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We asked MIT professor Arnoldo Hax to go back to the fundamentals and offer us some basic definitions of strategic management. To find out how your organization measures up as a strategy formulator, take his diagnostic tests.

The structure of an organization is no longer viewed as a rigid definition of hierarchical levels and interrelationships among different groups. Managers use the organizational design process as a fundamental tool for implementing and communicating the strategic direction selected for the firm.

In 1979, the company's Annual Report stated that Monsanto operations included “more than 180 manufacturing plants, laboratories, and technical centers in 20 nations. The company's products [were] sold in 123 nations.” According to the April 30, 1984, Fortune, “Monsanto hit its nadir in 1980; though sales increased 6 percent to $6.57 billion, earnings plunged 55 percent to $149 million….[The company] lost over $300 million on old‐line businesses, with fibers and styrene proving the worst performers.” Its return on stockholder equity was 5.3 percent.

Five hundred financial executives from North American companies were surveyed by means of a mailed questionnaire to gain a view from outside the operations functions of the basis on which aggregate inventory decisions are taken. The response indicated that more functions than might have been expected were involved in the process of determining inventory levels and, partly because of this, policy tended to be of a shorter rather than longer term nature.

This case aims to chronicle the dismantling of Tenneco – a large, prosperous diversified firm. Because it failed to manage risk, its best assets ultimately had to be sold to allow its survival. Behind its actions of problematic acquisitions and questionable financial policies, are underlying dynamics that offer lessons for other companies.

The study is are based on extensive interviews of management, board members, and review of documents and publications. The paper focuses on decisions that cumulatively contributed to enterprise‐wide risk.

The paper finds that Tenneco management's blind spot was its failure to consider the interaction of its decisions and implicit assumptions over time.

Six principles of enterprise‐risk management are distilled from the Tenneco case.

Although Tenneco's financial crisis occurred decades ago, the lesson for present‐day management is clear: independent board oversight is crucial. Moreover, the enterprise risks inherent in some decisions are only apparent if the board takes a system‐wide view.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the relationship between strategy and customer lifetime value (CLV). A new model was proposed for defining customers’ values based on the RFM model and segmenting bank customers using the K-means algorithm. In addition, the authors combined a new category with the delta model in order to analyze the behavior of each cluster.

This case study was based on an applied method following its objectives and a descriptive-analytic method in terms of data collection. In this research, the AHP, data mining and K-means clustering methods, as well as the discriminant analysis were applied for computing the weights of the indices, examining the relationship between the identified variables, clustering the records and ensuring the clustering accuracy based on the RFM model, respectively.

The paper confirmed the relationship between the strategies and CLV. For a cluster whose strategy was the best product, customers had a minimal CLV. For a cluster whose strategy was based on total customer solutions, customers had a median CLV. For a cluster whose strategy was a lock-in system, customers had a maximal CLV. The results suggested that the delta model with these three strategies could act as the CLV developers in two stages: conversion of transient customers to attached customers and conversion of attached customers to locked-in customers.

One of the limitations of this study was the lack of access to all the bank accounts and assessment of only the strategy type, while highlighting the exact association between every component of the strategies (e.g. structure, environment, etc.) and CLV as a dependent variable deemed to be of a great necessity. Hence, it is recommended that several studies on the relationships presented in this paper be performed to provide further insights into and guidelines on this issue in the future.

This study emphasized the relevance of strategy and CLV. Managers should differently treat customers in distinct CLV and loyalty levels. In other words, managers must segment their customers based on CLV and apply appropriate strategies for each segment.

This research tried to fulfill an identified need to study how strategy can be effect CLV through the application of the delta model with three strategic options.

This article focuses on three related themes. Firstly, normative decision rules for the international capital budgeting decision are outlined. Secondly, the strengths and limitations of finance theory in guiding the capital budgeting plan within the MNC are discussed. Thirdly, strategic views are introduced to complement financial analysis in the area of international capital budgeting.