Strategy

For more than two decades, businesses have been warned to "change or perish." Yet a growing number of companies are perishing because of change. What's going on? Columbia Business School Professor Eric Abrahamson argues that although change is necessary for companies to grow and prosper, many organizations have blindly taken the mandate too far. The "creative destruction" advocated by change champions has resulted in a painful cycle of initiative overload, change-related chaos, and widespread employee cynicism.

In Europe, Procter & Gamble and Henkel appear to follow significantly different brand positioning strategies for laundry detergents. Procter & Gamble tends to use pan-European brand positions while Henkel tends to use brand positions that vary by country. Why would Procter & Gamble and Henkel pursue different brand positioning strategies and both be correct? The answer is that their competitive situations differ and they would answer the questions posed in this article differently.

Recommendations often play a positive role in the decision process by reducing the difficulty associated with choosing between options. However, in certain circumstances recommendations play a less positive and more undesirable role from the perspectives of both the recommending agent or agency and the person receiving the recommendation. Across a series of four studies, we explore consumer response when recommendations by experts and intelligent agents contradict the consumer's initial impressions of choice options.

The purpose of this panel is to make significant headway in assessing and developing multilateral strategies to promote democracy. Throughout, we will focus on constructive avenues for change rather than on critique and lamentation. We begin with two diagnostic questions: What is the state of democratization in the world today? How have strategies for the promotion of democracy changed since September 11, led by the transformed U.S. agenda of war on terror? Here we will discuss recent interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as new developments in other parts ofthe world.

I propose an intertemporal precautionary saving model in which the agent's labor income is subject to (possibly correlated) shocks with different degrees of persistence and volatility. However, he only observes his total income, not individual components. I show that partial observability of individual components of income gives rise to additional precautionary saving due to estimation risk, the error associated with estimating individual components of income. This additional precautionary saving is higher, when estimation risk is greater.

We study linguistic access in a mixed language context by integrating the Bilingual Interactive Activation model and the Language Differential Processing model. We show that highly proficient bilinguals, compared to less proficient bilinguals, activate phonological and semantic representations of the dominant as well as the non-dominant language, and engage in differential processing for different types of scripts (phonetic vs. logographic). For highly proficient bilinguals, language emphasis (Chinese vs.

We examine the effects of both equity market liberalization and capital account openness on real consumption growth variability. We show that financial liberalization is mostly associated with lower consumption growth volatility. Our results are robust, surviving controls for business-cycle effects, economic and financial development, the quality of institutions, and other variables. Countries that have more open capital accounts experience a greater reduction in consumption growth volatility after equity market openings.

We argue that the root cause behind the recent corporate scandals associated with CEO pay is the technology bubble of the latter half of the 1990s. Far from rejecting the optimal incentive contracting theory of executive compensation, the recent evidence on executive pay can be reconciled with classical agency theory once one expands the framework to allow for speculative stock markets.