Is your company delivering products to customers at the right time, place, and price—with the best possible availability and lowest possible cost and working capital? If not, you're probably alienating your customers and suppliers, eroding shareholder value, and losing control of your fixed costs. These dangerous mistakes can put you out of business.In The New Supply Chain Agenda, Reuben Slone, J. Paul Dittmann, and John Mentzer explain how to reinvent your supply chain to...

Scott Klososkys manifesto will prepare any organization to withstand the high-velocity onslaught of a world now heavily influenced by technology usage. In this hands-on guide to helping leaders effectively steer their organizations through wrenching infrastructure and social changes author Scott Klososky details the actions that leaders must take to keep their digital plumbingthe all-important technological infrastructure of their organizationsup-to-date. Readers will learn that the surviv...

In the first edition of this landmark book, business loyalty guru Fred Reichheld revealed the question most critical to your company’s future: Would you recommend us to a friend?” By asking customers this question, you identify detractors, who sully your firm’s reputation and readily switch to competitors, and promoters, who generate good profits and true, sustainable growth.You also generate a vital metric: your Net Promoter Score. Since the book was first publi...

More than a decade ago, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton introduced the Balanced Scorecard, a revolutionary performance measurement system that allowed organizations to quantify intangible assets such as people, information, and customer relationships. Then, in The Strategy-Focused Organization, Kaplan and Norton showed how organizations achieved breakthrough performance with a management system that put the Balanced Scorecard into action.Now, using their ongoing resea...

The Balanced Scorecard translates a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The four perspectives of the scorecard--financial measures, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth--offer a balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between outcomes desired and performance drivers of those outcomes, and between hard objective measures and softer, more subjective measures. In the first part, Kaplan and Norton ...

In a world of stiffening competition, business strategy is more crucial than ever. Yet most organizations struggle in this area--not with formulating strategy but with executing it, or putting their strategy into action. Owing to execution failures, companies realize just a fraction of the financial performance promised in their strategic plans.It doesn't have to be that way, maintain Robert Kaplan and David Norton in The Execution Premium. Building on their breakthrough w...

Named as BusinessWeek's #1 Management Educator, expert Dave Ulrich and his team of authors bring human resources a whole new way of thinking and practicing—moving the focus from internal issues to actively helping to set business strategies. Businesses of the future need "all hands on deck" when implementing new ways to stimulate grown and cost efficiency, and this includes human resources.In HR Transformation, the team presents a four-phase model of transformation that sh...

If you’re starting a new business or planning your business’s future, there are plenty of things you should take into account. Strategic Planning For Dummies covers everything you need to know to develop a plan for building and maintaining a competitive advantage — no matter what business you’re in.Written by Erica Olsen, founder and President of a business development firm that helps entrepreneurial-minded businesses plan for a successful future, this handy guide covers a...

Most companies have massive amounts of data at their disposal, yet fail to utilize it in any meaningful way. But a powerful new business tool - analytics - is enabling many firms to aggressively leverage their data in key business decisions and processes, with impressive results.In their previous book, Competing on Analytics, Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris showed how pioneering firms were building their entire strategies around their analytical capabilities. Rather tha...

Companies around the world turn to MIT's Jonathan Byrnes for one reason: he can figure out where the profit is. He shows them which customers and businesses are cash cows, and which efforts are just a drain on resources. Most astonishingly, in each case he finds that roughly 40% of his client's businesses are unprofitable.We are transitioning from an era of mass markets to the Age of Precision Markets. Before, companies sought to distribute their products as widely as possible usin...

The vastly increased level of competitive intensity faced by corporations and the increased costs of selling have radically changed the nature of the traditional selling process. Key or "strategic" accounts have now become a company's most important asset, in some cases supplying in excess of 80 percent of a firm's revenues. Here, in one powerful volume, key account management expert Noel Capon provides the most comprehensive treatment of key account management and plannin...

A clear, concise resource for entering this lucrative career fieldConsulting For Dummies, 2nd Edition includes a reorganization and narrower focus of the topic, with new or updated information that delves into the specifics of running your own consulting business. There is greater emphasis on the business of consulting, along with financial and legal issues involved in setting up a consulting business, deepening coverage of consulting proposals, a...