The greatest obstacle to making decisions regarding money is the money itself.

Most of China's 500 million consumers still shop at small markets and local department stores. These consumers, who are reaching threshold spending levels for many products, represent China's fastest-growing market. Yet only a fraction of Western companies have explored the traditional trade beyond the largest cities, primarily because of distribution challenges. Of the various methods for dealing with distribution, active management of the wholesale channel--an approach that has been under-leveraged by global companies--presents an opportunity well worth considering.

Here is a summary of the concluding volume in Chris Zook's trilogy on the business core. The previous two books focused on supporting, exploiting and expanding your core business, whereas this book shows you what to do when your position in the marketplace is under threat. Zook points out the dangers of defending your core until your company dies, or of jumping to the next new thing and getting it wrong. He explains how to find hidden assets, how to structure the change process with the "focus-expand-redefine cycle" and why your customer base is so important. He provides questions to ask, and lists, charts and graphs to use in working things through.

Complacency, complexity and strained legacy systems are conspiring to raise the risk of an unexpected IT disaster to alarming levels. Standard backup policies and redundant systems are no longer enough. What's needed now is a strategic emphasis on rapid and well-rehearsed recovery.

Facing saturation and cutthroat competition in long-established markets, many multinational companies are seeking new markets. Yet until recently, they have largely ignored the more than 5 billion low-income consumers, thinking these consumers have no money to spend or are impossible to reach. Now several companies are disproving these perceptions.

The purchasing function is acquiring high priority in the eyes of senior management for a number of reasons. First, increasingly global strategies for marketing and manufacturing require equally global approaches to sourcing. The skills and knowledge required for effective worldwide sourcing are quite different from those typically found in a domestic purchasing organization. Furthermore, in a global company, purchasing plays a far greater role in gaining and maintaining competitive advantage, particularly in industries whose products evolve rapidly.

Naming. Doesn't matter what you're naming—your product, your business, your Web site or heck, even your child (which happens to be my current project), your choice is important. Here, you'll find a flock of ideas, strategies, and tools to make your name discovery a little easier.

A field guide to your tech staff.

"Groupthink" can result in spectacularly bad decisions, but the malady can be prevented.

ITIL, COBIT, and ISO 17799 provide a blueprint for managing IT services.

Most of the talk about better corporate governance has focused on the independence of directors and the separation of the CEO and chair. Not so, argue these authors, who point out that the most important factor is board process -- how boards work and reach the decisions they do. Improving process will not only improve board governance but will prove that there really is a link between a board of directors and a firm’s financial performance.

Like death and taxes, commoditization of your products is a given. Marketing professor John Quelch offers tips for delaying the inevitable and dealing with it once it arrives.

What is a company worth? The answer to this question can vary depending on who you ask and the purpose of the valuation. As a result, figures derived by an options trader, credit liquidator, and an acquiring firm will not only differ in amount but, more interestingly, in the methods used to reach them. While discounted cash flow methods are widely accepted as the most correct, many other methods remain popular despite serious technical shortcomings. IESE's Pablo Fernández reviews the four main groups of valuation methods, then identifies the mistakes that are most common, offering managers a more comprehensive understanding of firm valuation, and a disciplined approach to properly navigate this challenge.

This paper is organized into three major parts. The first part deals with mergers and acquisitions as an activity. Several major issues are reviewed (1) Why mergers take place? (2) Are mergers successful? (3) What is the key to the success of mergers and acquisitions in future? In the second part, some important elements of the "organization misfit" would be identified and appropriate management response suggested for dealing with them. In the third part of this paper the pre-merger decision making process and post merger integration process will be discussed and effort will be made to identify steps to make the process more effective.

Editor's Note: this is a fairly long article that was written sometime in the late 80's so some aspects are dated and the writing itself is of uneven quality, but there are some good sections worth checking out...

Once companies reach a certain size, setting realistic performance aspirations gets a bit trickier.

Nothing reinforces more the view that corporate chieftains are overpaid than the sums awarded CEOs given the boot. To be sure, some executives earn their lavish pay packages. And companies now accept in principle that compensation should be tied to performance. But in practice the disconnect between pay and performance is a persistent and troubling problem at many large public corporations. But what if sophisticated shareholders or truly independent and savvy directors were in a position to set compensation so it aligned with their interests? If that sounds like a fantasy, consider how private equity firms compensate the executives of their portfolio companies. The pay-for-success model most private equity firms have adopted could be a model for paying public company managers.

At a time when many barriers to global trade have fallen, countries all over the world are taking steps to harmonize their accounting standards and develop a truly global language of business. Under the lead of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), more than 100 countries have either implemented International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) or plan to do so. Yet while proponents of accounting harmonization say that IFRS will ultimately benefit firms and investors, Wharton accounting professor Luzi Hail says that there are reasons to be skeptical about these high hopes. He and three co-authors present their views in a new paper titled, "Mandatory IFRS Reporting Around the World: Early Evidence on the Economic Consequences."

When leading business thinker Gary Hamel analyzes the central problems with the modern hierarchical organization, he sees 5 debilitating deficits: too few voices are heard; creativity is confined and constrained; decisions are under informed; institutional barriers separate capital from talent; and an inability to adapt to fast-changing circumstances.

The fix? With its inherent ability to collect, store, share distributed data and knowledge, the Web can turn these problems into opportunities, says Hamel, conveying great benefit on the forward-looking firms that find the right solutions first.

Socially responsible investing is neither as profitable nor as responsible as advertised. But if you insist, here's how to do it right.

Kent B. Monroe talks about guidelines and basic rules to follow for developing and maintaining an effective organizational approach to solving pricing problems.

Pankaj Ghemawat does not believe the world is simply flat, instead asserting that "the complex world of semiglobalization offers a far richer palette of business opportunities than a simple "borderless" world of uniformity and ubiquity." In this manifesto, he offers an antidote by addressing what still matters: distance and difference.

This study identifies the top five contemporary challenges of the matrix organizational form. It also provides managers with the best practices that will improve their matrix organizations.

Corporate R&D labs used to be the key for companies to create competitive advantage. But in the 21st century, innovation is moving out of the lab and across the globe. That's why Harvard Business School professor Alan MacCormack and his research collaborators believe that a real source of competitive advantage is skill in managing innovation partnerships.

Low-cost-country outsourcing has become much more sophisticated, but that doesn't mean outsourcing is the answer for every company. Not all products - and not all portions of a product's supply chain-should be outsourced. Lasting competitive advantage requires a nuanced approach. You must consider internal costs and organizational processes in deciding what you send, where you send it, and how you operate. Even when outsourcing is the right answer, most companies face a steep learning curve.

For nearly two decades, consulting firms, technology companies, R&D-driven corporations and other knowledge-intensive organizations have made significant investments in "knowledge management" initiatives. These initiatives are intended to facilitate the capture and transfer of company expertise as a way to spur learning and innovation. But research by Wharton management professor Martine Haas and a colleague indicates that knowledge sharing efforts often fail to result in improved task outcomes inside organizations -- and may even hurt project performance. Their research is presented in a paper titled, "Different Knowledge, Different Benefits: Toward a Productivity Perspective on Knowledge Sharing in Organizations."