Journal of Business Strategy articles from July 1998

Journal of Business Strategy archives from July 1998

Tapping the emerging Americas market.
July 1, 1998... Latin America has emerged from the economic doldrums of the 1970s and 1980s to become a commercial power in its own right in the 1990s. The seeds for change were sewn with the 1980's movements toward democracy and free market economies. Then, in...

A pragmatic approach to vision.
July 1, 1998... The vision thing. George Bush downplayed it; Lou Gerstner said it was the last thing IBM needed, and it makes many executives uncomfortable. It's easy to see why. On the one hand, vision often means stirring slogans and ambitious generalities,...

What do your customers really want? (Special Focus: Marketing Strategies)
July 1, 1998... It's easy to say "the customer is king," but harder to walk the talk. Here's how leading-edge companies are dealing with customers, and the lessons they're learning from them. When U.S. luxury car makers surveyed customers, asking such...

Mine over matter. (use of data mining to reinvent marketing strategies)(includes related article on 'Predictive Data Mining: A Practical Guide' and data mining software firms)(Special Focus: Marketing Strategies)
July 1, 1998... There are obscene amounts of data in corporate coffers that could be used to reinvent marketing strategies. Data mining is one way to find the information that counts. Pity the market researchers from previous decades. Blessed with ungainly...

Turning competitive intelligence into business knowledge.(Special Focus: Marketing Strategies)
July 1, 1998... Executives who don't think they need to gather competitive intelligence set themselves up for a very hard fall. In 1980, a little-known semiconductor equipment manufacturer called Applied Materials established an office in Japan staffed by...

Spin-offs: breaking up is hard to do. (includes related articles on CVS Corp and Union Pacific Corp)
July 1, 1998... Wall Street loves spin-off announcements, but do spin-offs actually increase shareholder value? In 1997, the world's 500 largest companies announced more than $100 billion of divestitures, nearly 25% of which were spin-offs. Even the widely...

The diamond business gets rough.
July 1, 1998... More diamonds, new players, a changing game - how fast can De Beers' monopoly catch up to a freer market? "No serious, experienced, diamantaire [diamond expert] challenges the belief that De Beers is the diamond industry," says Marcel Pruwer,...

Eulogies for the long-term plan. (business planning)(includes related articles on Larry Downes, Chunka Mui, Shona L. Brown and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt's books)(Interview)
July 1, 1998... The authors of two new books advise: Throw out your five-year plan - in an era of relentless change, long-term planning is futile. Seems like every third business book the JBS gets - and we get a remarkable number of them - has the word...