Value and Strategy: Competing Successfully in the Nineties

(Hardback)

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Modern business faces the challenge of people's heightened expectations of product and service utility, novelty, and inventiveness. Such expectations coupled with aggressive international competition, have dramatically changed business practices. Companies need a new strategy to compete in highly volatile markets that place changing demands in rapid succession. Shenkman stresses the need for a vital response to markets and urges decision makers to meet their objectives and challenges through a basic but essential commitment to quality. The concept and application of quality implies a specific kind of relationship between a business and its customers. It stems from a deep and continuous search into consumer uses of products and services and also into customers' sense of what roles companies' products or services play or can play in their lives. Management's commitment to quality requires constant attention to production and innovation which, in turn, demand highly positive relationships not only with customers, but also with the workforce. The environment must develop and encourage everyone's contribution. Shenkman maintains that business can be a constructive, invigorating and creative part of people's lives. That will happen if the relationships established motivate the setting of high standards and inspire the necessary effort to attain them. He sees the world of business as dynamic, with relationships and interactions ever-changing. Managers must be aware, grasp opportunities, and react to the potential before them. This volume speaks to those managers who intuit the great changes occuring in the marketplace and who are willing to welcome the opportunities to innovate, adapt, and invent with a focus always on the customer.

Author Bio

MICHAEL H. SHENKMAN is a Senior Consultant at Mage Centers for Management Development. With more than twenty years experience in business, he has been an independent consultant for the past twelve years.