個案總覽

Who would want to join the audit committee of a board of directors? Wouldn't that just mean slogging through the minutiae of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance? Not anymore. Audit teams have pretty much mastered SOX compliance; they're now turning their attention to the meaty problems of increasing business value. To do that, say Northeastern University professor Sherman, Korn/Ferry's Carey, and Sprint CFO Brust, audit teams need a broader range of expertise. Four areas in particular cry out for new blood. Someone, the authors argue, needs to decipher financial guesstimates. GM reported a $3 billion loss in the second quarter of 2006, which it adjusted to a $1 billion profit. Why was that? Things might have gone differently last winter if the company's audit committee had explored the assumptions that GM's managers had used to come up with those kinds of disparate figures. Second, someone needs to keep an eye on M&A performance. Managers today have unprecedented discretion in determining estimates of an acquisition's fair market value, but such calculations clearly warrant greater scrutiny, since fully half of all mergers and acquisitions consistently fail to live up to expectations. Third, someone has to objectively analyze the myriad new risks facing businesses today. Imagine how altered the current economic climate might be if audit committees at Merrill Lynch or Lehman Brothers had recommended limiting their investments in mortgage-backed securities. Last, someone has to make sense of the difference between accounting standards used in Europe and those used in the United States and understand how those standards cloud companies' abilities to reward executives and accurately assess their own performance relative to rivals'.

Promotions to the C-suite are governed by unwritten rules. If you don't know what they are, you'll be left to your own devices interpreting vague feedback and finding a way to achieve your career goals. Beeson has created a framework to help you identify and address any issues that may be getting in your way. Executive placement decisions hinge on three categories of skills: nonnegotiables, without which you will not be considered for a promotion; deselection factors, which eliminate you as a candidate even if you're otherwise qualified; and core selection factors, which ultimately determine who gets the position. Leadership competency models typically fail to make these distinctions, and most don't spell out how skills should be demonstrated at different levels. In middle management, for instance, teamwork is a vital competency. At more senior levels, the imperatives are to think strategically and to acquire and develop talent. Many unwritten rules are especially elusive because they don't pertain to technical or business knowledge. Rather, they relate to the soft skills that give decision makers an intuitive sense of your potential for success. Complicating matters further, managers and HR professionals often give intentionally vague feedback - not direct constructive criticism - for fear of losing good employees. You'll need to dig deep to get useful input from executives and other colleagues: Project a sincere desire to understand what's holding you back. Ask questions, but don't lobby or argue. Avoid comments or gestures that convey defensiveness, which could cause the other person to clam up or move the conversation to safer territory. And be alert to code words and phrases - such as general observations about the need for "increased leadership ability" or "better communication" - that may mask fundamental issues.

Whether they know it or not, every person is a salesperson. Too often, individuals neglect this covert reality and suffer because of it. This article stresses the importance of putting your best face, and foot, forward in order to "sell".

This article explores the link between marketing and firm performance. Marketing is defended as a foundation of corporate success.

Sales force automation (SFA) is the use of software to automate sales tasks, including sales activities, order processing, customer management, sales forecasting and analysis, sales force management, and information sharing. An SFA system is often part of an enterprise-wide information system that connects and integrates sales activities with the organization's other operations. Therefore, SFA software is not only a tool critical to the success of today's sales force, but is also vital to the entire organization. SFA has the potential to empower companies to more efficiently manage their sales force and sales processes, to automate and standardize sales activities, and to connect the sales force with the rest of the organization. The value of these potential benefits in terms of lower costs or increased revenues has encouraged businesses to adopt SFA. Once adopted, however, SFA systems often fail to deliver anticipated benefits. The leading cause of SFA failures has been revealed as low user acceptance, which can be attributed to such factors as the disruption of established sales routines, sales force perception of the system as a micromanagement tool, differences in sales force and managerial expectations for the system, and lack of managerial support for the system as perceived by the sales force. Given these circumstances, managers who are aware of the major issues surrounding user acceptance of SFA will be more successful in implementing such systems. This article explores the utilization of SFA, the benefits derived from these systems, and user acceptance issues. Herein, we offer suggestions that will help organizations succeed in adopting SFA systems.

As more Reserve and National Guard troops are called to leave the civilian workforce and enter military service, employers must understand the legal rights those service members possess and the employers' legal obligations that are now required under The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA). Current data and litigation trends suggest many employers are not fully aware of their legal obligations under USERRA and the punishing legal liability they may face. USERRA applies to virtually all employers, and the law uniquely provides for both corporate and individual liability for discriminating against employees or applicants because of military service. This article provides an overview of USERRA from the perspective of employers, employees, and potential employees. Practical advice is rendered herein not only for those covered by the Act, but also for employers regarding adherence to this law while avoiding liability under USERRA.     

When the colors of all the U.S. armed services' uniforms are combined, the color purple appears; therefore, military insiders refer to inter-service operations as "purple" operations. Now a core concept, the "jointness" of U.S. military strategic response to a critical operational failure encapsulates principles and processes through which two or more armed services are best able to integrate strategies, strengths, and capabilities in ways that yield genuine synergies, despite the differences in mission and culture that naturally separate the services. The now ingrained ability of military services to "go purple" quickly has materially contributed to strategic and operational successes during the last 20 years. The internal circumstances as well as global environmental challenges faced by domestic firms, particularly at the marketing-manufacturing (M-M) interface, resonate with those faced by the U.S. military. Firms may benefit from evaluating the prospect of "going purple" at this crucial point of interface. This article integrates military-like jointness principles into an organizational framework that functions as a guide to pursuing cross-functional M-M integration more successfully. The framework also provides a methodology through which managers can determine whether and how much "purple" ought to be pursued.      

Healthcare, the largest industry in the United States, is in crisis, and threatens to bankrupt the nation's economy. Medical errors kill an estimated 98,000 people per year, and accessibility to adequate healthcare is an increasing problem for much of the country's citizenry. Despite being one of the most important keys to resolving this crisis, a national electronic healthcare network (eHealth) is under-appreciated and under-exploited, and faces several formidable barriers to implementation. Current and prospective national political leadership has focused narrowly on a subset of issues, in the belief that the crisis cannot be addressed holistically due to political interests. Yet the barriers that greatly impede eHealth's potential to help solve the crisis can only be removed in a timely manner by a comprehensive, national framework that reshapes the legal, operational, and economic landscape for eHealth. Only a greater public awareness that encourages national legislative action can enhance eHealth's potential to improve the quality and accessibility of healthcare while reducing its cost.     

Service firms must remember that the way they treat their employees is exactly how those employees will, in turn, treat customers. As such, taking good care of frontline personnel should be a top management concern. One way that service employees can be shown they are valued members of the organization entails the implementation of thoughtful and organized career development programs, initiatives which help increase employees' job satisfaction and feelings of empowerment in their customer-facing roles. Before they can become enthusiastic about meeting the needs of their customers, employees have to feel that their own needs are being met within the organization. In this regard, firm investment in frontline employee career development programs will be money well spent: they are capable of reducing employee turnover and increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability. This article provides a conceptual model of career development which should prove useful to service managers in evaluating their own career development efforts. Also presented herein is a framework for tying together many disparate areas of career development that have heretofore been handled separately in the services literature.     

This article explains the utility of adopting an identity-based view of the corporation, which underpins a diagnostic tool of identity management outlined in this article. Using British Airways as an extensive case history, it examines and analyzes how British Airways' senior executives have intuitively adopted an identity-based perspective as part of the strategic management of the carrier. The analysis is corroborated by insights from the former CEO of British Airways, Lord Marshall, as well as his predecessor, Lord King. The overriding message is that calibrating the multiple identities of the corporation is a critical dimension of strategic management.

In many industries, disintegration processes have drastically changed the overall industry structure as well as the organization of value creation processes and actors. Highly integrated production and distribution systems have been replaced by devolved organization architectures. This article introduces the concept of value creation architectures, a term that describes the structure and relationships of all the value-adding activities that are carried out by various actors and companies to bring a particular product or service to market. Analyses of business firms tend to overlook the relationship between competitive advantage and the architecture of value creation. This article investigates how different architectures of value creation affect the competitiveness of individual firms. The new concept is illustrated by an in-depth case study of the European automobile industry.

Despite the availability of many methodologies, management approaches, and literature on strategy execution, research suggests that seven out of ten organizations fail to successfully execute their strategies. However, three out of ten organizations do appear to succeed. To find out what these organizations do differently, ten key management elements for successful strategy execution were identified from the literature as well as seven business benefits that could be realized if these elements were performed effectively. Next, 93 organizations were surveyed, followed by focus group meetings with senior managers. While mastery of formal methodologies and development of business cases are important, successful strategy execution is critically dependent on having a portfolio of change programs that are explicitly aligned with the organization's strategy. Further, this portfolio needs to be supported by the strategic leadership team and managed within a culture conducive to change. There are specific actions that organizations need to take to identify which elements of their strategy execution capability need to improve in order to take their performance to the next level.

With companies being exhorted to become more strategically agile and internally connected, this article examines the role of the Senior Strategy Director, the executive tasked specifically with internal strategy. In particular, it explores what they do, what specific capabilities they deploy to enable effective contribution to the company, and in what ways they facilitate the connectedness of strategy. An analysis of multiple interviews over time with Senior Strategy Directors of large companies shows the vital and challenging role these executives play in both shaping, connecting up, and executing strategy. This article identifies the particular capabilities necessary for Senior Strategy Directors to perform their role and shows how it all depends upon their skillful deployment. These findings have significant implications for understanding unfolding micro-processes of strategy in large organizations, for assumptions about the skills and capabilities necessary to be an effective Senior Strategy Director, and for business schools in terms of the content and style of strategy courses they provide.

Managers are encouraged to develop deeper, collaborative relationships with NGOs as they execute their CSR strategies, and they have benefited from guidance to date that has focused on the dyadic relationships between a single firm and a single NGO. However, corporate relationships in CSR can include broader collaborations with both other firms and multiple NGOs. This article provides a framework for examining a range of collaboration opportunities and provides managers guidance for matching CSR strategies with the goals of the firm. The framework focuses on specific strategies that firms can employ to help ensure that returns from investments in CSR are maximized.

Successful scaling of social impact by a social entrepreneurial organization is driven by its capabilities in seven areas, identified in this article by using the acronym SCALERS: Staffing, Communicating, Alliance-building, Lobbying, Earnings-generation, Replicating, and Stimulating market forces. The relative importance of each of these capabilities in driving scaling will depend on several situational contingencies, such as the labor needs of the organization or the public support attracted by its causes or programs. The article presents the logic, theory, and prior research that support the SCALERS model and cites examples of case experiences that are consistent with the model.

Regulatory changes have affected the composition, role, and responsibilities of Boards of Directors worldwide. While stronger frameworks for directors' fiduciary responsibilities have resulted, considerably less attention has been devoted to understanding the nature of, and concomitant duty-of-care towards, the information systems and technology assets in the organization, or IT Governance. As a result, Boards have not demonstrated the competence or attention that good IT governance demands. IT Governance takes two forms: a defensive form, IT Risk Governance, that seeks to safeguard the organization from the consequences of IT-related disasters; and a strategic form, IT Value Governance, which creates lasting shareholder value. This article focuses on IT Risk Governance. Based on an academic and trade literature review, and interviews with Board members from six international firms, it presents a model, the IT Risk Governance Chain, and a dashboard that outlines the critical areas of IT risk and the key questions directors should ask to properly safeguard the information and technology assets of their firms.

A recent study from Wellington Hospital in New Zealand found that office workers who sat for several hours without getting up were more likely to form a deep-vein thrombosis - that is, a blood clot in a vein deep in the leg - than those who moved about more often. Together, deep-vein thromboses and pulmonary embolisms (which occur when a piece of the clot breaks away and blocks blood flow to the lungs) kill upwards of 100,000 Americans each year, or about as many as die from breast, prostate, and colon cancer combined. In this article, Goldhaber, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, explains the connection between DVTs and prolonged periods of sitting anywhere (not just on airplanes) and offers tips for prevention.

Many managers have never before had to shrink their operations or workforces drastically. Now, as they struggle to weather the storm of recession, they risk making what the author says is a common mistake: assuming that they will have to make the tough initial decision but can leave it to others to carry out. Long experience at Corning, Quest Diagnostics, Masonite International, and Accellent taught Freeman the benefits of what he calls a "soft hands" approach, which involves ensuring that employees, customers, suppliers, and communities are treated with consideration and compassion. Such behavior is simply good business. He offers four commonsensical - but frequently ignored - principles. Treat employees with dignity, fairness, and respect. Tell them why they're losing their jobs, what you will do to help them cope, and what you'll need from them during the transition. Communicate fully and often, be visible and personal, and honor company commitments. Treat your customers and suppliers like valued partners. Keep them informed, consider their needs, maintain your focus on quality, and take pains to transfer the business smoothly. Manage the layoff or closure like a project. Appoint an experienced, full-time project leader and a strong team. Define stages of the process, establish criteria for passing through them, and conduct regular reviews. Use judgment and, if necessary, fight back. Don't be pushed by Wall Street or others to move so quickly that the organization ends up suffering. The shutdown of a Corning plant in Indiana, the merger of Quest with SmithKline Beecham Clinical Labs, and the closure of an Accellent factory in Tennessee illustrate successful outcomes of a soft-hands approach.

The author combines his nine years' experience as the CEO of Procter & Gamble with the last writings of the management scholar Peter Drucker to answer the question "What is the work of the CEO?" The chief executive, Lafley says, is held singularly accountable for the performance and results of the company-according not just to its own goals but also to those of diverse and often competing external stakeholders. In other words, he or she is responsible for linking the outside to the inside-a job that consists of four fundamental tasks. Defining the meaningful outside. At P&G this means emphasizing that the consumer is boss. The company has also worked to change what had been win-lose negotiations into win-win partnerships with retail customers and suppliers. Deciding what business you are in (or not in). After a thorough analysis of its strengths, current competitive position, and structural conditions, P&G chose to grow from its core-laundry products, baby diapers, feminine care, and hair care-and also to focus more on low-income consumers and developing markets, where sales have grown from 21% to 31% of the total since 2000. The company has exited food and beverages and is selling its pharmaceutical business. Where to compete and where not to compete remain ongoing questions. Balancing present and future. P&G defines realistic growth targets and uses a flexible budgeting process with complementary short-term, midterm, and long-term goals. Shaping values and standards. The CEO must interpret the organization's values in the context of change and competition and define the standards that will guide decisions. Trust at P&G had come to mean that employees could rely on the company for lifetime jobs. Lafley redefined it as consumers' trust in the company's brands and shareholders' trust in its value as a long-term investment.

The boom years have made business careless with working capital. So much cash was sloshing around the system that there seemed little point in worrying about how to wring more of it out, especially if that might dent reported profits and sales growth. Today, capital and credit have all but disappeared, customers are tightening belts, and suppliers aren't putting up with late payments. It's time, therefore, to take a cold, hard look at the way you're managing your working capital. If you do, say Insead professors Kaiser and Young, you'll very likely find that you have an awful lot of capital tied up in receivables and inventory. In this article, the authors explore six common mistakes that companies make in this area: managing to the income statement, which can encourage executives to tie up capital in stock and receivables because income statements often fail to include important cost items; rewarding the sales force for growth alone, which makes concessions in the terms of trade more likely, as salespeople look for ways to get customers to buy; overemphasizing production quality, which often results in gold-plated and slow production processes; tying receivables to payables, because even an unfortunate and costly change in supplier terms should in no way be a reason for revisiting the customer relationship; applying bankers' current and quick ratios, which tends to increase the likelihood that a company will face a liquidity crisis; and benchmarking competitors, which can make managers complacent when their working capital metrics are in line with industry norms. Simply correcting these mistakes will release a lot of hidden cash.