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The primary purpose of this paper is to illustrate a new methodology for gaining actionable, strategic insight into a brand's associations and its competitive uniqueness vis‐à‐vis key competitors.

The authors integrate free association protocols, response latency, and more conventional scale items to develop a strategic overview of a brand's associations and to depict brands' strategic meaning in a comprehensive visual presentation.

The authors show, via an example featuring peanut butter brands, how their methodology effectively uncovers associations that the market has for the brands and how strong, unique, relevant, and favorable those associations are.

This methodology is most appropriate for four to six brands at a time.

The strategic brand association map process demonstrated provides managers with a very clear, consumer‐driven, strategic view of the associations their brand has, and how those associations may (or may not) be serving to differentiate their brand. Additionally, these strategic brand association maps serve as an excellent diagnostic as to the overall health of a brand and can provide actionable insight for better understanding strategic reasons why a particular brand may be under‐performing against expectations.

Brand associations are one of the fundamental cornerstones of brand value. Brand associations serve to differentiate and create meaning for brands. Better understanding and managing a brand's associations is a fundamental role of brand managers. This process illustrates a new way to give brand managers strategic, consumer‐driven insight into their brand's associative network.

Reviews the distinctive cultural patterns found in Taiwan, and then discusses the management practices of three “excellent” Taiwanese companies and explores their success in terms of the eight major characteristics discussed by Peters and Waterman in In Search of Excellence.

Many researchers have been investigating the subject of corporate culture, which has become a buzz word of the 1980s. All results have not been in agreement but a variety of changes to accommodate a change in corporate culture have been observed. Usually the change is effected in order to increase company profitability, and the strategy chosen depends on the existing culture, the company's stage of development (growth, mid‐life, maturity) and the kind of change required. American examples are cited.

Public sector management has never been overwhelmingly applauded for efficiency in operations; but in the last few decades accusations of mismanagement in the American federal government have been common, particularly in the wake of the Grace Commission report and the Gramm‐Rudman Deficit Reduction Plan. The pressure is on government to streamline operations and become more “efficient”.

Offers suggestions for management in a changing business environment. Advises managers to concentrate on customer responsiveness and creating niche markets; to encourage and develop innovation among the people on the organization; and empower employees. Finally, warns that leaders must genuinely love change and make it an integral part of their existence.

I. Routines and Experiments Though at least as old as The Wealth of Nations, the concept of the market as an experimental mechanism finds no place in standard modern theory; it is nevertheless implicit in the “appreciative theory” by which the relative merits of markets and central planning are commonly appraised. The outstanding analyst of the experimental process and its implications is Joseph Schumpeter; and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication in English of his Theory of Economic Development (the original German version of which appeared in 1911) provides a convenient opportunity for some comment on his work. What makes this opportunity particularly timely is the citation of Schumpeter by Nelson and Winter as one of the two primary intellectual pro‐genitors of their own Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change.

Roger L. Martin, one of the most respected strategists, is questioned by veteran S&L interviewer Brian Leavy. The questions range from the how and why of integrative thinking methodology to academic arguments over resource-based view of strategy.

Martin, co-author with Jennifer Riel of the new book Creating Great Choices, shares the insights they have developed while learning how to guide executives through integrative thinking methodolgy.

The necessary raw materials for an integrative solution are two opposing models. By exposing your model to other models through interaction, together you can utilize pieces of those models to generate a new one.

We see the value of prototyping solutions – expecting to be only partially right with the first prototype and learning a lot from putting the ideas into action, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and improving iteratively.

Martin’s guide to break though thinking shares the insights he has learned from working with brilliant CEOs and others who have sought to find a better solution to a dilemma or paradox than the unsatisfactory solutions confronting them.

This interview with the authors of Strategy – Beyond the Hockey Stick offers their insights into a major problem which has bedevilled the strategy process in too many companies over the years - the combination of bold but delusional “hockey-stick” forecasts and timid strategic moves – a coupling that severely limits the impact of any strategy.

The McKinsey authors examined publicly available information on the world’s 2,393 largest companies, and plotted their average annual economic profit

They found that the curve is extremely steep at the both ends: those in the top quintile average some 30 times as much economic profit as those in the middle three quintiles.

One of the biggest pitfalls in the strategy process is this very human propensity for bold forecasts and timid actions. Strategy requires confronting uncertainly head-on by embracing the notion of probability by calibrating the odds of a strategy succeeding, building in explicit trigger points to re-examine decisions as we learn more. 10;

What has been largely missing from the literature is a study of the average-to-top transition based on an extensive data set, one that encompasses a greater range of performance profiles and average-to-top transition trajectories. This is the knowledge gap that Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds fills.

The nature of Singapore′s political, economic and socio‐cultural environment is first discussed. Then the transferability of US management practices as described in In Search of Excellence is explored.

Executives must develop skills to manage management time as well as conventional time. Methods which improve skills include understanding time‐space structures, using methods proposed by Peter F. Drucker, and managing one′s immediate management molecule as proposed by William Oncken. Unconventional time management techniques used by Harold Geneen, Ex‐CEO of International Telephone and Telegraph are also explored.