistent with its financial resources? 2) Is the organization practicing intergenerational equity? 3) Are the sources and uses of funds appropriately matched? 4) Is the organization sustainable?
When companies join forces--whether on research or as full-scale partners--they often tend to emphasize the legal or financial aspects of the deal. But smart managers know that alliances involve much more. Like human relationships, business partnerships are living systems that have endless possibilities. And companies that know how to tap those possibilities and manage alliances effectively have a key corporate asset. Rosabeth Moss Kanter calls it a collaborative advantage. After completing a study of more than 37 companies from 11 parts of the world, Kanter concludes that relationships between companies grow or fail much like relationships between people. By paying attention to the human aspects of alliances, managers can leverage the maximum value from them, Kanter believes. Examples of companies enjoying a collaborative advantage today are FCB and Publicis; Northern Telecom and Matra Hachette; and the European Retail Alliances partners, Ahold, Argyll, and Groupe Casino.
In this article, Stanford economist Paul Krugman argues that fears about the impact of Third World competition are questionable in theory and flatly rejected by the data. After examining the consequences of isolated productivity improvements in three increasingly realistic economic models, Krugman concludes that an increase in Third World labor productivity means an increase in world output. And an increase in world output shows up in higher wages for Third World workers, not in decreased living standards for the First World. Yet if the West responds to the widespread fears about Third World economic success by erecting import barriers, the effects could be disastrous--dashing any hope of a decent living standard for hundreds of millions of people throughout the developing world.
Every year since 1982, Naturewise Apparel has donated $400,000 to charity through its Corporate Giving Fund. This year, Dana Osborne, the founder and CEO of the children's clothing manufacturer, decided to allow each of the company's regional divisions to decide for itself where the money should go. Her goal was to include all employees in the program and to pay back the various local communities that support the company. Dana's good intentions backfired, however, when an abortion clinic in Illinois was bombed and the bomber claimed affiliation with a radically pro-life group called TermRights. Naturewise's Midwest division had inadvertently provided donations to TermRights through a nonprofit umbrella corporation called CHICARE. How should Dana handle the media? Five experts consider this fictitious scenario and give advice on forming an effective media policy.
Health care reform in the United States is on a collision course with economic reality. Most proposals focus on measures that will produce one-time cost savings by eliminating waste and inefficiency. But the right question to ask is how to achieve dramatic and sustained cost reductions over time. What will it take to foster entirely new approaches to disease prevention and treatment, whole new ways to deliver services, and more cost-effective facilities? The answer lies in the powerful lessons business has learned over the past two decades about the imperatives of competition. In industry after industry, the underlying dynamic is the same: competition compels companies to deliver constantly increasing value to customers.
Virtually everyone agrees that the old covenant between employer and employee--under which companies offered at least a measure of job security in exchange for adequate performance and some exhibition of loyalty--is dead. Some management thinkers argue that instead of the traditional focus on employment, the focus should now be on employability. That means having the competitive skills required to find work, when you need it, wherever you can find it. Some companies, such as Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems, Raychem Corp., and 3Com Corp., are already moving in this direction. And from the progress they've made so far, the authors have been able to discern basic ingredients all programs should include and pitfalls to avoid. The company that embraces career resilience will have a huge strategic advantage. By encouraging people to grow, to change, and to learn, it will do those things better itself.
Responding to environmental problems has always been a no-win proposition for managers, report Noah Walley and Bard Whitehead in "It's Not Easy Being Green" (May-June 1994). Help the environment and hurt your own business, or irreparably harm your business while protecting the earth. Recently, however, a new common wisdom has emerged that promises the ultimate reconciliation of environmental and economic concerns. Being green is no longer a cost of doing business; it is a catalyst for constant innovation, new market opportunity, and wealth creation. This new vision sounds great, yet it is highly unrealistic. Environmental costs are skyrocketing at most companies, with little chance of economic payback in sight. Given this reality, should "win-win" solutions be the foundation of a company's environmental strategy? In this issue's Perspectives section, twelve experts assess both viewpoints.
Market-driven firms stand out in their ability to continuously anticipate market opportunities and respond before their competitors. The market learning processes in these firms are distinguished by: open-minded inquiry based on the belief that all decisions are made from the market back; widespread information distribution that ensures that relevant facts are available when needed; mutually informed mental models that guide interpretation and ensure that everyone pays attention to the essence and potential of the information; and an accessible memory of what has been learned. However, mastery of all the steps in the learning process is rare. Most firms suffer disabilities at one or more stages. Overcoming these learning disabilities and enhancing market learning competency is an important management challenge.