European Business Forum articles from March 2000

European Business Forum archives from March 2000

Exploring the European model.(Letter from the Editors)
March 22, 2000... Welcome to this first edition of European Business Forum (EBF), a new publication born in the spirit of an emerging European identity and reared in the reality of globalisation. Business in general and the company in particular have...

Does the 'European' management model have a future?(At the forum)
March 22, 2000... For the more chauvinistic European executive the very question could be impertinent. For the unthinking global imperialist it can be equally dismissed. But as far as most of us are concerned the theme of this first issue of European Business...

Net cast catches the minnows.(Did you know?)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... The market for teenage talent is getting hotter--and, what's more, it's international. In what looks like a conscious effort to get closer to its young customers the Tokyo based company Future Institute Corporation has asked a 15-year-old...

Tuesday on the mind.(Did you know?)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... First Tuesday, the forum for internet entrepreneurs is holding off line cocktail parties across Europe bringing together aspiring dot.com millionaires and venture capitalists. Starting with 50 people in a London bar in October 1998 the company...

Even more money.com.(Did you know?)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... There are now over 150 web sites brokering or auctioning internet domain names. Prices have been soaring with the record payment $7.5m for Business.com (according to eCompanies). Autos.com fetched $2.2 m and Bingo.com $1.1 million. Highest bid...

Are we speaking the same language?(Did you know?)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... Grey haired veterans of venerable corporate institutions and '30 something' entrepreneurs talk a totally different language, don't they? Well no, actually, according to the self appointed US press watchdog magazine Brill's Content which...

Signs of the times.(Did you know?)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... One Year--the amount of time that an average worker will spend in a career waiting for technical support. 'One half of our society guzzles aerated beverages while the other has to make do with muddied water.' KR Narayanan Indian President...

North-South divide.(Did you know?)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... Scandinavia's relatively greater web penetration than the rest of Europe has been well documented--you're more than twice as likely to meet a web user in Sweden than in Germany, for instance. But when will the south of Europe catch up? IDC's...

The song remains the same.(Did you know?)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... Parisian writer Viviane Forrester, who rode to fame four years ago with L'Horreur Economique, remains unimpressed by US-style capitalism. In her new book Une Etrange Dictature she claims that US and British mutual funds rule the world in the...

Small company apathy.(Did you know?)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... Small and medium sized entreprises appear indifferent to the prospect of EU enlargement. Only 28 per cent of the 1500 directors of businesses with 10 to 15 employees polled by the Commission's Enterprise Directorate General saw the accession of...

French stand tall.(Did you know?)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... According to an Economist magazine reader Napoleon was not as short as is commonly believed. This myth arose when early biographers equated French and English feet. Napoleon was 5ft 2in (1.70m) in the French system and 5ft 6in in the British,...

Europe gets connected.(Did you know?)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... The internet in Europe is becoming increasingly less dependent on the United States. A study by the Yankee Group, a US-based consultancy, says that more than half of all European internet traffic went to the US in 1998. By the end of last year,...

Women on the web.(Did you know?)(creation of websites)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... Why are more and more women creating their own web sites on the internet? According to Jean-Claude Kaufmann, a sociologist interviewed by the French magazine Le Point, the web is no longer seen as the technical domain of male engineers but...

Digital marketing: lastminute.com, priceline.com, Amazon.com--a revolution has taken place in the marketplace with consumers being offered greater transparency and often even the chance to dictate the price. This has raised crucial questions for the marketing executive.(In-depth)
March 22, 2000... The digital revolution has shaken marketing to its core. What does pricing mean in a world in which customers propose their own prices (as at priceline.com) or buyers and sellers haggle independently in auctions (as at e-Bay and many...

In my opinion ...(In-depth)
March 22, 2000... I completely agree with Wind and Mahajan that marketing is central to the success of an Internet company. In fact, it's probably two thirds of what's going on on the web--the rest boils down to technology. However, I would also say that Europe...

Turning innovation into success: in recent years, many companies have switched their focus from re-engineering and downsizing to innovation-led growth. But how many of them really understand the process of innovation and the factors which turn a good idea into a commercial triumph?(In-depth)
March 22, 2000... Senior executives are frequently frustrated by their companies' failure to convert creative innovation into shareholder returns. They become resigned to launching strings of new products in the hope that--by the law of averages--a certain...

In my opinion ...(In-depth)
March 22, 2000... Chantal de Moerloose addresses one of the most timely strategic issues in this paper. Her article presents a compelling analysis of 'newness' as a window onto the strategic choices that organisations make when innovating. [ILLUSTRATION...

How to get the best out of change: an agenda for raising corporate performance.(In-depth)
March 22, 2000... Organising to obtain substantial performance advantages is an active and continuous process. It involves managing complex interdependencies and is not simply a journey with a fixed end-point which replaces one static organisation structure with...

In my opinion ...(In-depth)
March 22, 2000... The findings in the article by Andrew Pettigrew and David Shaw echo three challenges we have faced at Cisco Systems as our company has grown--at over 50 per cent per year--into new markets and new geographies. These challenges have been to...

Understanding ABB's latest quickstep: a case study in organisational change.(In-depth)
March 22, 2000... If there is one European company that has managed over the last decade to excite management consultants, scholars and business people alike it is ABB (ASEA Brown Boveri). Christopher Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal famously used the Swiss-Swedish...

Why a euro 'corridor' approach makes sense: the arrival of the single currency means greater price transparency for the consumer and will force companies to react with a coherent strategy.(In depth)
March 22, 2000... Prices lie at the heart of supply chains and customer relationships and ultimately drive shareholder value. A recent study in the US, for example, found that assuming constant volumes and costs a one per cent fall in prices translates into a...

In my opinion ...(In depth)
March 22, 2000... One of the euro's biggest effects will be on prices. The good news, though, is that businesses can take greater control over this issue than they often assume and there are as many opportunities as there are threats (provided competitors do not...

Business humour.
March 22, 2000... Internet entrepreneur identity parade [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 'Watch out!,' 'Don't be silly. In the future all businesses will be on the net MATTI REMES, 'ALUEUUTISET', FINLAND [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 'OK guys.... who...

Romano Prodi: the European Commission President tells EBF that the European tradition of education does little to encourage innovation on the scale experienced in the United States. He was interviewed before receiving the Doctor Honoris Causa at the Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium.(View from the top)(Interview)
March 22, 2000... EBF The European Commission paper ahead of the Lisbon summit set out a new economic and social agenda for the EU. In what way was this 'new'? Prodi I think the Lisbon European Council was a really important turning point. It agreed the...

From America without love.(Sounding board)
March 22, 2000... It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was...

The new risk management.(Sounding board)
March 22, 2000... In a compelling analysis of the decision to launch the Challenger space shuttle on 28 January, 1986, Diane Vaughan has questioned the generally accepted explanation of that event. Instead of specific managerial wrongdoing combined with...

How to spot shareholder value.(Sounding board)
March 22, 2000... Executives generally assume that their businesses are highly complex and that only they have the 'big picture'. Only they have the vision and capability to attend to the many different problems facing their organisation. The management...

The leader's stake in change.(Sounding board)
March 22, 2000... 'Personal agenda' has always been a dirty phrase in corporate life. Yet business leaders have found that bringing their own personal goals out into the open is one of the most important factors in achieving major organisational change. Take the...

In my opinion ...(Sounding board)
March 22, 2000... Organisational change is an old but important question in the field of management and organisational thinking. How can management change the organisation? By which processes can management transform a company in order to make it more efficient,...

E-commerce and the new role of distribution: our regular focus on recent news events highlights a crucial internet challenge.(Zoom lens)
March 22, 2000... In a recent article published in The Economist Peter Drucker notes that e-commerce separates selling and purchase for the first time in business history. 'Selling is completed when the order has been received and paid for', he explains....

Frontiersman.(Book Review)
March 22, 2000... Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story WW Norton, New York [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If America is the land of the perpetual frontier, as historian Henry Steele Commanger and others have written, what happens when...

Mind the gap.(Book Review)
March 22, 2000... Amar V Bhide, The origin and evolution of new businesses Oxford University Press [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Entrepreneurs, everyone agrees, are a good thing. Governments in all the industrial countries are eager to promote start-up...

At your service.(Book Review)
March 22, 2000... Leonard Berry, Discovering the soul of service The Free Press, 1999 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Services permeate every aspect of our life. Many have always been present to some degree, but the complexity and diversity of services have...

Capitalist or mercenary?
March 22, 2000... Thomas Sattelberger, Wissenskapitalisten oder Soeldner? Gabler Verlag, 1999 Thomas Sattelberger is a well-known human resource manager who has worked for Daimler-Benz and Deutsche Lufthansa. More recently he became the head of products...

Yahoo! The path to intelligence.(Book extract)
March 22, 2000... Yahoo! Inc is one of those companies which anyone interested in the internet keeps a close eye on. A rare dot com that actually makes money--$143m of profits on revenues of $589m last year to be precise--the Santa Clara, California-based media...

Asia moves up the value chain: behind the mega deal headlines Far Eastern companies are engaged in a strategy which offers new opportunities and carries new risks.(Window on Europe)
March 22, 2000... Europe is back on the radar screens of Asian business people. But this is not because they suddenly perceive Europe as a massive, unexploited market. It's because Asian business sees Europe as a rich hunting ground for under-exploited brands...

Finding out about the euro: EBF's regular review of European business websites begins with places to go for news of the single currency.(Web.europe)
March 22, 2000... Euro sites abound on the Web, and are variable in quality ranging from official government sites (available for most EU countries as well as the European Commission itself), to general news sites hosted by established news providers such as the...

Fair shares in the boardroom? Wendelin Wiedeking, of Porsche, recently told a German newspaper that there can be conflicts of interest if senior managers hold their company's stock. EBF asked European and American experts if they agree.(Window on the world)
March 22, 2000... Should senior executives hold shares, or be granted share options, in the companies they manage? Few in the boardroom would answer this question other than with an unequivocal 'Yes'--which is why recent comments by Wendelin Wiedeking of Porsche...

An inseparable trio.(Letters to the editors)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2000... Dear Sir The launch of your new forum for the discussion of European business issues is indeed timely. Companies in Europe, as in the rest of the world, are discovering revolutionary ways of conducting business thanks to the internet....

The risk for risk management.(Letters to the editors)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2000... Dear Sir In his contribution to this issue Michael Power gives a short description of what he calls the 'New Risk Management' and asks whether and how the NRM can address the 'relentless inevitability of mistakes in organisation'. The...