個案總覽

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In recent years, gray markets--in which a firm's products are sold or resold through unauthorized dealers--have become ubiquitous. They exist for tangible products (lumber and electronic components) and intangibles (broadcast signals, IPOs); for massive goods (automobiles and heavy construction equipment) and for light, easily shipped products (watches and cosmetics); for the mundane (health and beauty aids) and the life saving (prescription drugs). Gray markets aren't going away soon. Although they ebb and flow as exchange rates, price differentials, and supply conditions change, surveys confirm the increasing incidence and scope of gray markets. In many situations, their sales outstrip authorized sales. An inability to compete with gray markets can wreak havoc on firms and industries. Unfortunately, because it is so hard to get data on gray market activity and what firms are doing to deal with it, there is little published guidance to help managers. The sale of legitimate products in the wrong place or through the wrong channel poses unique problems to companies. But there are unique solutions that can successfully manage them. Using several examples that show the scope and complexity of the gray market problem, the authors explain how managers can apply a framework based on sensing, speed, and severity to manage it. They also point out scenarios in which gray markets are actually helpful and should be tolerated.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Although the pursuit of opportunity promises outsized rewards to entrepreneurs and established enterprises, it also entails great uncertainty. The critical task of entrepreneurship lies in effectively managing the uncertainty inherent in trying something new. Some entrepreneurs foolishly try to ignore uncertainty; others go to the opposite extreme of attempting to avoid it altogether by believing naively that every contingency can be anticipated. Instead, entrepreneurs should manage uncertainty by taking a disciplined approach. Over the past five years, the author conducted systematic research into how entrepreneurs manage the inevitable risks while pursuing opportunities. A synthesis of the research revealed that discipline--and its byproduct, the successful management of uncertainty--comes through the adoption of an iterative experimentation model. In this three-step process, an entrepreneur formulates a working hypothesis about an opportunity, assembles the resources to test the hypothesis, and finally designs and runs real-world experiments. Depending on the results of a round of experimentation, the entrepreneur may revise the hypothesis and run another experiment, harvest the value created through a sale, or abandon the hypothesis and pull the plug. The model provides insights into some of the most daunting questions entrepreneurs face--including how to screen an opportunity, how much money to raise, when to make key hires, and how to use limited resources most efficiently.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Green marketing has not lived up to the hopes and dreams of many managers and activists. Although public opinion polls consistently show that consumers would prefer to choose a green product over one that is less friendly to the environment when all other things are equal, those "other things" are rarely equal in the minds of consumers. For example, when consumers are forced to make trade-offs between product attributes or helping the environment, the environment almost never wins. And hopes for green products also have been hurt by the perception that such products are of lower quality or don't really deliver on their environmental promises. And, yet, the news isn't all bad, as the growing number of people willing to pay a premium for green products--from organic foods to energy-efficient appliances--attests. How, then, should companies handle these issues? They must always keep in mind that consumers are unlikely to compromise on traditional product attributes, such as convenience, availability, price, quality, and performance. It's even more important to realize, however, that there is no single green marketing strategy that is right for every company. The authors suggest that companies should follow one of four strategies, depending on market and competitive conditions, from the relatively passive and silent "lean green" approach to the more aggressive and visible "extreme green" approach--with "defensive green" and "shaded green" in between.

Companies enact defenses against hostile takeovers to protect their independence and current management initiatives or to help ensure that hostile bidders are pressured to present their best offers. The critical challenge for executives is to determine--in anticipation of attacks on their firm--which defense strategies best fortify stockholder investments. Reviews the motivations for hostile takeovers, discusses the effects of popular defenses, and showcases several high-profile takeover bids to provide executives with well-reasoned and empirically supported evaluations of the major strategies they can use to maximize shareholder wealth.

In the face of fierce global competition and soaring customer expectations, many companies have turned to supply chain management (SCM) to leverage the resources and know-how of suppliers and customers. To obtain an accurate view of what this requires, 52 in-depth interviews were carried out with supply chain leaders to answer the question, "What are the principles that drive successful supply chain design and collaboration?" The findings are summarized as the 10 guiding principles of high-impact SCM. Mapping these guiding principles to a maturity framework reveals that there is much work awaiting managers who embark on the arduous journey toward supply chain collaboration.

There is a rising concern that marketing research is drifting away from the practical. With an ever-widening gap between business and academia, people are asking: What do practitioners want from marketing research? What do the researchers provide? Do the two coincide? In the short-term, parochial point of view, practitioners will never get what they are looking for in academic research. However, in the long term, research increases knowledge crucial to educating future marketing managers and enhancing their scientific decision making. Its essence is to level the playing field and intensify competitiveness among all firms, with the result of improved market efficiency and benefits to consumers and society as a whole.

With worldwide sales topping $85 billion, the scope and scale of direct selling warrants greater understanding of its chief asset: the sales representative. Self-employed individuals, these reps are instrumental to their firms' success and growth. Interviews with direct selling executives have helped identify universally applicable sales force success variables: selecting the right individuals, maintaining their motivation, developing the appropriate skills, and providing high perceived value and supply. With an independent sales force framework, it is imperative for direct selling firms to implement programs that aid in finding and keeping strong individual sellers.

Customer relationship management (CRM) requires the alignment of three building blocks: insight into customer decision making, information about customers, and information processing capability. However, its emphasis on the latter has outpaced the first two, so that CRM rarely realizes its full potential. The guidelines presented here can help managers build a full-spectrum information portfolio for CRM that, through the thoughtful integration of existing tools, information properties, and communication channels, can provide a more complete picture of customers and form the basis for long-lasting and profitable relationships with them.

Conventional hierarchical businesses can mimic features of self-organizing entities like Linux to gain a competitive advantage--especially over companies whose customers remain isolated from and ignorant of one another.

The penalties for antitrust offenses are more severe than most executives think. But companies that violate antitrust laws can win amnesty by fessing up before someone blows the whistle on them.

There's a way to build cross-functional innovation teams that can balance your appetite for risk with your hunger for a breakthrough. Do it wrong, and you may find yourself with a highly creative team producing a string of bad ideas.

Liberty Mutual mines the 389,000 electronic legal invoices it receives each year for detailed data on law firm performance and shady billing practices. In eliminating the paper-based approach, it has also increased productivity and slashed costs.

A $200 billion market has appeared on your business horizon, but you may not have noticed it. It's the new U.S. military. Virtually all aspects of the military are changing to ensure that it can fight unpredictable threats while sustaining the infrastructure needed to support and train forces. The military is turning to nontraditional business partners to meet a wide range of needs, from health care to housing to information technology. The Defense Department is yielding its monopoly on every aspect of national security and adopting a more businesslike model in which the military's warfighting capabilities are supported through outsourcing and business alliances. Market standards are replacing the heavy customization that has locked many companies out of this marketplace. The authors have participated in the transformation process from different perspectives--one civilian, the other military. Together, they highlight the prospects that transformation is creating for companies outside the traditional defense industry and reveal paths to success in this complex market. They also present six principles for doing business with the military that require persistence, integrity, and a willingness to master the intricacies of a distinctive culture.

Companies routinely squander their most precious resource--the time of their top executives. In the typical company, senior executives meet to discuss strategy for only three hours a month. And that time is poorly spent in diffuse discussions never even meant to result in any decision. The price of misused executive time is high. Delayed strategic decisions lead to overlooked waste and high costs, harmful cost reductions, missed new product and business development opportunities, and poor long-term investments. But a few deceptively simple changes in the way top management teams set agendas and structure team meetings can make an enormous difference in their effectiveness. Efficient companies use seven techniques to make the most of the time their top executives spend together. They keep strategy meetings separate from meetings focused on operations. They explore issues through written communications before they meet, so that meeting time is used solely for reaching decisions. In setting agendas, they rank the importance of each item according to its potential to create value for the company. They seek to get issues not only on, but also off, the agenda quickly, keeping to a clear implementation timetable. They make sure they have considered all viable alternatives before deciding a course of action. They use a common language and methodology for reaching decisions. And they insist that once a decision is made, they stick to it.

It's time to rethink global branding. More than two decades ago, Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt argued that corporations should grow by selling standardized products all over the world. But consumers in most countries had trouble relating to generic products, so executives instead strove for global scale on backstage activities such as production while customizing product features and selling techniques to local tastes. Such "global" strategies now rule marketing. Global branding has lost more luster recently because transnational companies have been under siege, with brands like Coca-Cola and Nike becoming lightning rods for antiglobalization protests. The instinctive reaction of most transnational companies has been to try to fly below the radar. But global brands can't escape notice. In a research project involving 3,300 consumers in 41 countries, the authors found that most people choose one global brand over another because of differences in the brands' global qualities. Rather than ignore the global characteristics of their brands, it's critical for firms to manage those characteristics, because future growth for most companies will likely come from foreign markets. Consumers base preferences on three dimensions of global brands--quality (signaled by a company's global stature); the cultural myths that brands author; and firms' efforts to address social problems. The authors also found that it didn't matter to consumers whether the brands they bought were American--a remarkable finding considering that the study was conducted when anti-American sentiment in many nations was on the rise.

We all admire leaders. In trying to understand how leadership works, however, we often lose sight of the fact that followers are a crucial part of the equation. Regrettably, they get short shrift in the management literature, where they are described as merely responding to their leaders' charisma or caring attitudes. What most analyses seem to ignore is that followers have their own motivations and are as powerfully driven to follow as leaders are to lead. In this article, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and management consultant Michael Maccoby delves into the unconscious recesses of followers' minds. He looks closely at the often irrational tendency to relate to a leader as some important person from the past--a parent, a sibling, a close friend, or even a nanny--what Sigmund Freud calls "transference." A solid understanding of transference can yield great insight into organizational behavior and endow you with the wisdom and compassion to be a tremendous leader. The author explains the most common types of transference--paternal, maternal, and sibling--and shows how they play out in the workplace. He notes that they have evolved as our family structures have changed. Whether followers perceive a leader as an all-knowing father figure, an authoritative yet unconditionally loving mother figure, or a brother or sister who isn't necessarily a model of good behavior, the leader can manage transferential ties by bringing unconscious projections to light. Then debilitating resentment and animosity can give way to mutual understanding and productivity--and a limping organization can start to thrive.

When a person sizes up a complex situation and rapidly comes to a decision that proves to be not just good but brilliant, you think, "That was smart." After you watch him do this a few times, you realize you're in the presence of something special. It's not raw brainpower, though that helps. It's not emotional intelligence either, though that, too, is often involved. It's deep smarts. Deep smarts are not philosophical--they're not wisdom in that sense, but they're as close to wisdom as business gets. You see them in the manager who understands when and how to move into a new international market, the executive who knows just what kind of talk to give when her organization is in crisis, the technician who can track a product failure back to an interaction between independently produced elements. These are people whose knowledge would be hard to purchase on the open market. Their insight is based on know-how more than on know-what; it comprises a system view as well as expertise in individual areas. Because deep smarts are experienced based and often context specific, they can't be produced overnight or readily imported into an organization. It takes years for an individual to develop them. They can be taught, however, with the right techniques. Drawing on their forthcoming book Deep Smarts, Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap say the best way to transfer such expertise to novices--and, on a larger scale, to make individual knowledge institutional--isn't through PowerPoint slides, a Web site of best practices, online training, project reports, or lectures. Rather, the sage needs to teach the neophyte individually how to draw wisdom from experience. Companies have to be willing to dedicate time and effort to such extensive training, but the investment more than pays for itself.

By the time Lou Gerstner took the helm in 1993, IBM had a long history of progressive management when it came to civil rights and equal opportunity employment. But Gerstner felt IBM wasn't taking full advantage of a diverse market for talent, nor was it maximizing the potential of its diverse customer and employee base. So in 1995, he launched a diversity task force initiative to uncover and understand differences among people within the organization and find ways to appeal to an even broader set of employees and customers. Gerstner established a task force for each of eight constituencies: Asians; blacks; the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered community; Hispanics; white men; Native Americans; people with disabilities; and women. He asked the task forces to research four questions: What does your constituency need to feel welcome and valued at IBM? What can the corporation do, in partnership with your group, to maximize your constituency's productivity? What can the corporation do to influence your constituency's buying decisions so that IBM is seen as a preferred solution provider? And with which external organizations should IBM form relationships to understand better the needs of your constituency? The answers to these questions became the basis for IBM's diversity strategy. David A. Thomas stresses that four factors are key to implementing any major change initiative: strong support from company leaders, an employee base that is fully engaged with the initiative, management practices that are integrated and aligned with the effort, and a strong and well-articulated business case for action. All four elements have helped IBM make diversity a key corporate strategy tied to real growth.

Most executives today agree that their efforts should be focused on growing the lifetime value of their customers. Yet, few companies have come to terms with the implications of that idea for their marketing management. Oldsmobile, for example, enjoyed outstanding brand equity with many customers through the 1980s. But as the century wore further on, the people who loved the Olds got downright old. So why did General Motors spend so many years and so much money trying to reposition and refurbish the tired, tarnished brand? Why didn't GM managers instead move younger buyers along a path of less resistance, toward another of the brands in GM's stable--or even launch a wholly new brand geared to their tastes? Catering to new customers, even at the expense of the brand, would surely have been the path to profits. The reason, argue the authors, is that in large consumer goods companies like General Motors, brands are the raison d'etre. They are the focus of decision making and the basis of accountability. But this overwhelming focus on growing brand equity is inconsistent with the goal of growing customer equity. Drawing on a wide range of current examples, the authors offer seven tactics that will put brands in the service of growing customer equity. These include replacing traditional brand managers with a new position--the customer segment manager; targeting brands to as narrow an audience as possible; developing the capability and the mind-set to hand off customers from one brand to another within the company; and changing the way brand equity is measured by basing calculations on individual, rather than average, customer data.

Reprint: R0409J The headlines are filled with the sorry tales of companies like Vivendi and AOL Time Warner that tried to use mergers and acquisitions to grow big fast or transform fundamentally weak business models. But, drawing on extensive data and experience, the authors conclude that major deals make sense in only two circumstances: when they reinforce a company's existing basis of competition or when they help a company make the shift, as the industry's competitive base changes. In most stable industries, the authors contend, only one basis-superior cost position, brand power, consumer loyalty, real-asset advantage, or government protection-leads to industry leadership, and companies should do only those deals that bolster a strategy to capitalize on that competitive base. That's what Kellogg did when it acquired Keebler. Rather than bow to price pressures from lesser players, Kellogg sought to strengthen its existing basis of competition-its brand-through Keebler's innovative distribution system. A company coping with a changing industry should embark on a series of acquisitions (most likely coupled with divestitures) aimed at moving the firm to the new competitive basis. That's what Comcast did when changes in government regulations fundamentally altered the broadcast industry. In such cases, speed is essential, the investments required are huge, and half-measures can be worse than nothing at all. Still, the research shows, successful acquirers are not those that try to swallow a single, large, supposedly transformative deal but those that go to the M&A table often and take small bites. Deals can fuel growth-as long as they're anchored in the fundamental way money is made in your industry. Fail to understand that and no amount of integration planning will keep you and your shareholders from bearing the high cost of your mistakes.