MIT Sloan Management Review

The challenges of management in the 1980s are enormous, but they are fairly easy to identify. The great difficulties that we face lie not in deciding what our goals should be, but in determining how to achieve them. Our problems in this area are problems of implementation: how can we reach goals that are often [...]

FOR SOME decades now, marketing textbooks and professors have assiduously distinguished between sales and marketing. Theodore Levitt’s 1960 definition is still the classic: “Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his product into cash; marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole [...]

I CAN DEFINE MY TOPIC of concern best by reviewing very briefly the kinds of issues upon which I have focused my research over the last several years. In one way or another I have been trying to understand what happens to an individual when he enters and accepts membership in an organization. My interest [...]

This article, based on Senge’s book, “The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization,” begins to chart this new territory, describing new roles, skills and tools for leaders who wish to develop learning organizations.

IN ANCIENT GREECE, a tale was told of a roadside inn where a traveler might find lodging for the night, and although the traveler might be tall, short, fat, or thin, the inn’s bed fit all just the same. The innkeeper, of course, was Procrustes, a giant who tied travelers to the bedstead and either [...]

The author presents strategies for negotiating with people from other cultures in a framework based on each party’s level of familiarity with the other’s culture and the extent to which they can explicitly coordinate their strategies. These factors determine the subset of strategies that are realistically feasible for an individual manager. Part 2 (HBSP product number xxxx) (Reprint 3537 in the Spring 1994 issue) describes a methodology for choosing among these strategies.

Organizational America is working very hard these days to become more competitive. Few organizations have been spared the necessity of taking serious action to fight increased pressures from home and abroad. The message is clear: either become more competitive or run the risk of going out of business.
Organizations have responded to this edict with a [...]

Empowering service workers has acquired almost a “born again” religious fervor. Tom Peters calls it “purposeful chaos.” Robert Waterman dubs it “directed autonomy.” It has also been called the “art of improvisation.”
Yet in the mid-1970s, the production-line approach to service was the darling child of service gurus. They advocated facing the customer with standardized, procedurally [...]

In 1994, U.S. health care expenditures approached $1 trillion, of which private businesses paid a substantial portion. While the debates on regulatory measures to contain these costs have not been resolved, the market has responded decisively to pressures from increased health care spending, evidenced by the broad shift to managed care. This trend has moved [...]

In the 1970s, Theodore Levitt presented a “production-line approach to service” as the remedy for the sector’s problems of inefficient operations and dissatisfied customers. He argued that the secrets of the production-line approach could be discovered, quite simply, by looking at the world of manufacturing. Industrial practices such as the simplification of tasks and the [...]