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Companies should do more than reduce the amount of time their customers spend waiting; they should actually add value to such time.

Today's problems often arise as unintended consequences of yesterday's solutions. Business and public policy settings suffer from policy resistance, the tendency for well-intentioned interventions to be defeated by the response of the system to the intervention itself. Just as an airline uses flight simulators to help pilots learn, system dynamics enables us to create management flight simulators to avoid policy resistance and design more effective policies. System dynamics is also a process for working with high-level teams designed to improve the chances for implemented results. This article discusses how system dynamics can be used effectively to design high-leverage policies for sustainable improvement and introduces the next three articles in this issue discussing the application of system dynamics to a variety of critical issues facing business leaders today.

Explores how service organizations respond to changes in work pressure, why they respond the way they do, and what managers can do about it. The system dynamics method captures the organizational and behavioral components of the social systems that produce and consume services, as well as the physical characteristics of the service delivery system. This method also supports the assessment of long-term consequences of complex interactions among responses to work pressure. The major recurring problems observed in the service industry--erosion of service quality, high turnover, and low profitability--can be explained by the organization's response to changes in work pressure. Also suggests ways to identify the structural characteristics that determine the preferred response to work pressure. By providing a specific link between characteristics of service settings and dysfunctional outcomes, the model assists managers in the design of high-leverage policies to eliminate undesired behaviors.

One of the most common syndromes in product development is firefighting, the unplanned allocation of resources to fix problems discovered late in a product's development cycle. Although it has been widely criticized in both the popular and scholarly literature, firefighting is a common occurrence in most product development organizations. Product development systems have a tipping point. In models of infectious diseases, the tipping point represents the threshold of infectivity and susceptibility beyond which a disease becomes an epidemic. Similarly, in product development systems, there exists a threshold for problem-solving activity that, when crossed, causes firefighting to spread rapidly from a few isolated projects to the entire development system. The location of the tipping point, and therefore the susceptibility of the system to the firefighting phenomenon, is determined by resources utilization in steady state. Many of the current methods for aggregate resource planning are insufficient, and managers wishing to avoid the firefighting dynamic must rethink their approach to managing multiproject development environments.

Today's managers face a paradox. On the one hand, the number of tools, techniques, and technologies available to improve operational performance is growing rapidly. On the other hand, despite dramatic success in a few companies, most efforts to use them fail to produce significant results. To understand and resolve this paradox, this article investigates the difficulties organizations face in implementing processes and techniques such as lean production, TQM, computer-aided design and development tools, stage-gate product development processes, and improved customer service systems. The inability of most organizations to reap the full benefit of these innovations has little to do with the specific technique. Instead, the problem has its roots in how the introduction of a new improvement effort interacts with the physical, economic, social, and psychological structures in which implementation takes place. Presents a framework to understand how these failures arise and illustrates strategies for overcoming the pathological behavior through case studies of successful improvement.

The essence of the information technology revolution and, in particular, the World Wide Web is the opportunity afforded companies to choose how they interact with their customers. The web allows companies to build better relationships with customers than has been previously possible in the offline world. This revolution in customer relationship management (CRM) has been referred to as the new "mantra" of marketing. However, a problem is that CRM means different things to different people. This article develops a comprehensive CRM model incorporating seven phases: database creation, analysis of the database, customer selection, customer targeting, relationship marketing, privacy issues, and new metrics necessary for evaluating the CRM effort. Also discusses the implications of CRM for future marketing organizations.

Academics and practitioners alike have been arguing about whether the Internet brings a revolutionary change in the fundamental way we do business or whether it simply offers a new distribution channel and communication medium. Regardless of the answer to that debate, one thing is certain: the Internet provides managers with an enormous amount of customer information that was previously unavailable. Thus, the new struggle has been to manage this information and to use it accurately and efficiently to measure customers, trends, and performance. However, the volume of this data has overwhelmed many e-commerce managers. As a result, e-commerce managers have been focusing on aggregate-level summary statistics rather than fully leveraging their data. Using commonly available clickstream data, this article discusses the benefits of separating an individual customer's buying behavior into simple patterns of visits and purchasing conversion. This analysis of the buying process allows us to examine more carefully the relationship between store visits and purchasing behavior.

As relationships and service become increasingly pivotal in business, the profitability of customers is becoming more important than the profitability of products. In this environment, marketing success will be equivalent to generating maximum profits from a firm's total set of customers. Doing so requires allocating managerial resources to the groups of customers that can be cultivated most efficiently by a firm. This article presents a management methodology called the "Customer Pyramid" that enables a firm to supercharge its profits by customizing its responses to distinct customer profitability tiers. The Customer Pyramid provides a tool for managers to strengthen the link between service quality and profitability and to determine the optimal allocation of often scarce resources to maximize profitability. Product and service strategies, customized for each customer tier, become more closely aligned with an individual customer's underlying utility functions. This results in more effective and profitable strategies for serving the customer. Also provides numerous examples and practical guidelines for improving firm profits by moving customers up the Customer Pyramid.

Supplements the (A) case.

Anatolia National Telekom is a multiparty negotiation simulation patterned after the Turkish government's aborted attempt to privatize its state-owned telecommunications monopoly, Turk Telekom, in late 1997. Provides participants with an opportunity to identify and negotiate complex issues related to the valuation and sale of a state-owned enterprise in an emerging market. Members of each negotiating team are valuing a 20% equity stake being offered by three "selling" teams to three prospective "buying" teams representing different types of foreign investors.

Anatolia National Telekom is a multiparty negotiation simulation patterned after the Turkish government's aborted attempt to privatize its state-owned telecommunications monopoly, Turk Telekom, in late 1997. Provides participants with an opportunity to identify and negotiate complex issues related to the valuation and sale of a state-owned enterprise in an emerging market. Members of each negotiating team are valuing a 20% equity stake being offered by three "selling" teams to three prospective "buying" teams representing different types of foreign investors.

Anatolia National Telekom is a multiparty negotiation simulation patterned after the Turkish government's aborted attempt to privatize its state-owned telecommunications monopoly, Turk Telekom, in late 1997. Provides participants with an opportunity to identify and negotiate complex issues related to the valuation and sale of a state-owned enterprise in an emerging market. Members of each negotiating team are valuing a 20% equity stake being offered by three "selling" teams to three prospective "buying" teams representing different types of foreign investors.

Anatolia National Telekom is a multiparty negotiation simulation patterned after the Turkish government's aborted attempt to privatize its state-owned telecommunications monopoly, Turk Telekom, in late 1997. Provides participants with an opportunity to identify and negotiate complex issues related to the valuation and sale of a state-owned enterprise in an emerging market. Members of each negotiating team are valuing a 20% equity stake being offered by three "selling" teams to three prospective "buying" teams representing different types of foreign investors.

Anatolia National Telekom is a multiparty negotiation simulation patterned after the Turkish government's aborted attempt to privatize its state-owned telecommunications monopoly, Turk Telekom, in late 1997. Provides participants with an opportunity to identify and negotiate complex issues related to the valuation and sale of a state-owned enterprise in an emerging market. Members of each negotiating team are valuing a 20% equity stake being offered by three "selling" teams to three prospective "buying" teams representing different types of foreign investors.

Anatolia National Telekom is a multiparty negotiation simulation patterned after the Turkish government's aborted attempt to privatize its state-owned telecommunications monopoly, Turk Telekom, in late 1997. Provides participants with an opportunity to identify and negotiate complex issues related to the valuation and sale of a state-owned enterprise in an emerging market. Members of each negotiating team are valuing a 20% equity stake being offered by three "selling" teams to three prospective "buying" teams representing different types of foreign investors.

Anatolia National Telekom is a multiparty negotiation simulation patterned after the Turkish government's aborted attempt to privatize its state-owned telecommunications monopoly, Turk Telekom, in late 1997. Provides participants with an opportunity to identify and negotiate complex issues related to the valuation and sale of a state-owned enterprise in an emerging market. Members of each negotiating team are valuing a 20% equity stake being offered by three "selling" teams to three prospective "buying" teams representing different types of foreign investors.

Anatolia National Telekom is a multiparty negotiation simulation patterned after the Turkish government's aborted attempt to privatize its state-owned telecommunications monopoly, Turk Telekom, in late 1997. Provides participants with an opportunity to identify and negotiate complex issues related to the valuation and sale of a state-owned enterprise in an emerging market. Members of each negotiating team are valuing a 20% equity stake being offered by three "selling" teams to three prospective "buying" teams representing different types of foreign investors.

Supplements the (A) case.

Supplements the (A) case.

Supplements the (A) case.