Marketing has finally become a conversation. Not, in most cases, as was intended, BETWEEN corporations and consumers (that would make too much sense), but rather a global conversation involving millions of consumers ABOUT corporations.

Why now? Because they finally can. For decades, consumers have been saving up their insights and rants about the stuff they consume, simply because there were no adequate means to interact with companies, or with other consumers for that matter. No longer. These fickle, wired, empowered, informed, opinionated and experienced holders of a MC (Master in Consumerism) are getting used to 'having it their way', in ANY way imaginable, which includes wanting to have a direct influence on what companies develop and produce for them.

Sure, some companies ARE now engaging creative customers in new ways. These companies are clearly aware that tapping into the collective intellectual capital of their customers yields great creative and 'real' content. However, let's not make the mistake to think that in the end these conversations will all be about communications and branding: how about extending this cooperation with consumers to virtually everything a corporation does, by making the customer an integral part of ALL creative and creational processes?

TRENDWATCHING.COM has dubbed the latter "CUSTOMER-MADE": the phenomenon of corporations creating goods, services and experiences in close cooperation with consumers, tapping into their intellectual capital, and in exchange giving them a direct say in what actually gets produced, manufactured, developed, designed, serviced, or processed.

Recent Accenture research has shown that C-suite executives highly value the importance of learning in improving worker productivity and overall performance. But only 16 percent of executives are very satisfied with their learning programs. Here are some essential practices for mastering the learning function.

Creating disruptions is fine, but mending them may be even better. The case for cautious inventiveness.

Transaction pricing is the key to surviving the current downturn-and to flourishing when conditions improve.

The business system of the Japanese multinational comprises five interlocking parts. This article discusses these five characteristics and their respective contributions to the success of Japanese multinational companies.

Editor's Note: this was written in 1991, before the Japanese bubble burst. Still, I find it a brief but interesting look at the Japanese business system.

If you've ever agonized over whether it's the right time to replace an old gadget with a spiffy new model-knowing that the new one may well become obsolete in a few months-you probably have an inkling of the kinds of decisions high-tech marketers must make in planning their products. And if you're marketing such products yourself, you probably have puzzled over when to time each release. Which bells and whistles should you introduce first? And how do you price the upgrade to make it attractive to existing users?

To help planners of high-tech consumer products make these sorts of decisions, V. "Seenu" Srinivasan and Sang-Hoon Kim created a mathematical model that forecasts the sales path of a new version of an existing product.

The fields of finance and accounting are well established, with numerous well-written articles and books available on how to understand financial statements (FS). However, the availability of information is not the real problem: there is too much information for people to absorb. Not only do you need to understand how financial statements are created, but what critical and essential information you can glean from the data itself, using financial ratios for trend, competitive, and comparative analysis. This article offers a framework to build a financial analysis and gives an overview of financial ratios and their general classifications.

Strategic planning at many large companies is a sterile annual exercise that managers endure. They're often asked to produce either a shining vision or financial certainty, or both. But with growth back on the agenda, a few leading companies are creating value through strategic managing, which connects strategy to the front lines and to market opportunities as they unfold.

Taylorism laid the foundations for science-based management more than 100 years ago. But early implementations led to worker resistance and distortions that have never quite gone away.

Too often companies seize on the implementation of metrics as a panacea, and six months later, many of these same companies find that after expending time and money to put in "Scorecards," "Dashboards," or some other metrics flavor-of-the-month, they're not getting expected performance gains.

More than ever before, Americans are talking about values. For marketers, it's tempting to do the same. But will a values-driven campaign drive business -- or drive it away?

Skepticism about the value-creating potential of mergers and acquisitions is unwarranted, according to this BCG study. The report analyzes the 1993-2002 stock-market performance of 705 public U.S. companies, based on their level of Merger & Acquisition (M&A) activity. The highly acquisitive companies in the sample had the highest median total shareholder return-more than a full percentage point per year greater than that of companies that made few or no acquisitions. This report demonstrates that there is no inherent disadvantage to growth by acquisition. [BNET annotation]

Are negative relationships squelching productivity in your company?

"The bullwhip effect" has become infamous as one of the worst and most widespread forces capable of paralysing supply chains. INSEAD Chaired Professor of Marketing Paddy Padmanabhan and Hau Lee and Seungjin Whang of Stanford present a study considered to be one of the Top Ten Most Influential Papers by the INFORMS Membership of Management Science in 2004.

Editor's Note: this is just a description of the Management Science article "Information Distortion in a Supply Chain: The Bullwhip Effect" which can be found (but is not free) at:
http://www.extenza-eps.com/extenza/loadHTML?objectIDValue=55918&type=abstract

The battle between proponents of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and champions of behavioral finance has never been more pitched, and there is little consensus as to which side is winning or what the implications are for investment management and consulting. In this article, I review the case for and against the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, and describe a new framework - the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis - in which the traditional models of modern financial economics can co-exist alongside behavioral models in an intellectually consistent manner. Based on evolutionary principles, the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis implies that the degree of market efficiency is related to environmental factors characterizing market ecology such as the number of competitors in the market, the magnitude of profit opportunities available, and the adaptability of the market participants. Many of the examples that behavioralists cite as violations of rationality that are inconsistent with market efficiency - loss aversion, overconfidence, overreaction, mental accounting, and other behavioral biases - are, in fact, consistent with an evolutionary model of individuals adapting to a changing environment via simple heuristics. Despite the qualitative nature of this new paradigm, I show that the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis yields a number of surprisingly concrete applications for both investment managers and consultants.

Editor's Note: FinanceProfessor reference

The trouble with work is that it almost always involves people. And the trouble with people is that they're, well, people. They have emotions; they have issues other than work; they get tired; they misunderstand things. No matter how wonderful your team is, eventually somebody is going to get mad at somebody.

And if you're the boss, you may be called upon to handle the problem. Depending on your own personality and preferences, the answer is either hands off or intervene.

During a corporate crisis, the media can aggravate an already difficult situation. But by employing effective media relations, leaders can guide their companies safely through the storm.

Most companies wait until their costs are demonstrably out of line before they scrutinize their manufacturing topography. But a forward-thinking firm can reduce unit costs by as much as 40 percent of total acquisition costs by asking: How many plants should we have? Where should they be? What should their focus and mission be? Designing an appropriate manufacturing footprint is not an easy process, but the complexity is manageable when a few essential principles are followed.

As a firm's cash flow increases, it is expected that its investment in potential revenue-generating opportunities will also increase. However, recent research examining the auctions of oil and gas leases shows that greater cash flow does not lead to investment in a greater number of tracts, a larger amount of acreage, or more productive, revenue-generating tracts. Instead, greater cash flow leads to paying more for leases that are not more productive.

This article describes the concept of hedge funds/alternative investments, many of the different strategies they employ, and their relationship to Modern Portfolio Theory.

Executive pay is often not linked to performance, says Lucian Bebchuk, who knows precisely what's needed to bring it into line.

Informative blog entry on how many VC firms calculate estimated IRR during due diligence to decide whether to make an investment or not.

A new look at US trade and employment data shows why it's wrong to believe that foreign competition accounts for weak job growth since 2000.

Editor's Note: a topical article, but the economic analysis provided is interesting and of value for other countries and times...

Public companies have been criticized for granting stock options to employees without adding chits to the corporate expense pile. As regulators and some shareholders argue for new rules, Stanford Business School researchers Jeremy Bulow and John Shoven try to follow the money-and the logic.

Every organization has a wealth of knowledge stored in the memories and intuitions of its employees. This tacit knowledge is shared through formal and non-formal networks which bond and motivate people within the organization. Karen Stephenson goes at the importance of trust in the creation of such networks and explains why managers must harness the power of networks to efficiently guide innovation and change.