Author Archive
Change Management
Businesses are perpetually torn between their desire to define for all time their organisation’s structure and strategy, and their recognition that their world is in a constant state of flux. For the larger part of the 20th century they were more concerned with the static elements of this dichotomy. Only in later years did they [...]
Benchmarking Overview
Benchmarking is a way of determining how well a business unit or organisation is performing compared with other units elsewhere. It sets a business’s measures of its own performance in a broad context and gives it an idea of what is “best practice”. In The Benchmarking Book, Michael Spendolini defines benchmarking as a “continuous systematic [...]
Crisis Management
The Institute for Crisis Management, an American consulting firm that specialises in developing communications strategies for crisis-struck businesses, defines a crisis as “a significant business disruption which stimulates extensive news media coverage. The resulting public scrutiny
will affect the organisation’s normal operations and also could have a political, legal, financial and governmental impact on its business”.
The Future of the Business
This is a written fantasy about the future of a new business. It has to be documented if the business is ever to get the financial support that it requires. It is not just a matter of qualitative fantasising, however, of asserting that “We intend to be innovative market leaders at the forefront of Internet [...]
The Idea of Cherry-Picking
The idea of cherry-picking is applied to a number of business contexts. It refers, for example, to customers who ignore products that are bundled together by a manufacturer (who in the process may disguise crosssubsidies between high-margin and low-margin components of the bundle). Such customers prefer to bundle their products together for themselves, selecting the [...]
The Power of Branding
Originally, branding was the placing on animals (usually by burning) of an identifying mark. In a business context, branding refers to imposing on goods and services a distinctive identity. Philip Kotler, author of Marketing Management, a standard textbook on marketing, defines a brand as: “A name, term, symbol or design (or a combination of them) [...]
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Cost-benefit analysis is the weighing-scale approach to reaching business decisions: all the pluses (the benefits) are put on one side of the balance and all the minuses (the costs) are put on the other. Whichever weighs the heavier wins. If the costs weigh more, the proposal gets the thumbs down; if the benefits weigh more, [...]
Business Cycles
Economies (and, therefore, the businesses in them) are believed to go through a regular cycle of boom and bust as they move in a generally upward direction. This idea is deep-seated and long-standing. Discussion has generally focused not on the existence of business cyclesbutontheirduration.
What is an e-service?
Simply put, an e-service is an electronic service available via the Net that completes tasks, solves problems, or conducts transactions. E-services can be used by people, businesses, and other e-services and can be accessed via a wide range of information appliances.
Three years ago companies began using the Internet to deliver information, streamline business processes, and [...]
Trading Portals
As Chapter 2 of the Internet emerges traditional portals are undergoing a profound transformation. They are no longer mere access points that aggregate information and catalog-based transactions for specific markets. One of the clearest demonstrations of a Chapter 1 to Chapter 2 transformation is the emergence of business-to-business trading portals. These trading portals enhance the [...]
