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Issue 4, 1993

Rethinking the Organisational Architecture

Getting the organisation right is an issue likely to preoccupy executives throughout the 1990s. This is a difficult time to work in, manage, or change a corporation. Although downsizing and restructuring have become widespread, their purpose has usually been merely to chip away at old structures...
Issue 1, 1993

Core-Technology-Based Management: The Next Japanese...

Intensifying competition - driven in part by the worldwide economic slowdown - is forcing Japanese companies to abandon their "copycat" or "me-too" strategies and adopt new Western-style strategies based on proprietary technologies. In the past, Japanese competitive advantage arose from superb...
Issue 4, 1993

Viewpoint Discontinuous Improvement: Five Catapulting Ideas

National and regional economies, like individual enterprises, cannot maintain positions of leadership by conducting business as usual. Nor can they, once they've slipped, regain leadership by imitating the current leader. Imitators seldom if ever catch up to those they imitate. While they are busy...
Issue 1, 1993

Getting a Return on Your Information Technology Investment

One of the most vexing challenges senior executives face is getting an attractive return on their information technology investments. They already recognize that information technology can fundamentally change their businesses - redefining their economic structures, product values, and customer/...
Issue 3, 1993

Six Imperatives for Excellence in Environmental Management

In managing for the environment, no company, however accomplished, can afford to rest on its laurels. The solid progress achieved over the past decade – in the development of clean technologies, sophisticated resource recovery systems, innovative environmental management systems, risk management...
Issue 1, 1993

The Coming Revolution in Manufacturing

New manufacturing technologies - exemplified by responsive design, moldless forming, and prototype simulation - will revolutionize the ways products are manufactured and marketed, permitting and indeed requiring the substitution of know-how for capital. Old notions of economies of scale will be...
Issue 3, 1993

An Eye on Disclosure: The EC's Eco-Management and...

"... Whereas the provision of information to the public, by companies, on the environmental aspects of their activities is an essential element of good environmental management and a response to the growing interest of the public in information on this subject..."Official Journal of the European...
Issue 3, 1993

Viewpoint Full-Cost Accounting

When it comes to full-cost accounting, nobody has all the answers. Certainly we don't. We do know, however, that air, water, and land are not the "free goods" our society once believed them to be. They must be redefined as assets so that they can be appropriately and efficiently allocated. Ideally...
Issue 2, 1993

Creating a Product Strategy

Surely every business has a product strategy - right? Wrong! A product strategy is much more than a list of specific product actions over time. It is an explicit route-map designed to guide a company in its efforts to develop and market products that build sustainable competitive advantage and meet...
Issue 2, 1993

Controlling the Product Creation Process

Pressure to be first to market with the right products is nothing new. Companies that rely on new product introductions for growth and prosperity have always known that ill-conceived products and lost development time cost them heavily in missed sales targets, lost revenues, postponed profits, and...