The Long View: High Performance in Navigating a Downturn

From the Editor’s Desk: Transformation and Globalization 

High-Performance Business: The New Globalization Playbook
The dynamics of global competition are rapidly moving away from the traditional mix of product exports, reliance on local partners and single-nation headquarters. High performers are adopting a new way of doing business that exploits the power of being simultaneously global and local.

High-Performance Business II: How to Organize for the New Realities
A well-chosen global operating model is critical to growth in today’s markets. What a model emphasizes, however, is likely to vary with a company’s goals, experience and home-country origins. Here’s how two successful emerging-market multinationals are executing their global strategies, with important insights for both developing- and developed-market companies.

China: A tale of Two Chinas
The rise of a new economic superstructure in China—featuring companies that are already world-class—is one of two sides to the new China story. The other side is the extent to which many other Chinese companies are struggling.

Public Service: The Bigger Picture
In the face of economic turmoil, many public-sector leaders are thinking tactically, not strategically. As a result, they risk overlooking the long-term implications of trends associated with the multi-polar world.

Information Technology: Meeting the Mandate for Global IT
CIOs are coming under more and more pressure to control costs, recruit the best talent and serve both the company and its customers from a global perspective. Here’s what many of them in North America are doing to meet the challenge of fully globalizing IT capabilities. 

Capital Markets: Can a New Business Model Save Investment Banking?
Transparency, liquidity and increased oversight will be prominent features of the new capital markets landscape. The key to growth in this industry: customer-focused financial-product innovation that helps clients identify and manage risk.

The Customer: How to Make the Most of the Great Consumer Trade Down
As discretionary spending all but disappears, companies must make adjustments in product mix, pricing, promotions and channel strategy to deliver the innovation today’s customers value. By providing offerings with a clear range of desirable benefits and delivering them at the right price point, leading companies will be showing a clear way forward.

Risk Management: Constructive Tension
Enterprise risk management and enterprise performance management are really two sides of the same coin. To achieve balance between the two, companies must fully integrate risk management with their operating model, performance goals and decision-making frameworks.

The Workforce: The New Talent Equation
The objective at the heart of successful talent management in difficult times: to think ahead and to think more strategically about creating a workforce with the capabilities to outperform the competition as the economy turns around. A number of fresh approaches are available to help companies go beyond responses focused only on staff reductions.

Private Equity: Private Practices
The downturn is driving private equity firms away from an emphasis on deal making and toward a new focus on operational improvements—a shift with important implications for public companies. 

On the Edge: Everything Elastic
Business elasticity—the IT-enabled, industrial-scale sharing of capabilities and processes—will have enormous consequences for companies and, indeed, for the very fundamentals that govern the economics of commerce.