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Distinctive Capabilities: A Bold New Look for Global Sourcing
The successful sourcing of critical business processes and IT functions in multiple locations around the world involves the flawless delivery of work, often among several providers. And leveraging this strategic capability for high performance requires new and more sophisticated operating models, methods and tools.
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Performance Anatomy: Talent: Leveraging Your Most Important Competitive Asset
In the global competition for talent, some companies may view the endgame as a matter of adding the right individuals. But the key to winning on talent is multiplication, not addition. Companies that build this critical capability will generate superior effort, creativity and results from their workforces.
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Special Report: Future Value and Innovation: How to Sustain Profitable Growth
Companies are beginning to look beyond traditional metrics like price-earnings ratio to assess their effectiveness at generating growth through innovation. Determining a company's future-value premium provides a simple but effective way for management to diagnose and understand the complexities of market expectations, as well as the investment community's confidence in the company's long-term outlook.
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Special Report II: Jobs, Profits and Patriotism
When globalizing companies send production abroad, do workers at home always lose out? Not in Germany, where the best performers among the country's biggest companies are turning the cost savings generated by outsourcing into domestic growth and job creation.
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Information Technology: Eight Trends that are Redefining IT
Converging trends are creating a new technology ecosystem that will address concerns ranging from hardware, applications and infrastructure to systems development and worker enablement. Net result: Enterprise agility will be the next basis of competition.
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Marketing: Why Winning the Wallets of China's Consumers is Harder Than You Think
Although they often behave like the new global citizens, China's modern consumers have many unique traits that aren't immediately obvious to marketers. New research into buying habits and brand preferences shows the risks of misreading this complex and fast-changing market.
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Pricing: Staying Power
Now that pricing is seen as a primary contributor to better performance, many companies are applying advanced technology and setting up new teams so they can price more effectively. But that's not enough. Here's how to make pricing a sustainable part of management's strategic repertoire.
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Compensation: How to Motivate Your Sales Force to Great Performance
It's not just about the paycheck. Effective incentive compensation management is based on an understanding of basic human motivation—on the importance of trust, self-esteem, social recognition and improved chances to fulfill one's potential.
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Supply Chain Management: Tapping the Strategic Potential of Procurement
Few business functions play a more critical role across the entire global organization than procurement. And for a select group of leading companies, procurement has become a strategic, proactive organization that contributes to profitability, growth and competitive advantage. Here's how it's done.