The ultimately accountable job: leading today's sales organization

In recent years, sales leaders have had to devote considerable time and energy to establishing and maintaining disciplined processes. The thing is, many of them stop there--and they can't afford to, because the business environment has changed. Customers have gained power and gone global, channels have proliferated, more product companies are selling services, and many suppliers have begun providing a single point of contact for customers. Such changes require today's sales leaders to fill various new roles: Company leader. The best sales chiefs actively help formulate and execute company strategy, and they collaborate with all functions of the business to deliver value to customers. Customer champion. Customers want C-level relationships with suppliers in order to understand product strategy, look at offerings in advance, and participate in decisions made about future products--and sales leaders are in the best position to offer that kind of contact. Process guru. Although sales chiefs must look beyond the sales and customer processes they have honed over the past decade, they can't abandon them. The focus on process has become only more important as many organizations have begun bundling products and services to meet important customers' individual needs. Organization architect. Good sales leaders spend a lot of time evaluating and occasionally redesigning the sales organization's structure to ensure that it supports corporate strategy. Often, this involves finding the right balance between specialized and generalized sales roles. Course corrector. Sales leaders must watch the horizon, but they can't take their hands off the levers or forget about the dials. If they do, they might fail to respond when quick adjustments in priorities are needed.     

资金密集型企业资本结构与财务绩效的相关性研究——以电力企业为例

资金密集型企业具有资本有机构成高,单位劳动力占用资金多,产品成本中物化劳动消耗所占比例大等特征。通过对30家电力上市公司2010到2012年的资本结构与公司财务绩效的实证研究发现,资金密集型企业的资产负债率在一定限度内,与其财务绩效正相关,超过这一限度,则与其财务绩效负相关,流动负债比率与其财务绩效正相关,国有股比例与其财务绩效负相关,股权集中度与其财务绩效不存在正相关关系,企业经营规模与其财务绩效正相关。为此,资金密集型企业必须创新融资方式,拓宽融资渠道,保持适度的债务融资比例,适当提高流动负债比例,适当降低国有股比例。只有这样,才能提高企业的财务绩效,促进企业持续稳定发展。     

Investigative negotiation

Negotiators often fail to achieve results because they channel too much effort into selling their own position and too little into understanding the other party's perspective. To get the best deal -or, sometimes, any deal at al--egotiators need to think like detectives, digging for information about why the other side wants what it does. This investigative approach entails a mind-set and a methodology, say Harvard Business School professors Malhotra and Bazerman. Inaccurate assumptions about the other side's motivations can lead negotiators to propose solutions to the wrong problems, needlessly give away value, or derail deals altogether. Consider, for example, the pharmaceutical company that deadlocked with a supplier over the issue of exclusivity in an ingredient purchase. Believing it was a ploy to raise the price, the drugmaker upped its offer--unsuccessfully. In fact, the supplier was balking because a relative's company needed a small amount of the ingredient to make a local product. Once the real motivation surfaced, a compromise quickly followed. Understanding the other side's motives and goals is the first principle of investigative negotiation. The second is to figure out what constraints the other party faces. Often when your counterpart's behavior appears unreasonable, his hands are tied somehow, and you can reach agreement by helping overcome those limitations. The third is to view onerous demands as a window into what the other party prizes most--and use that information to create opportunities. The fourth is to look for common ground; even fierce competitors may have complementary interests that lead to creative agreements. Finally, if a deal appears lost, stay at the table and keep trying to learn more. Even if you don't win, you can gain insights into a customer's future needs, the interests of similar customers, or the strategies of competitors.     

Leadership in literature

Business students nowadays are not, for the most part, poets. A growing proportion come to business school with a background in investment banking or management consulting and an undergraduate business major, rather than a degree in the arts and sciences. MBA students are already very familiar with business. A number of scholars and businesspeople have begun to question the scientific model that dominates business research and teaching. Formalized management tools work well enough if you're studying techniques for financial valuation, but less so when you're studying leadership and organizational behavior. Some argue that students could learn a lot more about these subjects if they took a course in literature. Examples from fiction can be as instructive as any business textbook. HBR senior editor Diane Coutu recently met with Joseph Badaracco, Jr., for a wide-ranging discussion of what leaders can learn from literature. For the past decade, Badaracco, the John Shad Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School, has used classical literature to provide well-rounded, complex pictures of leaders in all walks of life-particularly leaders whose psychological and emotional challenges parallel those of senior executives. Fiction provides some of the most powerful and engaging case studies ever written. Unlike contemporary management literature, which is relentlessly upbeat, classical literature is unsparingly realist. Leaders often struggle and sometimes fail-and the stakes are high. When business leaders read about the conflicts of literary characters, they can better understand their own circumstances. We pay far too little attention to the inner lives of leaders. Business school courses seem to suggest that you can treat executives like lab animals and control their behavior through their environment. But behaviorism is not enough. Literature suggests that leaders should learn more about themselves if they want to succeed.     

Network dynamics in business angel group investment decisions

Investors within a Business Angel (BA) group are embedded in a cohesive network of relationships that arises from past joint investments. In this paper, we have studied how the network position of a BA within this network affects the likelihood that a company will receive investments from the BA group. We have hypothesized a curvilinear, inverse U-shaped relationship between the centrality of the BA and the probability of a company being funded by the BA group. Moreover, we have explored how the experience of a BA and the geographical proximity between the BA and the company influence such a relationship.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article:
The Changing Role of the Individual Investor Marshall E. Blume and Irwin Friend.
Factors in Business Investment Robert Eisner
TOSCA: The Total Social Cost of Coal and Nuclear Power Linda Gaines, R. Stephen Berry and Thomas Veach Long, III.     

Morgan Stanley's Risk‐Reward Views: Unlocking the Full Potential of Fundamental Analysis

Since 2008, Risk‐Reward Views have been the basis for the recommendations on all the stocks covered by Morgan Stanley's equity research analysts globally. The firm's analysts use this systematic approach to communicate a broader range of fundamental insights about expected returns and risks, and to articulate more clearly the logic underlying their price targets and calls, and the level of conviction associated with them. The rationale for this approach is to align the firm's research product with its clients' thinking and investment discipline while also creating a link between traditional equity analysis and widely accepted principles of modern portfolio management. Too many sell‐side analysts still try to manifest expertise and conviction with one‐sided investment theses backed by single‐point estimates and “table pounding.” That does a disservice to investors who are looking to sell‐side analysts for an ongoing dialogue about the future with experts on company fundamentals. Risk‐Reward Views are designed to produce a more complete view of the risk‐reward trade‐off in a given stock. They are meant to supplement the use of quant‐only risk models that, while offering at least the illusion of precision, are also often opaque and backward looking. The approach aims to increase transparency while avoiding unnecessary complexity by focusing on a handful of critical uncertainties and modeling a manageable number of coherent scenarios that are relevant to investor debates and cover a full range of plausible outcomes. This article focuses on the theoretical underpinnings of the department's Risk‐Reward initiative. For a more detailed discussion of the institutional setting and the processes followed to implement these ideas, readers are referred to the recently published Harvard Business School case study, “The Risk‐Reward Framework at Morgan Stanley Research” (Harvard Business School Case N9–111–011).     

Die Geschäftsleiterkontrolle im Versicherungsaufsichtsrecht

The material risks, which can derive from insurance companies, legitimate the severe limitation of the insurance company manager’s constitutional right of the freedom of work. The reliability in insurance company managers is basically assumed. It can regularly only dispensed with a qualified infringement of law, not by a decline in moral standards. In this context the eligibility of infringements has to be detected by a valuation. Therefore the criteria besides the whole purpose of the German Insurance Supervision Act (VAG) are met in: The gravity of the offence, the reference to the occupation, frequency, the future comportment as well as the time lapse. Business judgements are categoricaly not approachable to the supervision of reliability.     

Is your company ready for one-to-one marketing?

One-to-one marketing, also known as relationship marketing, promises to increase the value of your customer base by establishing a learning relationship with each customer. The customer tells you of some need, and you customize your product or service to meet it. Every interaction and modification improves your ability to fit your product to the particular customer. Eventually, even if a competitor offers the same type of service, your customer won't be able to enjoy the same level of convenience without taking the time to teach your competitor the lessons your company has already learned. Although the theory behind one-to-one marketing is simple, implementation is complex. Too many companies have jumped on the one-to-one band-wagon without proper preparation--mistakenly understanding it as an excuse to badger customers with excessive telemarketing and direct mail campaigns. The authors offer practical advice for implementing a one-to-one marketing program correctly. They describe four key steps: identifying your customers, differentiating among them, interacting with them, and customizing your product or service to meet each customer's needs. And they provide activities and exercises, to be administered to employees and customers, that will help you identify your company's readiness to launch a one-to-one initiative. Although some managers dismiss the possibility of one-to-one marketing as an unattainable goal, even a modest program can produce substantial benefits. This tool kit will help you determine what type of program your company can implement now, what you need to do to position your company for a large-scale initiative, and how to set priorities.     

Oil and wasser

It was supposed to be an amicable "merger of equals," an example of European togetherness, a synergistic deal that would create the world's second-largest consumer foods company out of two former competitors. But the marriage of entrepreneurial powerhouse Royal Biscuit and the conservative, family-owned Edeling GmbH is beginning to look overly ambitious. Integration planning is way behind schedule. Investors seem wary. But for Royal Biscuit HR head Michael Brighton, the most immediate problem is that he can't get his German counterpart, Dieter Wallach, to collaborate on a workable leadership development plan for the merged company's executives. And stockholders have been promised details of the new organizational structure, including a precise timetable, in less than a month. The CEO of the British company--and of the postmerger Royal Edeling--is furious. It's partly a culture clash, but the problems may run deeper than that. The press is harping on details that counter the official merger-of-equals line. For instance, seven of the ten seats on the new company's management board will be held by Royal Biscuit executives. Will the clash of cultures undermine this cross-border merger? Commenting on the fictional case study are Robert F. Bruner, the executive director of the Batten-Institute at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business Administration in Charlottesville; Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, the codirectors of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Michael Pragnell, the CEO and director of the board for the agribusiness firm Syngenta, based in Basel, Switzerland; and David Schweiger, the president of the Columbia, South Carolina--based management consulting firm Schweiger and Associates.     

Canada Generators Limited*

This case depicts an armchair situation involving a newly formed small private Canadian company that has recently begun operations in Western Canada. Of concern to the owners is their understanding that Canadian generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) are about to be replaced by International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) at the end of 2010, and so the statements in their present form will have to be conformed to the new standards if the company decides to go public with a share offering, which is an option it is considering. Other issues facing the company concern the appropriate accounting and reporting requirements that will be required in order to allow the company to secure additional financing and engage in some necessary research and development. This case is suitable for students who have progressed beyond the introductory financial accounting level; it involves adjustments to inventory and capital asset accounts as well as income effects including taxation, and it draws out some of the more important nontransitional differences between GAAP and IFRS.     

Manage marketing by the customer equity test

Managers have recently begun to think of good marketing as good conversation, as a process of drawing customers into progressively more satisfying relationships with a company. And just as the art of conversation follows two steps--first striking up a conversation with a likely partner and then maintaining the flow--so the new marketing naturally divides itself into the work of customer acquisition and the work of customer retention. But how can managers determine the optimal balance between spending on acquisition and spending on retention? Robert Blattberg and John Deighton use decision calculus to help managers answer that question. That is, they ask managers to approach the large, complex problem through several smaller, more manageable questions on the same topic. Then they use a formal model to turn those smaller judgments into an answer to the larger question. The ultimate goal, the authors say, is to grow the company's customer equity the sum of all the conversations-to its fullest potential. Recognizing that managers must constantly reassess the spending points determined by the decision-calculus model, the authors also provide a series of guidelines and suggestions to help frame the issues that affect acquisition, retention, and customer equity. When managers strive to grow customer equity rather than a brand's sales or profits, they put a primary indicator of the health of the business at the fore front of their strategic thinking: the quality of customer relationships.     

Leading change when business is good. Interview by Paul Hemp and Thomas A. Stewart

Lou Gerstner's was a hard act to follow. As CEO in what were arguably IBM's darkest hours, Gerstner brought the company back from the brink. After nearly ten wrenching years, in which the big-machine manufacturer remade itself into a comprehensive software, hardware, and services provider, business was looking good. So the challenge for Sam Palmisano, when he took over as CEO in 2002, was to come up with a mandate for a second act in the company's transformation. His primary aim was to get different parts of the company working together so IBM could offer customers "integrated solutions"--hardware, software, services, and financing--at a single price. As part of this effort, he asked all of IBM's 320,000 employees, in 170 countries, to weigh in on a new set of shared corporate values. Over a 72-hour period, thousands of IBMers throughout the world gave Palmisano and his executive team an earful in an intranet discussion dubbed "Values-Jam," an often-heated debate about the company's heart and soul. Twenty-four hours into the exercise, at least one senior exec wanted to pull the plug. The jam had clearly struck a chord with employees, but it was a dissonant one, full of rancor and discontent. Palmisano let the discussion continue, and the next day, the mood began to shift. The criticism became more constructive. Out of the million words generated by the jam grew a set of values that, as Palmisano explains in this interview, are meant to guide the operational decisions made by IBM's employees-and, more important, to serve as Palmisano's mandate to continue the reinvention of the company.     

The costs of complying with a government data collection program: the FTC's Line of Business Report

The Federal Trade Commission's Line of Business Report Program requires some 440 of the largest U.S. corporations to gather and report detailed data. The program's compliance costs were and are a major issue between the reluctant respondents and the FTC. Analysis of the estimates made by the parties reveals why and how a government agency tends to underestimate costs severely. Principally, the agency does not recognize that a company must prepare data that can withstand hostile scrutiny: inexpensively prepared estimates will not do. The analysis reveals that the estimates used by the FTC are based on very questionable procedures and evidence. A procedure is suggested to avoid or resolve differences in cost estimates claimed by the parties.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: Aggregate Theory and Policy: Technology, Economic Growth, and Public Policy. By Richard R. Nelson , M. J. Peck , and E. D. Kalachek . Aggregate Theory and Policy: Economic Behavior of the Affluent. By Robin Barlow , Harvey E. Brazer and James N. Morgan . Business Finance and Investments: The Theory of Business Finance: A Book of Readings. Edited by Stephen H. Archer and Charles A. D' Ambrosio . Business Finance and Investments: C.F.A. Readings in Financial Analysis (First Edition). By The Institute of Chartered Financial Analysis . Business Finance and Investments: Corporate Dividend Policy. By John A. Brittain . Business Finance and Investments: Credit Management. By Robert Bartels . Financial Institutions and Markets: Regulation of Interest Rates on Bank Deposits. By Albert H. Cox , Jr . Financial Institutions and Markets: Politics and the Regulatory Agencies. By William L. Cary . Financial Institutions and Markets: Monetary Theory and Policy. By Richard A. Ward . Financial Institutions and Markets: The Currencies and Financial System of Mainland China. By Tadao Miyashita . International Finance: Economic Policies Toward Less Developed Countries. By Harry G. Johnson . International Finance: International Aid: An Introduction to the Problem of the Flow of Public Resources from Rich to Poor Countries. By I.M.D. Little and J. M. Clifford . International Finance: Public International Lending for Development. By Raymond F. Mikesell . International Finance: International Financial Aid. By Wolfgang G. Feiedmann , George Kalmanoff and Robert Meagher . Public Finance: Public Economics. By Leif Johansen . Public Finance: Studies in the Economics of Income Maintenance. Edited by Otto Eckstein .     

A pattern‐based approach to extract REA value models from business process models

Business models are economic models that describe the rationale of why organizations create and deliver value. These models focus on what organizations offer and why. Business process models capture business activities and the ways in which they are accomplished (i.e. their coordination). They explain who is involved in the activities, and how and when these activities should be performed. This paper discusses the alignment between business models and business process models. It proposes a novel systematic method for extracting a value chain (i.e. business model) expressed in the Resources, Events, Agents (REA) ontology from a business process model expressed in Business Process Model and Notation?. Our contribution is twofold: (1) from a theoretical standpoint we identified a set of structural and behavioural patterns that enable us to infer the corresponding REA value chain; (2) from a pragmatic perspective, our approach can be used to derive useful knowledge about the business process and serve as a starting point for business analysis.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: Aggregate Theory and Policy: Studies in Economic Stabilization. Edited by Albert Ando , E. Cary Brown , and Ann F. Friedlaender . Aggregate Theory and Policy: Britain's Economic Prospects. By Richard E. Caves and Associates . Aggregate Theory and Policy: Why Growth Rates Differ. By Edward F. Denison . Aggregate Theory and Policy: Monetary Economics: Readings. Edited by Alan D. Entine . Aggregate Theory and Policy: The Costs of Economic Growth. By Ezra J. Mishan . Business Finance and Investments: Investment Decision-Making. By Albert I. A. Bookbinder . Business Finance and Investments: Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management. By Jerome B. Cohen and Edward D. Zinbarg . Business Finance and Investments: Financial Management and Policy. By James C. Van Horne . Business Finance and Investments: Basic Financial Management: Text, Problems and Cases. By Edward J. Mock , Robert E. Schultz , Raymond G. Schultz and Donald Hart Shuckett . Business Finance and Investments: The Management of Capital Expenditures. By Robert G. Murdick and Donald D. Deming . Financial Institutions and Markets: The Retail Price Structure in American Life Insurance. By Joseph M. Belth . Financial Institutions and Markets: Finances and Banking. Edited by Zdzislaw Fedorowicz . Financial Institutions and Markets: The Five-Year Outlook For Interest Rates. Edited by Herbert V. Prochnow . Financial Institutions and Markets: Mutual Savings Banks and Savings and Loan Associations. By Alan Teck . Financial Institutions and Markets: Money in the Computer Age. By F. P. Thomson . Financial Institutions and Markets: The Management of Cyclical Liquidity of Commercial Banks. By G. Walter Woodworth . International Finance: Trade Liberalization Among Industrial Countries. By Bela Balassa . International Finance: Studies in Trade Liberalization: Problems and Prospects for the Industrial Countries. By Bela Balassa and Associates . International Finance: Monetary Reform and The Price of Gold-Alternative Approaches. Edited by Randall Hinshaw . International Finance: Overseas Manufacturing Investment and the Balance of Payments. By G. C. Hufbauer and F. M. Adler . International Finance: The Open Economy: Essays on International Trade and Finance. Edited by Peter B. Kenen and Roger Lawrence . Public Finance: Illinois Municipal Finance. By Glenn W. Fisher and Robert P. Fairbanks . Public Finance: Budget Concepts for Economic Analysis. Edited by Wilfred Lewis , Jr .     

基于企业战略的税收筹划优化思考

企业战略与税收筹划是目标与手段的关系,企业战略是企业的整体和长远目标,税收筹划是实现该目标的具体手段,应服从于企业战略。应从市场竞争战略、投资战略、成本战略、价值链角度四个方面,优化税收筹划,以有效实现企业战略目标。     

Putting leadership back into strategy

In recent decades an infusion of economics has lent the study of strategy much needed theory and empirical evidence. Strategy consultants, armed with frameworks and techniques, have stepped forward to help managers analyze their industries and position their companies for strategic advantage. Strategy has come to be seen as an analytical problem to be solved. But, says Montgomery, the Timken Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, the benefits of this rigorous approach have attendant costs: Strategy has become a competitive game plan, separate from the company's larger sense of purpose. The CEO's unique role as arbiter and steward of strategy has been eclipsed. And an overemphasis on sustainable competitive advantage has obscured the importance of making strategy a dynamic tool for guiding the company's development over time. For any company, intelligent guidance requires a clear sense of purpose, of what makes the organization truly distinctive. Purpose, Montgomery says, serves as both a constraint on activity and a guide to behavior. Creativity and insight are key to forging a compelling organizational purpose; analysis alone will never suffice. As the CEO--properly a company's chief strategist--translates purpose into practice, he or she must remain open to the possibility that the purpose itself may need to change. Lou Gerstner did this in the 1990s, when he decided that IBM would evolve to focus on applying technology rather than on inventing it. So did Steve Jobs, when he rescued Apple from a poorly performing strategy and expanded the company into attractive new businesses. Watching over strategy day in and day out is the CEO's greatest opportunity to shape the firm as well as outwit the competition.     

The vision trap

At Mentor Graphics Corporation, Gerry Langeler was the executive responsible for vision, and vision, he discovered, has the power to weaken a strong company. Mentor helped to invent design-automation electronics in the early 1980s, and by the end of the decade, it dominated the industry. In its early days, fighting to survive, Mentor's motto was Build Something People Will Buy. Then when clear competition emerged in the form of Daisy Systems, a startup that initially outsold Mentor, the watchword became Beat Daisy. Both "visions" were pragmatic and immediate. They gave Mentor a sense of purpose as it developed its products and gathered momentum. Once Daisy was beaten, however, company vision began to self-inflate. As Mentor grew more and more successful, Langeler formulated vision statements that were more and more ambitious, grand, and inspirational. The company traded its gritty determination to survive for a dream of future glory. The once explicit call for effective action became a fervid cry for abstract perfection. The first step was Six Boxes, a transitional vision that combined goals for success in six business areas with grandiose plans to compete with IBM at the level of billion-dollar revenues. From there, vision stepped up to the 10X Imperative, a quality-improvement program that focused on arbitrary goals and measures that were, in fact, beyond the company's control. The last escalation came when Mentor Graphics decided to Change the Way the World Designs. The company had stopped making product and was making poetry. Finally, in 1991, after six years of increasing self-infatuation, Mentor hit a wall of decreasing indicators. Langeler, who had long since begun to doubt the value of abstract visions, reinstated Build Something People Will Buy. And Mentor was back to basics, a sense of purpose back to its workplace.