Many of the problems associated with quality programs are the result of increased complexity. The half-life concept, a new tool, strives to make complexity more manageable. By doing so, learning is accelerated and improvement becomes continuous.

Editor's Note: a highly recommended read...

Note: Darwin Magazine is now dead. Some articles are moving to CIO. I will try to update the links when I have time...

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Not all vendor contracts are dependable. It's up to you to make sure they are.

In many companies, top managers are frustrated because the sales process seems disconnected from corporate objectives, says Jonathan Byrnes. Here's what you can do to fix it.

Although among our client firms we see a wide range of technological sophistication, we've noticed that many companies - even the most sophisticated - make similar mistakes. In this article we highlight 13 technology management "pitfalls" we often see in the process industries, but which are common in a range of other industries as well.

What makes your top performers so productive? If you knew, you could hire more people like them. Traditional measures can't unlock the mysteries, because they don't reflect human nature and job experience, but some companies are coming closer to answering this question.

Thomas Davenport has helped midwife some of the biggest trends to have shaped business over the past 25 years--among them, reengineering and knowledge management. Now he's asking: Where do ideas come from? And how do they get traction? Here's his eight-point plan for winning with ideas.

Learning is an essential part of any company's effort to change and innovate. But to be successful, learning must be extended to strategy and management issues and involve the direct participation of senior executives. It's a price too many CEOs are unwilling to pay.

Leaders everywhere are grappling with organisational issues, as they align their strategies to reflect a new set of competitive givens. And as they reshuffle, spin off or acquire, the overriding global vs. local dilemma has not only become old, it's become painful. Because knowledge will ultimately differentiate leaders from followers, it is a company's ability to leverage its knowledge that will secure its competitive edge, and its future.

Confused about the differing assumptions of pricing models? More than likely you know that the assumptions don't hold very well and you probably know much research has looked at how the assumptions matter. Fama and French now provide a framework to hopefully make sense of some of this confusion. In a working paper they show that investor tastes and expectations matter. For instance, when discussing the CAPM, they conclude that with differing expectations, there is little a priori reason to expect that the market portfolio is the tangency portfolio (and hence the market portfolio may or may not be mean variance efficient, which is a central tenant of CAPM). Additionally the authors use the concept of investor disagreement (and its impact on the market portfolio) to discuss a range of topics ranging from value investing, to stock picking, and mutual fund performance. Very interesting. Not sure how they do it. Great paper after Great paper! [FinanceProfessor.com Annotation]

If implemented correctly, problem management can bring great benefits to your organization. It can reduce the number and impact of problems, reduce problem resolution time, and improve support staff productivity.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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A study of the vast structural and cultural change at the Belgian telcoms operator Belgacom illustrates the importance of seeing the 'big picture' and learning to adapt while on the move.

Editor's Note: offers an excellent review of five different models of organisational change

The two most popular approaches to pricing a new product or service are cost and competitive positioning. But it's time for a third option: an approach that focuses on value. Unlike the traditional methods, companies use value-based pricing to build a deeper understanding of their customers' business drivers, align their goals with their customers' goals, and share in each others fortunes in a way that isn't possible with more traditional pricing schemes.

This paper discusses A.T. Kearney's approach to value-based pricing. We begin by outlining the basic steps: how to determine what is valuable, what is not, and the obstacles companies may encounter. The paper discusses ways to gain a clear understanding of the customer's economic performance, and how to quantify the full value that a new offering can create. It also discusses how to "sell" value to customers and, finally, how to ensure that the value is split equitably between buyers and sellers.

Strategy is all about creating value for your shareholders. A strategy map is your guide to getting there. A Q&A with Robert Kaplan And David Norton.

By now, plenty were supposed to be in the corner offices. It's not working out that way. In many fields, men still rule, while women often choose more nuanced paths that keep them from reaching the top. But who are the real winners?

Best practice doesn't always equal best strategy. Best-practice benchmarking, rightly viewed as one of the most important tools for improving operational efficiency, can be a double-edged sword. Managers must guard against transforming what is a purely process-related technique into the overriding goal of strategic decision making. When industry competitors begin to herd around a single strategy, declining margins are bound to follow.

The lean manufacturing support philosophy has recently received increased interest, potentially allowing it to break like a huge wave across industry. The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems of the 1990s have been burdened with the liability of carrying on some well-publicized Material Requirements Planning (MRP) problems like complex bills of material (BOMs), inefficient workflows and unnecessary transactions, activities, and data collections.

Companies such as John Costanza Institute of Technology (JCIT) have been the pioneering source of the philosophies and techniques behind flow manufacturing, which replaces shop-floor silos, such as machines grouped by their function, and traditional scheduling and forecasting with process or product family-based production lines (often referred to as cells) designed to fill orders based on actual daily demand.

The term flow manufacturing is closely related to and thus often confused with other demand-driven manufacturing strategies, such as agile, just in time (JIT), and lean manufacturing. They also streamline processes, eliminate waste, use kanban signals to replenish supplies and are subject to continuous improvement.

However, flow manufacturing leverages some additional techniques helping manufacturers create any product on any given day and quantity, including the "quantity of one" (i.e., through the so-called mixed-model production), while keeping inventories to a minimum and shortening cycle times to fill customer orders quickly.

In commodity-goods markets, price is usually the only differentiator. But if you can brand those goods and bundle them with services, even bricks and sand can command premium prices. Here is how to turn commodities into branded goods.

Editor's Note: see a related European Business Forum (EBF) article, "Marketing through collaboration: how seller and buyer can benefit" by Kamran Kashani at:
http://www.ebfonline.com/main_feat/in_depth/in_depth.asp?id=462

Using Sale Cues to Influence Customer Purchasing

The consumer buying process is complex and can demand a great deal of effort. As a marketer, imagine that you could minimize both the consumer's effort and your own - creating demand and sales leads in a coordinated fashion, while simultaneously enhancing customer loyalty and increasing positive word of mouth. This is the principle behind dialogue marketing - a structured program of ongoing, two-way communication.

But dialogue programs are by nature highly ambitious and require tremendous focus, process and information management skills, internal collaboration, and cost-control discipline. In this article, we outline the general framework for developing a dialogue marketing program and suggest 10 guiding principles for implementing such programs successfully.

Current global economic data is available to anyone, anytime. But there are millions of pages on the Web, so finding the best data to further business decisions can be daunting. Here are some sites that offer high-value information and some guidelines for searching.

Chapter excerpted from Due Diligence for Global Deal Making: the definitive guide to cross-border mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, financings, and strategic alliances.

The authors present a comprehensive toolkit for cutting through complexity in cross-border deals to identify core value and its potential.

Editor's Note: this is a bit long and a bit heavy on examples but of particular value is the strategic planning framework (particularly the 4Cs detail) in the early pages and the due diligence checklist toward the end.

I love summary articles. They help make sense of the world and let us see the forest through the trees. Some of my favorites include the Harris and Raviv summary article on capital structure, Fama's paper that responds to Behavioral Finance Theories, and Cliff Smith's introduction to his book of readings in Corporate Finance. And now I have a favorite on the CAPM and other pricing models. While still officially a working paper, Fama and French give us an excellent recap of both current and past work in the field. My favorite line (and totally coincidentally the conclusion): "The CAPM, Like Markowitz' (1952, 1959) portfolio model on which it is built, is nevertheless a theoretical tour de force. We continue to teach the CAPMÂ….but we also warn students that despite its seductive simplicity, the CAPM's empirical problems probably invalidate its use in applications." WOW! Well said. [FinanceProfessor.com Annotation]

From appliances to medical equipment, from aircraft to golf clubs, the Internet is giving consumers unprecedented access to a growing number of used products. Whether your market is consumer or business-to-business, the emergence of efficient electronic resale markets will fundamentally change the perspective and behavior of your customers.

To answer this question, you first have to answer another, says columnist Stever Robbins: Just what is it you are trying to motivate in your employees?

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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Every so often a technological innovation, social revolution or geopolitical shift fundamentally changes the business landscape, providing the nimble with new opportunities for profit and the complacent or foolhardy with threats to their survival. But how can CEOs and other members of the top team distinguish a mirage from the real thing? Where should we be looking? Is technology the only source - or at least the main one? What does history teach us about those who succeed in spotting the right trends and those who fail?

These are some of the questions addressed by EBF's distinguished panel of contributors - a mix of academics, business advisors and business executives. Their rich variety of perspectives are broadly grouped into three main themes:
1. Dangers of Next Big Thing thinking (Thomas Davenpor, Enrique Dans)
2. The Next Big Thing and Technology (Will Hutton and Gwendolyn Carpenter, Peter Cochrane, Josephine Green, Bo Parker)
3. Next Big Thing case studies (Julian Perkin, Tim Harper, Michael Mainelli)

Editor's Note: I found the articles by Thomas Davenport, Peter Cochrane, Tim Harper, and Michael Mainelli to be the most interesting.