Public-policy negotiator Susan Podziba, a teacher and a mediator-for-hire offers this two-part article on negotiation skills. Part I, gives nine tenets for negotiating success. Part II follows up with some thoughts on refining your skills.

"Winds of change are blowing through the continent," declared Smuts Ngonyama, chief strategic advisor to South African President Thabo Mbeki during a Wharton-sponsored forum on investing in Africa. While Ngonyama's upbeat sentiments were echoed by other speakers, these experts also noted persistent obstacles that still hamper significant levels of investment and development, including corruption and the lack of an adequate criminal justice system. But here as well, one speaker noted, the last few years have brought new efforts at reform and a greater sense that progress is indeed possible.

Choosing performance measures is a challenge. Performance measurement systems play a key role in developing strategy, evaluating the achievement of organizational objectives and compensating managers. Yet many managers feel traditional financially oriented systems no longer work adequately. A recent survey of U.S. financial services companies found most were not satisfied with their measurement systems. In an article on Oct. 16, in the Financial Times' Mastering Management series, Wharton accounting professors Christopher Ittner and David Larcker suggest that financial data have limitations as a measure of company performance. The two note that other measures, such as quality, may be better at forecasting, but can be difficult to implement.

Over the last two decades western economies have experienced a wave of M&A activity and a common hunger among many CEOs to increase the size of their corporation. Will the next wave in economic growth be engulfed by a series of demergers? If this were to happen, would it be similar to the de-conglomeration wave in the 1980s that followed the conglomerate mergers of the 1960s? In order to establish whether demergers create value for the shareholder, researchers at the London School of Economics collected data on the performance effects of European demergers over the last 10 years. The results showed that, unlike mergers, demergers on average seem to be beneficial for the shareholder.

Editor's Note: this is one article in the EBF Debate titled "Should we control the urge to merge?" at
http://www.ebfonline.com/at_forum/at_forum.asp?id=139
Unfortunately, I cannot recommend too highly any of the other articles in that debate...

Their message was clear: The future of the global economy is in Asia. A group of renowned executives, entrepreneurs, and asset managers convened at the Sixth Annual Wharton Asian Business Conference in Philadelphia to discuss the changing face of Asia and its transition to the new economy. Despite the negative impact of the economic crisis of the late 1990s, experts noted that further development of the Internet, construction of a technology and telecommunications infrastructure, and institutional reform are all signs that a second East Asian miracle-powered largely by foreign capital and investments-will take place in the region soon.

This Economist article examines the impact and importance of the Internet on business and management. Raises some interesting points, some novel and some commonly known.

Note: account required to access after current month

The spoken word is the hot commodity this fall, for Internet companies ranging from retailers that envision voice-activated sales to advertisers envisioning a captive audience. In this special report, Business 2.com examines how companies will profit from voice technologies on the Web, what obstacles remain, who the leading players are, and what the future will bring.

English isn't managing to sweep all else before it - and if it ever does become the universal language, many of those who speak it won't understand one another.

The Caucasus region -- bounded by Russia and Iran, by the Black Sea and the Caspian -- is rich in oil and hatred. It is where Stalin was born, and where the Soviet empire died.

It's in the headlines nearly every morning: the urge to merge. Each day heralds a new marriage between colossal companies - creating a merger- and-acquisition frenzy unrivaled in history.

Conventional wisdom explains these deals in terms of strategy, scale, and globalization - and stops there. We invited 10 influential thinkers and leaders to peel back the merger issue by answering three different questions: Will these megacorporations really work and succeed over time? Who will want to work with them? And will they work for us - what does this new cast of corporations mean for business and society?

The 10:
Ralph Nader
Karen Stephenson
Peter J. Solomon
Joanne Lawrence
David Dorman
Charles B. Ames
Tim DeMello
Clive Meanwell
Peter Senge
George Gilder

Priceline's founder says there are exactly four ways to make money on-line.

An author-publisher dispute about material posted online raises tough questions about Internet copyright law.

Quite an impressive amount of recent academic research focuses on the idea that financial factors may cause or reinforce real fluctuations. In these models, it is typically a monetary policy shock that serves to lower the value of an asset which is used to secure a firm's borrowing, thereby generating broad credit channel effects of monetary transmission. We empirically investigate the impact of corporate risk management strategies on this specific transmission channel by using the seminal paper of Gertler and Gilchrist (1994) as a benchmark. A potentially important impact of corporate hedging is suggested by corporate finance models that generate hedge incentives by introducing asymmetric information into the credit markets, the assumption at the very heart of the available theories of a broad credit channel. The advent of liquid US interest rate derivatives markets in the mid-1970s should, therefore, serve as something like a turning point in the history of US monetary transmission. Credit channel effects should have been in operation prior to the introduction of these markets, while any such effect should have tended to vanish afterwards. In addition, we should be able to detect marked differences in the behaviour of small and large firms up to the 1970s in contrast to a broadly identical behaviour on the part of these firms in the period thereafter.

Big firms thought VCs could help them get rich and build online businesses. Now they're thinking again.

This complementary paper to Froot, Scharfstein, and Stein (1993) seeks to explore some of the corporate finance foundations of monetary economics. In particular, it investigates the impact of corporate risk management strategies on the monetary transmission mechanism. It employs a simple model of a financial accelerator (synonymously: a broad credit channel of monetary policy transmission) to argue that information asymmetries - which are at the heart of these models of the transmission mechanism - create incentives for corporate hedging programmes, that is, cash flow management. These policies, in turn, diminish the impact of monetary policy measures, which is reduced to the pure cost-of-capital effect.

Companies need EU enlargement in order to secure the opportunities which have flowed from economic and political reforms in Eastern Europe. By taking the initiative now they can be good corporate citizens as well as wise investors.

Very little observational data are available on what management consultants actually do on an hour-to-hour basis. The purpose of the present research study is to gain insight into the work of management consultants by answering the following questions: (1) What are the characteristics of the management consultants' working days? (2) What are the characteristics of the management consultants' verbal interaction patterns during scheduled interactions? (3) Which intervention strategies are dominant during management consultants' scheduled interactions? (4) What are the main functions of unscheduled interactions? (5) What are the characteristics of the management consultants' desk work?

What ivory tower? Today's entrepreneurship profs are jumping on board student start-ups just as soon as their pupils graduate.

This Technology Note covering the e-procurement is presented in two parts. The first part covers: 1. The Promise of E-Procurement; 2. E-Procurement Myths and Reality; 3. Preparing for an E-Procurement Initiative. The second part covers: 4. E-Procurement Architecture; 5. Selecting an E-Procurement Partner(s); 6. Implementing E-Procurement.
(see Part II at: http://www.technologyevaluation.com/ViewArticle.asp?id=74.601.52.1180)

Rayona Sharpnack is a teacher and a mentor to some of the most powerful women in some of the most important companies around. Her message: Don't worry so much about what you need to know. Instead, figure out who you need to be.

Internet Capital Group has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in companies that are looking to make their mark in e-commerce. John Hamm evaluates and advises the entrepreneurs who run those companies. Here are the character traits that he looks for. Do you have what it takes?

Cruel World contributor and San Francisco State Marketing professor Dan Wardlow discusses the importance and impact of taking a socially responsible attitude toward business and marketing.

There are three "waves" of e-business, according to Gartner analyst and former Sun Microsystems CIO Dennis Wayson. And if you want to successfully implement e-business, you need to know which wave you're in and what steps you should be taking to reach the next level.

Entrepreneurs often say they're looking for smart money. So it should come as no surprise that more of them are shunning old-school venture capitalists in favor of savvy tech veterans who have started their own investment funds...

Robert Lederer, an expert in market research chats about the past, present and future of online surveys.