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Describes U.S. antitrust policy, including major judicial decisions and their impact on competitive strategy. Omits information on the history of antitrust policy and on the specific prohibitions of the various acts.

Describes how general managers can build organizational capability in their firms.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Although few would deny that vision serves a critical role in today's organizations, in practice, most managers are intimidated and frustrated by the challenge of developing one. The author explores the notion of vision by first explaining how and why visions work. He presents a template, tested in organizations representing the corporate, nonprofit, and public sectors, that outlines the principal themes necessary for an effective vision. Because not all great visions succeed, the author analyzes why they sometimes fail.

ETrade pioneered the electronic deep-discount brokerage business and experienced phenomenal growth by making extensive use of technology to achieve significant cost advantages over traditional firms. ETrade's strategy has been to pass these cost savings from automation on to its customers as it amortized its fixed costs over a greater number of accounts. By 1996, a flood of new competitors are establishing Internet sites and ETrade has been dethroned as the price leader. While some executives within ETrade believe they should continue to lower prices and go head-to-head with eBroker, others believe the company faces a larger challenge from Charles Schwab's entry into the market. Defending against Schwab would require focusing resources on enhancing its product/service offering, which might jeopardize ETrade's low-cost position. ETrade must decide where it can create a profitable and sustainable position along the price/quality (service) trade-off.

Our understanding of how markets and businesses operate is based on the assumption of diminishing returns: products or companies that get ahead in a market eventually run into limitations so that a predictable equilibrium of prices and market shares is reached. The theory was valid for the bulk-processing, smokestack economy of Alfred Marshall's day. But in this century, Western economies have gone from processing resources to processing information, from the application of raw energy to the application of ideas. The mechanisms that determine economic behavior have also shifted--from diminishing returns to increasing returns. Increasing returns are the tendency for that which is ahead to get further ahead and for that which is losing advantage to lose further advantage. If a product gets ahead, increasing returns can magnify the advantage, and the product can go on to lock in the market.

Managers have recently begun to think of good marketing as good conversation, as a process of drawing customers into progressively more satisfying relationships with a company. And just as the art of conversation follows two steps--first striking up a conversation with a likely partner and then maintaining the flow--so the new marketing naturally divides itself into the work of customer acquisition and the work of customer retention. But how can managers determine the optimal balance between spending on acquisition and spending on retention? The authors use decision calculus to approach the large, complex problem through several smaller, more manageable questions on the same topic.

Many U.S. managers want to enlist their suppliers in their efforts to develop products faster and to reduce manufacturing costs. But they have wondered whether they can have the sort of mutually supportive relationship that characterizes manufacturers and suppliers in a Japanese keiretsu. Chrysler Corp. shows that the model can indeed be adapted successfully. Chrysler's relationship with its suppliers used to be one of mutual distrust and suspicion. At the end of the 1980s, however, dire financial straits convinced the company that it had to rethink its supplier relations. The resulting new model has played a major role in Chrysler's stunning revival.

In his review of Phillip L. Zweig's Wriston: Walter Wriston, Citibank, and the Rise and Fall of American Financial Supremacy, James Grant puts the career of Citibank's longtime CEO into historical perspective. At the end of the last century, credit was a virtue to be cultivated. But by the time Walter Wriston became Citibank's president in 1967, banking had changed. The Federal Reserve Act had given the United States a central bank, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. protected depositors' savings. In Wriston's time, credit, far from being delicate, often appeared to be indestructible. Grant, who edits the respected Grant's Interest Rate Observer, argues that credit is no longer an absolute virtue, like honesty, but an economic asset, like property, plant, or equipment.

In many companies, strategy making is an elitist procedure and "strategy" consists of nothing more than following the industry's rules. But more and more companies, intent on overturning the industrial order, are reviewing those rules. What can industry incumbents do? Either surrender the future to revolutionary challengers or revolutionize the way their companies create strategy. What is needed is not a tweak to the traditional strategic-planning process, but a new philosophical foundation: strategy is revolution. The author offers ten principles to help a company think about the challenge of creating truly revolutionary strategies.

"In my role, I'm the guy who catches it all. I can't seem to get people to stand still and listen, and I can't continue to take all the hostility. I don't know how much longer I can last in this job." The executive who speaks these words is one of several who describe their feelings of burnout in this article, first published in May/June 1981. Anyone can feel overwhelmed by the challenges posed by complex organizations and the need to deal with conflicting personalities, says psychologist Harry Levinson. In this article, he suggests ways in which top management can help prevent burnout. In his retrospective commentary, Levinson notes that although burnout is as prevalent today as it was 15 years ago, the assumption underlying his article--that top management can play a role in preventing burnout--now feels outdated. Why? Because we are living in an age of self-reliance.

Henry Mintzberg, a professor of management at McGill University in Canada and at INSEAD in France, takes aim at the hype surrounding management fads and gurus and dares to suggest that the emperor has no clothes. In order to rile all who care about management and get them thinking creatively, he presents ten contrarian observations on such topics as the meanness of leanness, the folly of CEOs who fancy themselves strategists, the disempowering that so-called empowerment creates, the myopia of purely financial measures, and the inadequacy of M.B.A. programs.

Cyrus Maher, CEO of Waterway Industries, thinks he may be facing a human resources problem. Lee Carter is a relatively new employee whose high-powered sales ability has rocketed Maher's sleepy canoe company into unprecedented growth. But Maher has overheard Carter discussing a new job that would offer equity, and he fears her defection is imminent. Maher has begun to reconsider his employees' compensation arrangements, particularly Carter's. As he consults with his banker and with advisers in the industry, he begins to realize that the easygoing culture he created at Waterway may have changed for good. In 96408 and 96408Z, James McCann, Kay Henry, Myra Hart, Ronald Rudolph, Bruce Schlegel, and Alan Johnson offer advice on this fictional case study.

Cyrus Maher, CEO of Waterway Industries, thinks he may be facing a human resources problem. Lee Carter is a relatively new employee whose high-powered sales ability has rocketed Maher's sleepy canoe company into unprecedented growth. But Maher has overheard Carter discussing a new job that would offer equity, and he fears her defection is imminent. Maher has begun to reconsider his employees' compensation arrangements, particularly Carter's. As he consults with his banker and with advisers in the industry, he begins to realize that the easygoing culture he created at Waterway may have changed for good. In 96408 and 96408Z, James McCann, Kay Henry, Myra Hart, Ronald Rudolph, Bruce Schlegel, and Alan Johnson offer advice on this fictional case study.

Cyrus Maher, CEO of Waterway Industries, thinks he may be facing a human resources problem. Lee Carter is a relatively new employee whose high-powered sales ability has rocketed Maher's sleepy canoe company into unprecedented growth. But Maher has overheard Carter discussing a new job that would offer equity, and he fears her defection is imminent. Maher has begun to reconsider his employees' compensation arrangements, particularly Carter's. As he consults with his banker and with advisers in the industry, he begins to realize that the easygoing culture he created at Waterway may have changed for good. In 96408 and 96408Z, James McCann, Kay Henry, Myra Hart, Ronald Rudolph, Bruce Schlegel, and Alan Johnson offer advice on this fictional case study.

No matter how much inventory a wholesaler carries, when a customer places a rush order, the essential item is often out of stock. No matter how many services a dealer provides, what a customer needs is often one that the dealer has never supplied. And no matter how hard a distributor tries to beef up its capabilities, when a customer has an emergency, the distributor often lacks the skills to respond. A number of companies are experimenting with ways to make their distribution channels more flexible and responsive. They have realized that by sharing resources in novel ways, they can take advantage of opportunities that they could not exploit alone. Business dynamics and emerging technologies make this new approach both essential and feasible.

By now, the monolithic factory was supposed to have given way to the virtual factory: a community linked by an electronic network that would enable numerous partners to operate as one. But for most companies, that promise has been elusive. The traditional technologies--electronic data interchange, proprietary groupware, and wide-area networks--are proving inadequate. Traditional systems cannot meet the three basic requirements of a large-scale virtual factory. First, an internetwork must be able to accommodate members whose IT sophistication varies enormously. Second, it must, while maintaining tight security, cope with partners in both transient and long-term relationships. Finally, it must provide a high level of functionality, including letting partners operate programs on one another's computers.

Over the past decade, business units have increasingly taken the role of strategy formulation away from corporate headquarters. The change makes sense: business units are closer to customers, competitors, and costs. Nevertheless, business units can fail, just as headquarters once did, by losing their focus on the organization's priorities and capabilities. The author offers a method for refocusing companies that he calls the strategic-renewal process. The principles behind the process are straightforward, but its execution demands extensive data, rigorous analysis, and the judgment of key decision makers. However, when applied with diligence, it can produce a strategy that yields both growth and profit.

Organizations evolve through periods of incremental or evolutionary change punctuated by discontinuous or revolutionary change. The challenge for managers is to adapt the culture and strategy of their organizations to its current environment, but to do so in a way that does not undermine its ability to adjust to radical changes in that environment. They must, in other words, create an ambidextrous organization--one capable of simultaneously pursuing both incremental and discontinuous innovation.

Perhaps no other article published in the management literature has had the impact of Richard Pascale's piece on the "Honda Effect" that was published in the Spring 1984 issue of the California Management Review. This now classic article has stimulated considerable debate over the role and value of corporate strategy in business decision making--which is the subject of this forum. This special collection of essays includes an abridged version of Pascale's original article ("Perspectives on Strategy: The Real Story Behind Honda's Success"), an exchange of correspondence between Henry Mintzberg and Michael Goold, and new essays by Richard Rumlet, Michael Goold, and Richard Pascale, who revisits his own original article as well as this whole debate.

Describes the development of McKinsey & Co. as a worldwide management consulting firm from 1926 to 1996. In particular, it focuses on the way in which McKinsey has developed structures, systems, processes, and practices to help it develop, transfer, and disseminate knowledge among its 3,800 consultants in 69 offices worldwide. Concludes by focusing on three young consultants operating in each dimension of the firm's organization--the local office, the industry practice, and the firm's competence center. Managing director, Rajat Gupta, wonders if the changes he has made are sufficient to maintain the firm's vital knowledge development process.