Emerald

“The creative leap is achieved by imagining idealistic solutions first, then thinking logically backward to solve the problem in the reverse direction.”

What are the cutting edge leadership practices in marketing today, and how do they differ from what your company is doing? In order to analyze how the most successful companies operate their marketing process, A. T. Kearney recently completed a six‐month study of marketing leadership practices for six multi‐billion dollar corporate sponsors.

We are coming into an era in which business will have unprecedented opportunity to deal with government on a creative and profitable basis. What has made this opportunity possible is the New Federalism started during the Nixon administration. The states, with money received from the federal government, are now in a position to make new strides toward solving a series of social problems. With noncategorical grants from Washington, they are, moreover, free to undertake these programs with a minimum of bureaucratic interference.

Firms must constantly monitor and assess the emerging European market, the players, and the instruments and forces of change.

Michael Hammer, the consultant often credited with coining the term “reengineering,” inspires top management at a number of cutting‐edge U.S. firms to attempt radical process redesign. Here, he updates us on this evolving management practice.

Everybody talks about formal planning. Everyone reads the literature. And most people agree that the concept is compelling and logical, and that planning is a thoroughly grand and sensible thing to do.

Today we are experiencing in the increasingly turbulent corporate environment, nothing less than a challenge to the Divine Right of Management. We see this phenomenon not only in the external challenges to large (bureaucratized) corporations and other institutions by consumers, environmentalists, civil rights and women's organizations, and those demanding greater corporate accountability, but also from within these institutions themselves.

Proposals to create a formal, comprehensive U.S. industrial policy are now receiving wide attention in Washington and in the press. Moreover, the continued relatively weak performance of many manufacturing industries, along with ongoing rising import penetration into U.S. markets, is likely to make it a topic for presidential electioneering.

Two large sample surveys of chief information officers (CIOs) were sponsored by Arthur Andersen & Co. in the last three years to analyze the market served by its consulting practice. Beginning in April of 1986, and then again in February of 1988, samples of 120 companies representing both the service and industrial segments of the Fortune 500 were selected. CIOs from those organizations were interviewed on issues, trends, and problems in the deployment of information technology (IT) within their corporation. A clear profile of evolving CIO responsibilities and the roles that information and technology played in those organizations emerged from these surveys. Below we have summarized the results of each study, and outlined the concerns of the CIOs who were given the task of establishing IT plans. We then go on to offer some advice to general management for overcoming obstacles that we see as inherent in executing such plans.