How to avoid some common offshoring blunders -- and what to do when you can't.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the demise of the IT consultant have been exaggerated.

Traditionally, two roles have been associated with consultants: Superman, the expert who can do it faster and/or better than anyone else; and Prometheus, who brings the fire of innovation to the ambitious enterprise. In the realm of information technology in particular, neither of these roles is going to disappear. Indeed, the need for consultants to help identify, extract and refine IT-based value has perhaps never been greater.

"Txt msgs bad 4 corp comms. Pls rd." Confused? So are a lot of people. Here's what happened to good business writing.

I recently asked a question to a senior supply chain executive:
"When should you trust your trading partners and when should you withhold information from them?"

His answer:
"Never and Never."

His answer was only partly tongue-in-cheek. It highlights a dilemma we all face. When important information is withheld, it leads to enormous inefficiencies or even disasters in the supply chain. Trust is needed to streamline decision making and interactions in the supply chain. But, in spite of what "Kumbaya Collaborationists" preach, there are very real and serious risks with sharing information.

Ground breaking research by MIT examines the relationship between information disclosure and a company's cost of capital.

A leader truly leading the enterprise will work to grasp the big picture, use that insight to incite the workforce to high performance, forge the organization into a thinking, adaptive enterprise, and focus on the continuous transformation of the individuals involved and the organization as a whole. (GIFT model)

It's no surprise that the front lines of a corporate call center are unusually stressful, but companies don't always account for that when hiring and training workers for this critical customer contact role, according to speakers at a recent Call Center Industry Forum sponsored by Wharton's Financial Institutions Center. Given that an estimated 3% of the U.S. workforce is employed in call centers, and that such centers typically experience a 30% annual turnover, it's clear that new approaches to call center management are needed.

Emerald Now interviews Pascale, professor at the University of Oxford and author or co-author of numerous books including 'Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business' and the bestselling 'The Art of Japanese Management'. His 1990 book, 'Managing on the Edge: How the Smartest Companies Use Conflict to Stay Ahead', received critical acclaim as one of the best business books of the decade. In this interview, Dr. Pascale takes on the concept of 'social engineering' and offers other interesting insights on change management.

It's time for another soul-sapping, oxygen-depriving, time-wasting, mind-numbing company meeting. Or is it? We offer 15 clever solutions to the problems with most meetings.

More than ever, directors must take precautions to protect their personal assets. It's not always wise to depend on the corporate counsel. You're not his client.

As consolidation pressures rise in technology and telecommunications, companies in these sectors are returning to the M&A market. But several studies have shown that the majority of mergers fail to create significant shareholder value. Bain & Company's survey of 250 global executives involved in mergers and acquisitions indicates that two of the top four reasons for failed corporate marriages relate to poor integration. Through our work in helping companies maximize deal value through integration, we have identified some imperatives for integration success.

Surprise: Managers are not always rational decision makers. In this interview, professors Rogelio Oliva and Noel Watson discuss how human behavior affects supply chain coordination.

Marketers continue to seek the answers: which advertisements resonate with men, and which with women? In most cases, a single page of advertising with a bold headline, few lines of text and a simple image generally appeals to male audiences, while an ad with multiple images and lots of imagination-provoking detail and text is effective with female consumers. According to Chicago associate marketing professor Joan Meyers-Levy, this is no accident. In several groundbreaking articles, Meyers-Levy reports the findings of her own empirical investigations and explores evidence from decades of gender research. She contends that there are fundamental differences in how males and females process information.

Does socially responsible investing (SRI) hurt (or help) returns on a risk adjusted basis? Of course theoretically it seemingly should lower pecuniary returns, but empirically it seems that every researcher has a different answer. Now Derwall, Guenster, Bauer, and Koedijk present their views on the argument. The authors form portfolios based on Innovest eco-efficiency scores. The finding? "After controlling for risk and investment style we find that our high-ranked portfolio outperforms the low-ranked counterpart. This performance gap widens considerably and becomes statistically significant once industry-effects are accounted for as well." Which goes against theory and keeps the debate alive for another day. [FinanceProfessor.com Annotation]

In the field of supply chains, there are many different strategies, fads and cures for a variety of problems. There is an abundance of information that outlines every new concept and idea on how to improve supply chain performance. But what works for one company or industry will not necessarily work for another. Given the diverse needs of different industries and businesses, one-size-fits-all or try-everything-until-something-sticks strategies simply do not work. Companies that indiscriminately adopt new supply chain strategies may find their efforts thwarted or, worse, they might be left with a cadre of look-alike supply chains that don't offer true advantages.

Unless supply chains are aligned properly, companies risk squandering cost-saving opportunities, revenues, competitive advantage and asset productivity. Today, executives are challenged to think and reflect on a new set of concepts. Among the most important is the choice of supply chain. Choosing the right chain for the right business requires thinking strategically about how your business operates and what your company needs, which includes how many supply chains it takes to serve your customers.

This paper describes a framework for identifying distinct supply chains within a business and offers a how-to approach for developing strategies that appropriately align with each supply chain. We discuss the issues, complications and benefits of determining just how many supply chains you really need.

Editor's Note: see related graphics,
"Elements of Supply Chain Segmentation"
http://www.mbadepot.com/graphics/graphics.php?ID=140

"Developing a Supply Chain Strategy"
http://www.mbadepot.com/graphics/graphics.php?ID=141

"Match Strategies to Supply Chains"
http://www.mbadepot.com/graphics/graphics.php?ID=142

Companies that are stuck in a rut look to Keith Yamashita to find out how to get back on track.

Being CFO on the target end of a deal brings challenges -- like having to coach "redundant" staffers.

Finance executives who develop effective relationships with external customers can add value by boosting sales, identifying new business opportunities and gathering performance feedback.

Did you know that only 28% of the entire European population can read English? The percentage is even lower in South America and Asia. Even the growing Hispanic community in the US still prefers to read in Spanish.

This means that if you want to sell your products and services to these markets, you will need to be able to communicate effectively in their languages.

Innovation, or new business creation, is the process by which a company builds insights about its customers; identifies and evaluates unique market opportunities and prepares a bold game plan to seize them; and develops a stream of winning products. The process of new business creation can generally be split into two parts: an upstream process - sensing and creating opportunities - and a downstream process - converting the selected opportunities into successful products. Most companies have a formal process in place to manage the downstream part. Few that we know of have set up an equivalent process to manage the upstream part: sensing and creating opportunities. This lack of process for managing innovation reflects management's fear of stifling what is still often perceived as a soft and intangible - i.e., creative - process. Can one realistically structure and manage a "high-touch" activity that depends so much on an entrepreneurial culture and a climate receptive to innovation? Can one seriously talk about setting up innovation management mechanisms?

It's the venture capital investor's rule of thumb: Nine of every 10 investments will not make money. If all goes well, the 10th will make enough money to exceed all the losses. Given these odds, investors are always looking for ways to increase returns from their winner. Bill Hilliard and Charles Baden-Fuller, visiting scholars at Wharton's Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center, believe they have a strategy that can provide investors with an extra edge from investments that prove to be profitable, and perhaps take the edge off some of the losing ones.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s conventional wisdom increasingly had it that the 'commanding heights' should be controlled by the private sector. Privatisation flourished almost everywhere - and where it didn't, 'market driven' solutions have been widely employed to deliver public services.

But what have we learnt from privatisation? Has it been a success - or were expectations overblown?
Is the public sector really lagging in most respects?
Is it more important for infrastructure (energy, transportation, telecoms) to be reliable or profitable?
What is the contribution to European economic development of so-called Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs)?
Have the boundaries between state and business become clearer, or more blurred?

These are just some of the questions addressed by a distinguished panel of business people, academics, advisers and policymakers in EBF's summer debate.

A second generation of open-source tools such as databases and app servers is winning business converts. But do they have the innovation and influence to prosper?

Cash is back in incentive compensation, but companies are struggling to set the right performance targets.

With business leaders calling the shots, some leading companies are transforming their IT architecture by grouping increasingly complex systems into "domains" - sets of applications and databases that have a business rationale for being managed together. The goal is to turn what often resembles a plate of cooked spaghetti, with thousands of applications and databases dispersed across the architecture, into logical blocks with a minimum of interconnecting wires.