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Drucker argues that in the post-capitalist society, managers must learn to negotiate a new environment with a different set of work rules and career expectations. Companies currently face downsizing and turmoil with increasing regularity. In addition, businesses in the post-capitalist society grow through many and varied complicated alliances, often baffling to the traditional manager. In this new world of business, managers must learn to use information in the place of authority as their primary tool. As companies increasingly become temporary institutions, the manager also must begin to explore what Drucker calls competencies: a person's abilities, likes, dislikes, and goals. If executives rise to these challenges, a new organizational foundation will be built. While a combination of rank and power supported the traditional organization, the internal structure of the emerging organization will be mutual understanding and trust.

Timothy Firnstahl, restaurateur, faced rising costs, inefficient management, and a recession. Firnstahl got the answer to his problem from Mikhail Gorbachev: slash the centralized command and liberate the company. In doing so, he would also transfer virtually all power and responsibility to his line managers. And after five months of intensive study and planning, he accomplished what he set out to do. He fired most of his corporate staff, empowered his restaurant managers with "100% Power and Responsibility," and undertook a massive promotion campaign.

Logistics have the potential to become the next governing element of strategy. Customer needs vary, and companies can tailor their logistics systems to serve them better and more profitably. The goal of logistics strategy is building distinct approaches to distinct groups of customers. The first step is organizing a cross-functional team to proceed through the following steps: segmenting customers according to purchase criteria, establishing different standards of service for different customer segments, tailoring logistics pipelines to support each segment, and creating economies of scale to determine which assets can be shared among various pipelines.

In the West, we believe that privatizing an Eastern European enterprise will invariably improve governance, management, and performance. But the positive effects of privatization are far from automatic. In fact, most newly privatized companies need dominant, experienced Western shareholders to compensate for the weaknesses of communist-educated managers. Whereas privatization with a strong shareholder can work miracles, privatizations without one rarely do well for long. Because owners must educate, motivate, or replace incumbent managers, ownership is critical. Privatization is a means to an end, not always an end in itself.

The author sets up a new metaphor for competition drawn from the study of biology and social systems. He suggests that a company be viewed not as a member of a single industry but as part of a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries. In a business ecosystem, companies "co-evolve" around a new innovation, working cooperatively and competitively to support new products and satisfy customer needs. In a large business environment, several ecosystems may vie for survival and dominance. In fact, it's largely competition among business ecosystems, not individual companies, that's fueling today's industrial transformation. Managers can't afford to ignore the birth of new ecosystems or the competition among those that already exist. McKinsey Award Winner.

Mueller Chemical Company's biggest customer, Ameriton, demanded that MCC install a total quality management system five years ago. Now, in this fictional case study, Ameriton has gone bankrupt. As a result, MCC has had to cut its work force, and senior managers are meeting to decide whether TQM should be part of the downsized MCC. The division is more cost-efficient, product defects are nearly nonexistent, and its safety record is spotless. Ameriton's failure is no reason to abandon all that MCC has built. Furthermore, shareholders and customers would think that MCC was panicking. But, does MCC have the time or resources to tailor TQM to a smaller organization? Seven experts in TQM and organizational change consider whether TQM has a place in MCC's restructuring.

The more business ethics secures its status in campuses across the country, the more bewildering it appears to actual managers. It's not that managers dislike the idea of doing the right thing. As the author argues, far too many business ethicists just haven't offered them the practical advice they need. After some initial stumbles, however, ethicists have begun to get their hands dirty and seriously consider the costs of doing the right thing. Finally, a new business ethics is emerging that acknowledges and accepts the messy world of mixed motives. As a result, novel concepts are springing up: moderation, pragmatism, and minimalism, among others. In each case, the practical analyses offered are not as important as the commitment to converse with real managers in a language relevant to the world they inhabit and the problems they face.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Vertical integration is a risky strategy--complex, expensive, and hard to reverse. Yet, some companies jump into it without an adequate analysis of the risks. The authors developed a framework to help managers decide when it's useful to vertically integrate and when it's not. They examine four common reasons to integrate and warn managers against a number of other, spurious reasons. Their primary advice: Don't vertically integrate unless it is absolutely necessary to create or protect value.

Too often, quality programs fail to improve quality because they concentrate on internal processes that do not affect the customer. This is at least partially due to the alienation of marketing from the quality movement, a situation for which both sides are partially at fault. Ideally, marketing should serve as the eyes and ears of the organization, linking the external customer to managerial processes. One way to do this is to organize the collection of customer satisfaction measures around the managerial processes themselves. This forms a natural bridge from the customer to management and allows management to track the impact of quality improvements all the way from internal process measures to overall customer satisfaction and market share.

"Think global, act local" goes the saying. But Gurcharan Das, who helped build Vicks Vaporub into what is now one of Procter & Gamble's most successful Indian brands, believes that "think local" is at least equally good advice. The key to all business success, he argues, is local passion. The most successful global brands, Das argues, are those that make best use of the rich experience their geographical diversity gives them. Business truths are invariably local in origin, but they are often expressions of fundamental human needs that are the same worldwide. Flexible, open-minded managers can take local insights with a universal character and make them global.

A new paradigm is required to explain patterns of competitive success and failure in information technology. Success flows to the company that establishes proprietary architectural control over a broad, fast-moving, competitive space. Architectural strategies have gained importance in information technology because of the astonishing rate of improvement in microprocessors and other semiconductor components. Since no single vendor can keep pace with the outpouring of cheap, powerful, mass-produced components, customers insist on stitching together their own local systems solutions. Architectures impose order on the system and make the interconnections possible. The architectural controller is the company that controls the standard by which the entire information package is assembled.

For many managers, being strategic means pursuing the opportunities that fit the company's resources. This approach is not wrong, but it obscures an alternative approach in which being strategic means creating a chasm between ambition and resources. Winners find less resource-intensive ways of achieving their ambitious goals. Managers at competitive companies can leverage their resources in five basic ways: by concentrating resources around strategic goals; by accumulating resources more efficiently; by complementing one kind of resource with another; by conserving resources whenever they can; and by recovering resources from the marketplace as quickly as possible.

As CEO of the Swiss Corp. for Microelectronics and Watchmaking (SMH), Nicolas G. Hayek has engineered one of the world's most spectacular industrial comebacks - the revitalization of the Swiss watch industry. But SMH is more than a turnaround story. It is a case study of Hayek's management philosophy and strategic thinking, both of which are strikingly at odds with prevailing wisdom about how to compete in the new economy. For example, conventional wisdom suggests that "stateless" global companies should seek low-cost production wherever they can find it. Yet SMH is committed to its Swiss home base. Ultimately, Hayek's unconventional philosophy embraces corporate muscle and strategic imagination: "If you combine powerful technology with fantasy, you create something very distinct."

For generations, emigrant Chinese entrepreneurs have operated in a network of family and clan across many national borders. Chinese businesses in the Pacific Rim and beyond make up the world's fourth economic power. The author calls this global network of entrepreneurial relationships the Chinese commonwealth. The author details the Confucian tradition and the values that have hindered so many Chinese businesses in the recent past, including Wang Laboratories. The sudden wealth of expatriate Chinese communities and the new possibilities for business still come down to a patchwork of many small enterprises that often have no respect for one another. But a new ideology of economic self-interest that transcends politics and the constraints on traditional Chinese business may lead to even greater integration of the commonwealth.

Day after day, CFOs and investors alike make decisions based on the principles of modern financial theory. Developed in the decades after World War II, these theories began as isolated academic concepts. Today they shape our corporations. Now the thinking is changing. As a result of the increasing globalization of the markets and the increased technological firepower of its participants, there is both a pragmatic and philosophical attack being waged against both the efficient market hypothesis and the capital asset pricing model. As such, the benchmarks and yardsticks that used to matter to managers--such as the well-known measure of stock price volatility, beta, and the ubiquitous credit rating--are now in question. There are, however, only the sketchy outlines of the new philosophies and practices that might eventually become post-modern theory.

Few companies have systematically revamped their operations with customer loyalty in mind. MBNA credit cards and State Farm Insurance are successful because they have designed their business around customer loyalty--a self-reinforcing system in which the company delivers superior value and reinvents cash flows to find and keep customers and employees. When a company consistently delivers superior value and wins customer loyalty, market share and revenues go up and the cost of acquiring new customers goes down. The company then can pay workers better. Increased pay boosts employee morale and commitment; as employees stay longer, their productivity goes up and training costs fall; employees' overall job satisfaction, combined with their experience, helps them serve customers better; and customers are then more inclined to stay loyal to the company. Finally, as the best customers and employees become part of the loyalty-based system, competitors are left to survive with less desirable customers and less talented employees.

People don't take vacations to "get away from it all," states marketing guru Ted Levitt, but to escape from modern commercialism. And the chief culprit is advertising: omnipresent, relentless, loud, sometimes tasteless. Even if you like a product or love an ad, the ubiquitousness, the repetition of advertising can drive you crazy. But advertising helps a lot too, Levitt asserts. Facilitating the free flow of commerce, advertising creates opportunities and employment and spurs innovation. Informing, entertaining, and exciting, it presents a change of pace amidst the usual news, drama, sports, or MTV. Ads open doors to the products people create to reshape their environments and enhance their lives, the tools they use to get results. And in an era where there is so much to mistrust, advertising is straightforward in its purpose. Acting in behalf of whoever is paying, it hides no agenda but blatantly seeks your money.

Western manufacturers have long believed that standardized work in a hierarchical environment alienates employees, poisons labor relations, stifles initiative, and lowers quality. This belief sets up Frederick W. Taylor's time-and-motion studies as the enemy of manufacturing innovation and excellence. NUMMI, the joint-venture auto assembly plant set up by General Motors and Toyota in 1984, shows that hierarchy and standardization motivate workers and increase job satisfaction. NUMMI has a no-layoff policy and its production system is strongly committed to the social context in which work is performed. Workers rather than engineers analyze jobs, design more efficient procedures, and create a consensus for new standards. Reduced variability in task performance increases safety, quality, productivity, and flexibility, and gives continuous improvement a base. Workers interact with the system by refining it.

No industry relies more on information than banking does, yet Continental, one of America's largest banks, outsources its information technology (IT). Continental executives, eager to focus on the bank's core mission of serving business customers, decided to outsource one after another in-house service--from cafeteria services to information technology. While conventional wisdom holds that banks must retain complete internal control of IT, Continental bucked this argument when it entered into a ten-year, multimillion-dollar contract with Integrated Systems Solutions Corp. Continental is already reaping benefits from outsourcing IT. Most important, Continental staffers today focus on their true core competencies: intimate knowledge of customers' needs, and relationships with customers.

When Peter Johnson became the administrator of Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) in Portland, Oregon, he realized that BPA had to listen to its harshest critics--the people affected by the agency's decisions. When Johnson arrived in 1981, BPA was reviled for its approach to decision making--the agency first made decisions and then explained them. Despite the warnings of attorneys, and his own apprehensions, Johnson opened up BPA's decision making to the public. The first attempts to involve BPA's critics were filled with confrontation, but success soon followed. Early experiences proved to Johnson that involving the public in BPA's decision making was a practical alternative to litigation. Former adversaries became BPA's partners in making better decisions, and the agency gained authority and legitimacy.