Corporate treasurers and chief financial officers have become adept at quantifying and managing a wide variety of risks: financial, hazard, and operational. To defend themselves, they use tried-and-true tools such as hedging, insurance, and backup systems. Some companies have even adopted the concept of enterprise risk management, integrating available risk management techniques in a comprehensive, organizationwide approach. But most managers have not addressed in a systematic way the greatest threat of all: strategic risks--the array of external events and trends that can devastate a company's growth trajectory and shareholder value. For example, a new technology may overtake your product. Gradual shifts in the market may slowly erode one of your brands beyond the point of viability. The key to surviving these strategic risks, the authors say, is knowing how to assess and respond to them. In this article, they lay out a method for identifying and responding to strategic threats. They categorize the risks into seven major classes and describe a particularly dangerous example within each category. The authors also offer countermeasures to take against these risks and describe how individual companies have deployed them to neutralize a threat and, in many cases, capitalize on it. Besides limiting the downside of risk, strategic risk management forces executives to think more systematically about the future, thus helping them identify opportunities for growth.

At a time when companies are poised to seize the growth opportunities of a rebounding economy, many of them, whether they know it or not, face a growth crisis. Even during the boom years of the past decade, only a small fraction of companies enjoyed consistent double-digit revenue growth. And those that did often achieved it through short-term measures--such as mergers and inflated price increases--that don't provide the foundation for growth over the long term. But there is a way out of this predicament. The authors claim that companies can achieve sustained growth by leveraging their "hidden assets," a wide array of underused, intangible capabilities and advantages that most established companies already hold. To date, much of the research on intangible assets has centered on intellectual property and brand recognition. But in this article, the authors uncover a host of other assets that can help spark growth. They identify four major categories of hidden assets: customer relationships, strategic real estate, networks, and information. And they illustrate each with an example of a company that has creatively used its hidden assets to produce new sources of revenue. Executives have spent years learning to create growth using products, facilities, and working capital. But they should really focus on mobilizing their hidden assets to serve their customers' higher order needs--in other words, create offerings that make customers' lives easier, better, or less expensive. Making that shift in mindset isn't easy, admit the authors, but companies that do it may not only create meaningful new value for their customers but also produce double-digit revenue and earnings growth for investors.

As we enter the twenty-first century, the business world is consumed by questions about e-commerce. In this article, four close observers of e-commerce speculate about the future of commerce. Adrian Slywotzky believes the Internet will overturn the inefficient push model of supplier-customer interaction. He predicts that in all sorts of markets, customers will use choiceboards--interactive, on-line systems that let people design their own products by choosing from a menu of attributes, prices, and delivery options. And he explores how the shifting role of the customer--from passive recipient to active designer--will change the way companies compete. Clayton Christensen and Richard Tedlow agree that e-commerce, on a broad level, will change the basis of competitive advantage in retailing. The essential mission of retailers--getting the right product in the right place at the right price at the right time--is a constant. But over the years retailers have fulfilled that mission differently thanks to a series of disruptive technologies. The authors identify patterns in the way that previous retailing transformations have unfolded to shed light on how retailing may evolve in the Internet era. Nicholas Carr takes issue with the widespread notion that the Internet will usher in an era of "disintermediation," in which producers of goods and services bypass wholesalers and retailers to connect directly with their customers. Business is undergoing precisely the opposite phenomenon--what he calls hypermediation. Transactions over the Web routinely involve all sorts of intermediaries. It is these middlemen that are positioned to capture most of the profits.

Explains why sales management has become an increasingly important and complex topic for top managers. Demonstrates the financial impact of a superior salesforce and then describes a way to gain superiority. The focus is on a salesforce that is responsive to customer needs and competing imperatives. Organization and management receive careful attention.

Describes the Darwinian internal and external processes that lead to poor performance from a previously well performing company. Demonstrates why any business design eventually fails and the role of organizational calcification and poor leadership in the failure. Also provides prescriptions to prevent and alleviate the problems.

When it comes to marketing, concentrating on the four Ps - product development, price determination, place of distribution, and promotion - no longer ensures competitiveness. Relying on short-term thinking, many companies base their marketing budgets on annual sales forecasts and then demand immediate results based on dollars spent. These companies are confusing cause and effect. They don't realize that developing a "quality" customer base - loyal customers who yield high profits - can take many years. And quality is what matters for long-term success. Companies would do better treating marketing expenditures the same way they treat capital outlays: as investments that drive revenue over time. Many industry giants - Ivory Soap, Heinz Tomato Ketchup, and Ritz Crackers, to name a few - got that way through cumulative investment of years and even decades. Newcomers can leverage to beat the odds, however, and, with a shrewd strategy, turbocharge their returns.