Marios Alexandrou

Project Management and the Critical Path Method

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:39:00 +0000

There are more lawyers, accountants and business school graduates in top management these days, and fewer engineers. The engineer as business manager is in eclipse, along with the shrinking weight of manufacturing in developed economies. Yet there is much that managers can and do learn from the down-and-dirty business of project management, in planning complex [...]

Organizational Excellence

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:34:54 +0000

Many esoteric works on management never make it past the campus gates. Others can influence the way companies are organized and run, though they usually have to filter their way through the consultancy profession first. A limited number of management books deliver an idea that's gripping enough to be read by senior management itself, drinking [...]

What Business Are You Really In?

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:01:49 +0000

Every once in a corporate blue moon a truly revolutionary idea comes along, one that makes every thinking company look at what it is doing through a new pair of spectacles. And a vision corrective was exactly what Theodore Levitt offered managers with his scornful, provocative and hugely influential article Marketing Myopia, when it appeared [...]

Systems Thinking

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:01:14 +0000

Some farmers discovered systems thinking the hard way. With their crops being devoured by insects, they reached for the spray gun and blasted them with pesticide. And it worked, for a time. But then the crop damage returned, worse than ever, and the pesticide that was so successful had no more effect. As it happened, [...]

The Five Forces of Competition

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:01:05 +0000

The four Ps, the seven Ss -- management thought is often packaged in this mnemonic, slightly gaudy way. There's a whiff of Barnum & Bailey, cheap gimmickry designed to catch the crowd's attention. Today's most successful management thinkers are certainly in the entertainment business, complete with public appearances, book signings and, if they touch the [...]

The Four Ps of Marketing

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:00:44 +0000

As the arm of the business responsible for getting the customer's attention, marketing has generated more than a few tankerloads of snake oil. The four Ps, however, has the virtue of being a simple and sound management idea, still much-used more than 40 years after it was first formulated. The idea of the four Ps is [...]

The Knowledge Economy

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:00:31 +0000

As usual, Peter Drucker was on the case before anyone else. In the late 1960s he coined the term 'knowledge economy', predicting that the spread of information would cause major changes in society. What management had to do, he said, was to boost the productivity of 'knowledge work' and the 'knowledge worker'. Academics and statisticians -- [...]

The Learning Organization

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:00:11 +0000

The world is speeding up, as it gets more wired and as people get more demanding -- I want exactly what I want, and I want it now. But I might want something different tomorrow. As markets fragment and change accelerates, business has to keep up or die. That's why the continuous improvement that started [...]

War and Strategy

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:59:49 +0000

The idea that business could be warfare by another name took hold of many business leaders during the 1980s. It was not that they wanted to destroy the enemy -- though some of them undoubtedly did -- but that they believed they should strategize like successful generals. Though it's no longer fashionable to admit it, many [...]

Web 2.0

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:59:36 +0000

With a few far-sighted exceptions, business is slow to wake up to the new. When it does, however, it devours it. A handful of early movers turn a new idea into a competitive advantage until everyone else catches up. Then the new becomes the norm and the field is leveled once again. That is as [...]

The Long Tail

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:58:19 +0000

The Internet changes everything, they used to say in the 1990s. That was just before they discovered that it didn't. But it changes quite a lot of things and one of them -- according to the long tail theory - is the ability, over time, to make money out of very small niches. There was a [...]

Theories X and Y (and Theory Z)

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:58:05 +0000

Management's ideas about motivating employees have changed a bit since scientific management first considered how to make workers more efficient. Today, most managers would at least pay lip service to the idea that employees are human beings, with human needs and aspirations, and that you need to recognize this to get the best from them. [...]

Tipping Point

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:58:00 +0000

The combative former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously used the term tipping point to describe the position that the Iraq war had not yet reached. On his and many, many other lips, tipping point has passed its own tipping point, and business has leaped aboard the bandwagon. A quick dance around the Web reveals [...]

Total Quality Management

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:57:51 +0000

If management is a science, as some have argued, it is an imprecise one and one which encourages an endless flow of management ideas that surface and then, as often as not, sink. Where there has been truly impressive progress is in the realm of quality, where science and maths feel quite at home. Much [...]

Value Chain

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:57:41 +0000

Michael Porter, who has given management more big ideas than anyone since Peter Drucker, is unyielding on the subject of being competitive. If a company wants competitive advantage, he insists, it must examine every little thing it does through the prism of competitiveness. His five forces model was a tool for assessing the strength of [...]

Supply Chain Management

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:57:11 +0000

When supply chain managers compare notes, the talk will eventually get round to the perfect order. That's an order which reached the customer complete, in the right place, undamaged and on time. like other manifestations of perfection, it is not as common as some companies would like. Lower-than-necessary perfect order rates not only create unhappy [...]

Strategic Alliances

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:57:07 +0000

"It's partner or perish", declared Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy. She was announcing yet another in the chain of strategic alliances that her company has built, to powerful effect, over many years, starting with Fuji of Japan in 1960. It may have sounded like roll-of-the-drums hyperbole, but in today's fast-moving markets -- and particularly in the [...]

Stakeholder Management

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:57:02 +0000

It is the fate of some words to evolve rapidly through enlightening to hot, overused and, finally, very irritating, and stakeholder has become one of them. It is sprinkled over reports and jammed into mission statements, as if use alone were enough to prove concern. Worse, politicians have got hold of it. In their mouths, [...]

Six Sigma

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:56:57 +0000

Martial arts mixes with the Greek alphabet and a US electronics maker in a defects control discipline that has won many thousands of corporate converts -- Six Sigma. It was designed to reduce defects and shorten cycle times, something it does very effectively, but today its sponsors are promoting it as a fully integrated management [...]

Scientific Management

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:56:51 +0000

Is management an art or a science? The debate is not new, nor is it over. In recent times, the 'art' lobby has been making up some lost ground, but it was 19th-century engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor who first cast management as a science. Peter Drucker, the management guru's management guru, says Taylor deserves a [...]