Transparency challenges companies by making information about products and pricing, as well as corporate practices around labor, environment, healthcare and other issues, instantly available to potential customers. Empowered by YouTube and other new media, consumers have the power to reframe, even shatter, the reputations of products, services and companies. As transparency washes the windows of corporate headquarters, leaders of retail and consumer product companies will have to ask themselves:

* How will information technology increase transparency in the industry?
* How will transparency impact consumer behaviors, retailer strategies and producer strategies?
* How can we capture value and mitigate the challenges of transparency in terms of price, reputation and other drivers of purchase behaviors?
* How should we react to empowered stakeholders — from consumers to third parties like environmental lobbies — who can impact the reputation of the firm?

Competition in the glass house of transparency will require CPGs and
retailers to focus on:

* Creating customer trust and avoiding lapses that destroy reputations
* Co-opting customers to co-create value with the company
* Increasing responsiveness to customers by improving their abilities to sense needs, interpret requirements, frame responses, act to deliver, and learn from outcomes
* Competing on design and brand
* Strategically and proactively using information to define demand

Effectively executing the above strategies will depend on retailers’ and CPGs’ abilities to strategically ‘push’ and ‘pull’ key information to and from stakeholders.

Private label products, or store brands, can bolster a store’s market share and positively impact retail sales. But what effect do private label products have on the supply chain? Is introducing a store brand always a good idea, or can it have detrimental effects as well? Marc Sachon and Víctor Martínez de Albéniz propose a model that can help retailers determine whether introducing a private label product is a wise idea.

Multichannel retailing has become a market imperative. Consumers who shop in two or more channels are often much more profitable than single-channel shoppers—although they expect a seamless experience across stores, catalogs, Web sites, mobile sites, call centers, TV networks, and direct mail. It’s a daunting challenge, but retailers often overestimate its difficulty. Rather than focus only on big investments in technology integration, retailers should also make smart investments in coordinating activities, aligning organizational incentives, and targeting high-value consumers.

What it really takes to survive a corporate bankruptcy.

Here’s Guy Kawasaki's advice to all the Biffs, Sebastians, Brooks, and Tiffanys who want to be kingmakers: "Venture capital is something to do at the end of your career, not the beginning. It should be your last job, not your first." He's also concocted the venture Capital Aptitude Test (VCAT) to help people decide whether they are right for the venture capital business.

Fred Wilson follows up his original venture economic post with this look at venture returns, specifically the impact on returns of management fees and carry.

Fred Wilson explains the basics of venture fund economics. It appears to be the first of several posts he's planning to write on this topic. [Hat Tip to Brad Feld]

The popular impression that management consultants are key to spreading new ideas in organizations is exaggerated and misleading, according to a unique fly-on-the-wall study. The consultant's image as an expert outsider bringing new knowledge or understanding to clients is firmly contradicted by findings from the three-year long project. For the investigation, researchers spent 30 months working alongside consultants and their clients in four diverse consultancy projects. Their aim was to clear away the mystique and understand exactly what clients and consultants do when working together and how their relationships work for or against the flow of knowledge. [Hat tip to Rob at Business Pundit]

"Any study of the history of Silicon Valley should start with a magazine article by perhaps the greatest literary journalist of our time, Tom Wolfe. In this 1983 Esquire piece, Wolfe offers a highly engaging profile of the charismatic founder of Intel and tells the story of the founding of the computer chip business. It's a terrific tale: A group of young geniuses, many still in their 20s, follow the great Bell Labs engineer and transistor inventor William Shockley to start Shockley Transistor. Soon frustrated with the controlling and self-centered leader, a group of them, led by Noyce, persuade a sleepy East Coast camera company to underwrite them, and dump Shockley to start Fairchild Semiconductor, which later gave birth to Intel, AMD, LSI Logic, and most of the rest of the chip business. In the style of The Right Stuff, Wolfe captures the spirit and culture of Noyce and his crowd in a way that's never been equaled, and is as good a read today as it was 25 years ago." -- Jonathan Weber, strategy+business

What happens when demand myths, faulty forecasts, and financing traps converge.

Attention, shoppers: Did you find everything you were looking for? Retail customers who answer "yes" to this question might very well represent the Holy Grail to retail operators who want to increase their sales with only a modest increase in costs or, in some cases, increase sales by merely reallocating staff within a store at no extra cost. Impossible? Not according to a new study on retail store execution by Wharton operations and information management professors Marshall L. Fisher and Serguei Netessine, and Wharton doctoral student Jayanth Krishnan.

Forget what you might have heard about Private Equity (PE). Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that PE destroys companies and employment. In fact, the latest statistics reveal that PE accelerates the growth of jobs and generates value (to the tune of one million over the past four years in Europe and 600,000 in the United States). Is it time for traditional firms to reconsider their strategies? Yes. Because every firm can enhance value creation and reach new levels of excellence.

The management consultant has come to be taken for granted. But the management consultant is an extraordinary and indeed a truly unique phenomenon.

When consumers have a bad shopping experience, they are likely to spread the word, not to the store manager or salesperson, but to friends, family and colleagues. Overall, if 100 people have a bad experience, a retailer stands to lose between 32 and 36 current or potential customers. These are some of the conclusions of The Retail Customer Dissatisfaction Study 2006, conducted by The Jay H. Baker Retailing Initiative at Wharton and The Verde Group, a Toronto consulting firm, in the weeks before and after Christmas 2005.

Do tech vendors wield influence over IT research? You bet--but how much is a matter of perspective.

While the full story of the next economy and beyond has yet to be written, it is clear that the winners in the future economic environment will be those companies and individuals best able to learn quickly the skills required to thrive in the emerging business climate. This report focuses on two competency areas that are believed to be critical: leadership and management competencies, and customer-relationship competencies.

Nonprofit managers who develop social purpose ventures to generate revenues to support a social mission have limited opportunities to share their experiences with others in the field or to learn from the experiences of others. Many nonprofit managers also have modest business backgrounds. Yet, despite these challenges, the movement toward income generation by nonprofits continues to grow. Some of these ventures succeed, yet many more fail to meet either their social or financial goals. Clearly, the field lacks well-defined criteria, standards, and strategies for achieving success in this area. The potential payoff from the diffusion of learning appears to be substantial. This paper offers a first step in the process.

Bus and train systems habitually run at a loss. But public-transit agencies could lower costs and raise the quality of service by emulating best practices from around the world.

Editor's Note: there is no real management learning value in this article, but if, like me, you have ever used the public transportation facilites around the world, you might find it an interesting read just the same.

VC Brad Feld tries to explain the notion of participating preferred (a maligned and typically hotly negotiated issue in many venture capital investments), how it works, and its financial and emotional impact on a deal.

The industry has already extracted much of the benefit to be had from improving productivity and concentrating on core brands. Meanwhile, its dynamics are changing. What comes next?

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

New competitive threats mean that manufacturers can no longer take their sales of aftermarket parts for granted.

There is a new and growing challenge to the closeted culture of venture capital. Recent court rulings have forced public institutions that invest in venture capital funds to disclose information about the funds through the Freedom of Information Act. Public investors, such as state pension funds, need to turn over the information, while private groups such as family endowments do not.

Old bad debt hasn't been fully resolved. New bad debt is piling up. Yet the problems can be cleared up without a systemic crisis.

The U.S. payments system is going through a period of rapid change. Paper checks are increasingly giving way to electronic forms of payment, which themselves are being transformed as new products, new players, and new industry structures arise. Some of the most dramatic changes are being seen in the automated teller machine (ATM) and debit card industry. This paper provides a much-needed overview of the ATM and debit card industry and begins the process of identifying and analyzing some of the more important public policy issues.