Ivey Business Journal Online

An Interview with Christopher Bartlett

In an interview, author Christopher Bartlett talks about his books and the qualities that a global manager must possess to be effective. He said that part of the reason his book entitled Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution was successful was purely an accident of timing. It did come at a time when companies were in the thrust of globalization. His other book, Transnational Management: Text, Cases and Readings in Cross Border Management, is an integrated book that looks at stra...

Bringing Business Back ... To the Customer

The global recession has caused consumers to change their spending habits dramatically. Predictably, this change has had a negative impact on revenue and margin performance for most companies. In Canada, from Q2 2008 to Q2 2009, operating revenue across all industries fell by 8%, while operating profits fell 32%. Many companies may need to cut costs in order to survive the current downturn and the sluggish recovery. Most importantly, they will need to execute their survival strategies intelli...

China Is Undergoing a Transformation...Yet Again

China has been experiencing declining foreign direct investment (FDI) since late 2008. Year-on-year, FDI was down 37% in Jan 2009, 16% in Feb 2009, and nearly 10% in Mar 2009. Foreign investors looking to establish high-value-added activities in China necessarily look beyond the improvements in the fiscal and physical infrastructure, for signs that substantive steps, not increased rhetoric, are being taken to enhance China's regulatory infrastructure. Fundamental institutional change would be...

Defining Some Different Avenues of Innovation

With intensified competition, economic challenges and changing technology, there is increased pressure on companies to become more innovative in their quest to achieve greater growth and profits. Organizations that are innovative in how they accept change, evaluate their overall business, develop talent, keep their eye on the future, and use technology to their advantage will have the greatest opportunity to succeed. This article will examine the different avenues that companies have used in ...

How Social Media Can Be Used to Dialogue with the Customer

Effective use of Social Media requires new processes and a different orientation for effective customer dialogue. Many companies are struggling to understand how to use social media in their marketing mix. This article attempts to address some of the questions marketers need to consider when attempting to understand social media. The questions are: 1. How can social media be harnessed for achieving customer intimacy? 2. Why is social media different than the rest of the marketing mix? 3. How ...

In China, It's Not Just About the Economy. Will Canada Get It?

It is ironic that it has taken an economic crisis to awaken Canadians to the importance of China. The Chinese economy was last in and first out of the recession, and it is Chinese demand that has kept the world economy from plunging into a deeper slump. The rebalancing of the Chinese economy will take many years, which means Chinese exports of manufactured goods will continue to flood the world for the foreseeable future. For too long, Canada's connection to the Asia Pacific region has rested...

Is Heroic Leadership All Bad?

These days, heroic leadership is out and post-heroic is in. Heroic leaders use the power of their position to make decisions unilaterally. By contrast, post-heroic leaders are facilitators. The difference between them is their decision-making style: one is autocratic, the other is participative. Both are positional leaders; they lead from a position of authority. But in groups' rush to embrace the post-heroic leader, they overlook another way leadership demonstrates itself, namely by challeng...

Outliers: Malcolm Gladwell Does It Again

Executives will find Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers, (Little, Brown and Company, 2008) a very good use of their very scarce reading time. The book not only offers a number of thoughts useful to running a good business, but is also marvelously written, full of interesting and useful anecdotes and just plain a lot of fun. In Outliers, Gladwell analyzes success. Here are a few things that will resonate with executives if they take a trip through Outliers. First, success for an individual,...

Reinventing Management

Some observers would like to get rid of the word manager altogether, favoring terms like leader, executive and entrepreneur. A more useful approach is to reinvent management -- to go back to first principles, and recapture the spirit of what management is all about. The author believes that management -- as a social activity and as a philosophy -- has gradually become corrupted over the last 100 years. Corruption has taken place for two major reasons: 1. Large industrial firms became dominant...

The Emerging Market to Emerging Market Opportunity: Are You Ready to Play?

Trade patterns in Asia are shifting and traditional business models, built on buying cheaply in Asia and selling at higher prices in the United States, won't easily fit the new reality. Multinationals need to evaluate the suitability of their business models for the booming opportunities in trade between emerging markets. Key steps are outlined below. Multinational companies around the world will need to define their strategic stance relative to this EM2EM awakening. As a first step, multinat...

The International Joint-Venture: A Discussion with Professor Paul W. Beamish

Paul Beamish, Professor of International Business at the Richard Ivey School of Business and the Founding Director of the School's Asian Management Institute, discussed the opportunities that international joint ventures represent, as well as the management challenges that must be considered and overcome for them to succeed. Beamish said that a Joint Venture (JV) can be an excellent vehicle for North American companies doing business in a foreign market, while sharing the start-up and operati...