If you're in the supply chain business, right up there with Newton's law of gravity stands Murphy's other law stipulating that demand and supply, if left to their own tendencies, will always tend to diverge and get you in trouble.

Welcome to the world of predictive demand and supply planning whose mission is to predict imbalances as far in advance as possible, in order to provide ample time and opportunity to design and implement corrective sales and operations solutions. The more time we allow for resolving forecasted imbalances, the greater the number of potential cost-effective solutions. So how do we design a system for identifying potential issues and expressing them via a commonly understood key process indicator (KPI) where the cause and effect of our actions can be readily measured?

Growing attention has been focused on top people's rewards, notably on so-called 'rewards for failure'. But rewards systems remain a difficult challenge at every level of the organisation.
* Are we any nearer to agreement on what constitutes fairness?
* What is the next generation of employees looking for?
* What balance in work/life issues?
* How does the collapse of the pension promise in many western countries affect the equation?
* Who should decide remuneration for top management?
* Do incentives drive behaviour?
* Do we know the value of the people we pay for?
* How efficient is the European labour market?

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

Editor's Note: I found this EBF Debate to be less coherent and of less consistent quality compared with other EBF Debates. The two articles I found most worthwhile were the ones by Adrian Furnham and Angela Bowey.

Business plan competitions are a powerful way to help nonprofits turn ideas into sustainable commercial ventures.

According to Wharton marketing professor Leonard M. Lodish, "positioning and pricing are the most important entrepreneurial marketing decisions that you can make ... Before you go out and raise a lot of money, before you invest in research and development, before you start spending serious money, you must find out if there is a demand for your product and whether or not you can price it so you can make money." It was back to school for participants at the Wharton Marketing Conference who turned out to hear Lodish's primer on how to combine entrepreneurial aspirations with savvy marketing.

Ever since Ronald Coase posed the question in 1937 -"Why do firms exist?"-, all the answers given have explained the genesis of firms o­nly in terms of the need to economize o­n costs, such as transaction costs, agency costs, and supervision and monitoring costs. In their paper "Dispersed Knowledge and an Entrepreneurial Theory of the Firm", Nicholas Dew of the Naval Postgraduate School, S. Ramakrishna Velamuri of IESE Business School, and Sankaran Venkataraman of Darden Graduate School of Business offer an alternative explanation by arguing that the dispersion of economic knowledge over people and places and over time leads to uncertainty, which, combined with heterogeneous expectations, and the nexus of an individual and opportunity, is the rationale for the emergence of new firms.

This article is a summary sketch of the structural and cultural downsides of matriced relationships. It is an outgrowth of the author's organization development (OD) consulting experiences. It draws on a great many group interviews and workshop observations. It encompasses the (remarkably consistent) views of both managerial and non-managerial personnel within those matrix organizations.

Traditional approaches to addressing organizational behavior problems always focus on changing shared values. They always try to change motivators. It's the only approach most senior managers can take because they're using models of the problem that have no cause-and-effect built into them.

So they try to "teach teamwork," "encourage quality," and "inspire customer service." But they are trying to change the symptom without changing the factors that make the symptom inevitable. That's why those approaches are developing such a tarnished reputation. They're trying to push water uphill.

If instead you find the unwritten rules, you can understand the conflict with what you're trying to achieve. Understand the conflict, and you'll see how to eliminate it. Eliminate the conflict, and you'll get the behavior you want.

The bright young things from Harvard Business School are making their way to Wall Street in droves. Some 26 percent of the HBS class of 2004 took stock-market related jobs, up from 23 percent of the class of 2003. I guess that means it's time to sell.

In this article, we will discuss two areas of research that we believe are foundational for answering the question of what IT organizations typically need to change and what they need to change it to. We will present a working definition of what characterizes a high-performing IT organization, and then discuss the key differences in the belief systems between them and more typical IT organizations in three areas of pain: patch management, proliferation of IT management scorecards, and managing outsourced IT services.

Don't think of offshoring as just reducing expenses-it's a great way to generate new revenue. This Harvard Business Review excerpt helps you determine if your company is ready for a global reach.

Research using the CLEAR index finds effectiveness just as important as efficiency in improving productivity.

The challenge for companies is not achieving a single point of focus. It is harmonizing multiple points of focus. No company is immune from the new customer mantra: "I want what I want." In industry after industry, customers are demanding ever-higher levels of customization - products and services tailored to their needs. And they're confident that, in an economy characterized by greater and greater information transparency and laden with information technology and operational advances that make customization possible, they stand an excellent chance of getting it - from inside or outside their existing supplier base.

The way a company adapts its business model and its organization to demands for customization can make the difference between performance that leads a sector and performance that lags industry peers.

Many companies that thought they knew how to split them stumbled along the way. Five steps can make the process smoother and more successful.

Maybe hediging is not all that it is cracked up to be. That is the conclusion of "Does Hedging with Derivatives reduce the Market Risk Exposure" by Bali, Hume, and Martell. They find that hedging, at least as it is currently being done, may not add to firm value.

From key phone numbers to essential payroll figures, here's a handy list of 2005's facts and figures that no HR professional can afford to be without.

In a new study that compares Fortune 100 executives in 1980 with their counterparts in 2001, Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources, and colleague Monika Hamori document what many CEOs and other senior managers have no doubt already witnessed: The road to the executive suite and the characteristics of the executives who get there have changed significantly over the last two decades. Among the researchers' findings: Today's executives are younger, more likely to be female, and less likely to have Ivy League educations. They get to the executive suite faster than ever, hold fewer jobs along the way, spend about five years less in their current organization before being promoted, and are more likely to be hired from the outside.

Asset management systems have used the concept of preventive maintenance for years as a strategy to avoid unplanned downtime. Preventive maintenance uses time-based rules to determine when a specific maintenance task should be performed to avoid unplanned downtime. But, applying the principles of lean manufacturing tells us that unnecessary maintenance is waste. Failure analysis reveals how assets fail and why. Numerous studies tell us that the majority-80 percent-of failures are not time based. The reason for failure is most often not time, and for most assets, there are numerous ways that it can fail. So, how can we determine the right maintenance strategy for a specific asset?

The tension between competitors keeps markets active, inspires managers to innovate and creates value for consumers.

A new study by Teresa Amabile (HBS) will change how you generate ideas and decide who's really creative in your company.

Common to every great company is the ability to create and maintain a unique combination of business attributes that enable it to outperform its rivals. This competitive essence comprises both a company's ability to succeed in today's markets and its positioning for the future.

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 its growth and profit objectives. A good product strategy maximizes both customer satisfaction and profits - while stating the firm's priorities so clearly that every function can refer to it at any time for practical operational guidance.

Few companies have a clearly formulated product strategy. This article will help you develop one.

This paper describes a three-phased approach to the development of a comprehensive project based performance framework. It presents and discusses in some detail a project based strategy map, a set of KPI and project initiatives. It identifies the points of interface between BSC and C/SCS and discusses the project governance issues that must be addressed by the project team. A comprehensive approach to project management such as this can enhance the chances that projects are consistently delivered on time, within budget and to the specification.

With one rare exception, to date there has been no empirical support for the proposition that this paper tests: Does a reputation for corporate social responsibility protect a firm from financial harm in times of "crisis?" We explore this question using data from the stock market reactions to the Fortune 500 firms following the failure of the 1999 World Trade Organization's (WTO) ministers to set an agenda during the organization's Seattle meeting.

All individuals, communities, systems, and other business assets are massively interconnected in an evolving economic ecosystem. In such a connected system we can no longer focus on the performance of individual actors -- we must manage connected assets.

As a MOOT CORP judge, Rob Adams sees too many business plans written with the ink of wishful thinking. A clipboard and some astute questions are always more useful.