Considering a major change? Identify potential problem areas first with this quick assessment.

Harvard Business School professor David B. Yoffie takes the martial arts into the executive suite. Your rivals will flip over his ideas (if you apply them right).

Many purchasing organizations are being challenged to increase the level of "global sourcing" to tap into promising opportunities and to fend off competition. Unfortunately, many companies are ill equipped for the challenge: though global sourcing employs the same set of activities as domestic sourcing, there is also greater complexity. Based on our experience, most companies need to enhance the skills of their purchasing organizations to pursue global sourcing effectively. Although our research in this area is still under way, this article explores some issues in global sourcing encountered by our clients. The article is part of a series in Strategy & Business expounding upon the skills required in the business model that Booz-Allen describes as "balanced purchasing."

Unless we fully understand the theory or thinking that we held true when we created practices and procedures that we use presently, we will be forever condemned to create different versions of what we have always done.

Fast Company speaks with David Nadler, who has advised the CEOs of some of the biggest and best-known companies in the world through the consulting company he started, Delta Consulting Group. Topics discussed include:
At 70 MPH, Failure Comes Faster
Beware: Balance Sheets Can Kill
Ask Yourself: How Elastic Is My Enterprise?
Understand What It Really Is That You Do Best
Moving Faster Means Braking Faster Too

What does it take to grow shareholder value at world-class rates? For many years companies have successfully focused their efforts on cost reduction through increased labor and asset productivity and have achieved short-term increases in shareholder value as a reward. Today, with their businesses re-engineered and running efficiently, these companies have refocused their energies into developing long-term growth strategies. Aggressive revenue-oriented strategies are the most common approach to creating long-term value for shareholders. These strategies typically include acquisitions, new products that extend the line and marketing programs to improve customer loyalty and retention. Unfortunately, our research indicates that these strategies can cause more harm than good because superior long-term value for shareholders results only from a specific type of revenue growth: growth that results when a company delivers an order-of- magnitude increase in value to its customers (what we call "10X value").

The ways of thinking that underlie strategy formulation are seldom addressed in business textbooks. But principles, or at least guides, can be reverse engineered by careful review of business case studies. The author has assembled some of these and presents them in a skeletal form in hopes they offer a useful checklist and
food for thought as to how leaders think.

John Hancock's outspoken CEO names names and points fingers at some high-profile brand offenders in his new book. He also offers some good advice on not screwing up your own company's brand.

This article offers some warning signs of a failed CEO, including:
1. A chief executives who argues for fewer and shorter board meetings.
2. A chief executive's refusal to consider board candidates who have a reputation for being outspoken and who might be quick to criticize the chief executive's actions. A corollary of this last warning sign is the manipulation by the chief executive of the membership of key board committees.
3. The steady erosion in the number of security analysts who follow the company.
4. The chief executive's reliance on his or her "vision statement."
5. Excessive dependence on management consultants.
6. The dismissal of market share as a measure of performance.
7. Chief executives who go out of their way to blame subordinates for the unhappy circumstance of the company or alternatively to excuse or defend the underperformance of those subordinates.
8. The unexpected departure of management people of promise.
9. The steady coming and going of popular management programs.
10. The growing presence of management by committee.
11. An excessive preoccupation with compensation.
12. The chief executive's personal agenda is slowly but significantly changed.
13. A chief executive who develop an "edifice complex."
14. A sharp decline in the chief executive's grasp of the financial and operating details of the business.
15. The chief executive's propensity for diminishing his or her heirs apparent.
16. The increasing delegation of key decisions upward to the board.

Why do some management ideas take root and remain viable and others wither and die? This article offers four fundamental reasons:
- All organizations are, fundamentally, living social organisms;
- Organizational culture is more powerful than anything else;
- System-focused interventions work; component-centered interventions usually do not;
- Interventions clearly tied to business strategy work; interventions not clearly tied to business strategy do not.

Success lies in the alignment of culture, strategy, and leadership.

"The pressure is on for strategic sales management. We attempt to alleviate this pressure for all arenas by explaining first of all that strategic sales management works: we present data which reveal that corporate financial performance depends on a well-run sales force. We next turn to the importance of customer selection, customer focus and customer retention. We explain the importance of designing a sales force architecture around a carefully defined sales task. Finally, we delineate a three-part sales management system that will help you integrate these activities to make strategic sales management the cornerstone of an organization dedicated to dealing with today's customers in today's competitive world."

Fundamental stock analysis has long been the domain of legendary stock pickers like Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch. By studying companies' earnings, assets and liabilities, they have unearthed hundreds of stocks with the potential for future earnings and growth. But there is another set of tools that can help you pinpoint more profitable times to enter or exit a trade than you might get with fundamental analysis alone: technical analysis. Technical analysts examine a stock's past price movements and use that historical information to forecast future price movements.

Use this quick quiz to check out your perceptions and intentions vs those of those who report to you. Compare the perceptions; talk about the differences; identify the opportunities; and close the important gaps.

Rather than propose rules for the entire economy, Professors Vijay Mahajan (McCombs) and Jerry Wind (Wharton) focus their proposals on marketing. As contributing editors of the forthcoming book, Digital Marketing: Global Strategies from the World's Leading Experts, Mahajan and Wind are out to reshape their discipline. What follows are key points paraphrased from Mahajan's and Wind's new rules for digital marketing, with selected excerpts from their essay.

A Quick Look at the 10 Rules:
1. Target segments of one and create virtual communities
2. Design for customer-led positioning
3. Expand the role of branding in the global portfolio
4. Leverage consumers as co-producers through customization
5. Use creative pricing in the priceline.com world
6. Create anytime-anyplace distribution and integrated supply chain
7. Redesign advertising as interactive and integrated marketing communication, education and entertainment
8. Reinvent marketing research and modeling as knowledge creation and dissemination engine
9. Use adaptive experimentation
10. Redesign the strategy process and supporting organizational architecture

Editor's Note: this same basic material is covered again in the EBF article, "Digital marketing" at:
http://www.ebfonline.com/main_feat/in_depth/in_depth.asp?id=57

A useful look at the healthcare industry including a history of its move toward vertical integration in the 1980's and its retrenchment in the 1990's, analyis of the issues involved and some predictions for the future.

A summary of key points found in the book 'Change Is the Rule
Practical Actions for Change: On Target, On Time, On Budget' by Winford E. "Dutch" Holland, Ph.D.

Grading employees via forced rankings is a valuable management tool, say many companies. A slew of employees beg to differ.

Europe's tighter privacy laws present challenges and risks for U.S. companies.

Separating complaints from economic reality. When there is a conflict, there are effective options. Don't overreact, but don't get paralyzed either.

Studies reflect fewer than 30 percent of downsizing efforts have achieved anticipated profitability. This statistic suggests the real downsizing losers are organizations and stockholders.

Sure, if caring brings a profit. And businesses are discovering that it pays to be concerned about society.

Sound marketing principles from an unlikely source, the Grateful Dead rock group. Jerry Garcia and his fellow musicians emerged from the non-materialistic counterculture of the 1960's to create an exceptionally strong and lucrative brand name that has stood the test of time, and even Mr. Garcia's death in 1995. The basis of the Grateful Dead brand was the group's sustained personal relationship with its customers, derived from an unusual dedication to playing its distinctive and improvisational music at live performances.

A summary presentation of 10 Rules illuminated in the book, 'Sam Walton: Made in America, My Story'

Businesses are extending CRM tools and customer data to their partners to improve service and boost the bottom line.

"Japan's extraordinary postwar industrial success was defined by lean production, consensus and continuous improvement. But lately it has been the country's perceived weak points, such as lifetime employment and over-regulation, that have come to the forefront of the debate on Japanese management. But new ideas are emerging with the younger, more flexible generation of Japanese managers, which means there will still be plenty for the outside world to learn from Japan." Adapted from "The Witch Doctors"