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The nonpunitive approach to discipline is gaining acceptance at U.S. companies. Since Tampa Electric adopted a nonpunitive system of discipline companywide in January 1981, it has reported only favorable results. Organizations that have adopted a nonpunitive system have found measurable reductions in absenteeism, dismissals, disciplinary actions, grievances, and arbitration. They have also found a reduction in wrongful termination suits.

People decisions are long lasting in their consequences and difficult to unmake. At most one third of such decisions come out right. Executives who take their people decisions seriously will find the following principles helpful: 1) take responsibility for the decision--if the person the executive places in a position does not perform, the executive has made a mistake; 2) it is the duty of managers to make sure that the responsible persons in their organizations perform; 3) make the decision well; 4) don't give new people major new assignments. There are also some basic steps managers can follow in making effective promotion and staffing decisions.

Corporate response to the threat of foreign competition is often misdirected and ill timed--in part because many executives don't fully understand what global competition is. Executives must anticipate competitive moves by starting from new strategic intentions rather than from old strategies. They must think and act in complex ways. They may slice the company in one way for distribution investments, in another for technology, and in still another for manufacturing. In addition, global competitors must develop varied criteria and analytical tools to justify these investments. Even when its manufacturing is not on a global scale, a company must be sensitive to the potential of global competitive interaction.

Many American companies have begun to plan for their professional, managerial, and technical personnel. The most critical element is management's appreciation for the ways in which its human resource decisions affect the company's ability to achieve its business plans--and vice versa. Designing and strengthening work programs, assessing the corporate culture, and modifying or reinforcing it from the top are among the ways human resource planners target performance objectives.

Information technology is more than just computers. It must be conceived of broadly to encompass information as well as a spectrum of technologies that process the information. An important concept that highlights the role of information technology is the "value chain." This concept divides a company's activities into the technologically and economically distinct activities it performs to do business (marketing and delivery to buyers, support and servicing after sale, installation, repair, and parts inventory management, for example).

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Shows how the value-added chain can be used to analyze sources of international strategic advantages. The author argues that it is essential to draw a distinction between competitive and comparative advantage. He looks at structural shifts in the world economy and argues that they reflect changes in comparative advantage. The impact of these changes leads to only a few choices for the firm facing import competition and possessing no competitive advantage. If the global advantages acquired by international participation are not sustained, competition reverts to domestic competition among firms with different national names.

Successful research is designed to lead to actionable conclusions. By working backward and ascertaining results before the research actually hits the field, managers are more likely to get results they can work with. Managers must tell researchers the answers they need to accomplish company goals. By determining where they want to go, and then figuring out how to get there, both managers and researchers can expect successful research.

A study of 12 mature industrial companies shows that managing a financial goals system is a complex process in which competing and conflicting goals must be balanced. Once a company recognizes that its goals are interdependent and that trade-offs among them are necessary, it tends to emphasize market priorities in order to preserve its standing in the industry. In selecting its company's financial objectives, management should specify realistic time horizons for achievement, ensure that all primary goals are consistent with one another, and account for changing economic and competitive conditions.

New managers need from 24 to 36 months before they can be said to have mastered their jobs. Research on 14 U.S. and European new managers, which included turnaround and normal situations, reveals that the taking-charge process involves five predictable stages of learning and action: taking hold, immersion, reshaping, consolidation, and refinement. Success depends on critical factors such as experience and special competence, management style, relationships with key people, and critical front-end work.

Integrated manufacturing, the simultaneous collaboration of specialized functions, brings manufacturing engineering, quality engineering, and test engineering in during the early stages of the design process. The work cell integrates the design, development, and procurement functions in the new type of manufacturing. To redesign manufacturing around the work cell, companies must train engineers and managers in statistical quality techniques, put engineers and managers through apprenticeships in all phases of their businesses, encourage employees to adopt attitudes that foster integration of functions, and organize integrated task forces.

A study of U.S., Japanese, and European companies shows that, contrary to the claims of some corporate critics, large companies can be as technologically innovative as small companies. The effective management of innovation is surprisingly similar in both. Founders of small companies pursue their technological goals over many years, keeping costs low, tolerating uncertainty and setbacks, and readily adapting their products to meet market needs. By contrast, many managers of large organizations emphasize orderly and predictable operations. Innovative large companies accept the tumultuous realities of the innovative process and behave much like their smaller counterparts. McKinsey Award Winner.

A well-conceived business plan is essential to the success of an enterprise. Whether you are starting up a venture, seeking additional capital for an existing product line, or proposing a new activity for a corporate division, you will have to write a plan detailing your project's resource requirements, marketing decisions, financial projections, production demands, and personnel needs. The plan must reflect the viewpoint of three constituencies: the customer, the investor, and the producer. Too many business plans focus excessively on the producer.

A cost center can take pride in the service it gives to the company, but it's difficult for managers to tell if the center is working at an efficient level. Xerox's answer is to use the yardstick applied in the profit center in the cost center. The Logistics and Distribution (L&D) cost center of the Business System Group has taken steps to emulate the behavior of the profit center.

New projects, especially those involving high technology, are prone to cost overruns that may double, triple, or even quadruple original estimates. An inadequate design is often the cause. If necessary, management should abandon a project, and corporate environments should encourage honest appraisals and courage in their project managers. Suggestions for solutions include: verifying the nature of the problem, reengineering the project, and identifying underestimated areas.

In a letter to outside counsel, a hypothetical CEO comments that although corporate lawsuits are expensive, time consuming, and often counterproductive, business people and lawyers alike assume that litigating rather than settling is the normal way to deal with disputes. To alter this pattern, the CEO proposes that executives and lawyers recast their assumptions, treating prompt settlement of disputes as a primary goal and litigation as a last resort, and viewing lawyers, not as warriors, but as cost-conscious mediators. A cooperative effort by business people and lawyers, the CEO concludes, best ensures a reasonable and cost-effective approach to resolving disputes.

Many managers see the experience curve as out of date, but experience curve strategies can improve competitive performance in some clearly defined situations. Successful use of the curve requires understanding why and how it works and when to apply it. Industry examples explain how products have different experience curve slopes, experience bases, and cost reduction sources. Managers should study three critical variables to discover both the opportunities and traps in putting the experience curve to work for their companies: industry structure, the relative position of key competitors, and government impact.

Buyers need to be sold first on the selling company and on the salesperson before a sale can be made, says this industrial sales executive. He introduces a planned sales approach that can cover a period of years and he details creative selling techniques that have succeeded for his group. The author believes companies should be customer-driven and all areas should get behind the sales effort.

Entrepreneurship is a trait that is confined neither to certain types of individuals nor to organizations. A society can do much to stimulate or inhibit the development of entrepreneurship. Government policy decisions in recent years to lower the capital gains tax and deregulate certain industries have been instrumental in encouraging establishing new businesses. College and university business programs are also instrumental in stimulation. But it's up to individual organizations to foster conditions that allow entrepreneurship to flourish.

There are two radically different strategies for managing a company's workforce--a strategy based on imposing control and a strategy based on eliciting commitment. At the heart of control strategy is the wish to establish order, exercise control, and achieve efficiency in operations. Underlying the commitment strategy is a management philosophy that acknowledges a company's multiple stakeholders--owners, employees, customers, and the public. At first, most organizations adopt a limited set of changes--that is, a "transitional" approach. Evidence suggests that the rate of such transformations will continue to accelerate and the move toward commitment will extend to a larger number of plants and offices.

During a product's evolution to maturity, corporate customers inevitably change from inexperienced generalists to experienced specialists. The benefits customers seek change as well. Anticipating the patterns of evolution in customer decision making is as vital to success as is the most technically sophisticated product development program.