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In today’s markets, many organizations feel pressure to become more responsive to their customers. Managing your business to deliver superior value to targeted customers may provide a strong avenue to improved performance. The route from value-based strategies to share holder value can be complicated, however. These strategies have the most direct impact on performance with your customers in the form of customer satisfaction, word of mouth and loyalty. Successful customer performance should translate into higher market performance, as evidenced by a supplier’s higher customer retention rates and sales. Finally, market performance provides the engine for increasing company performance or shareholder value. Attaining shareholder value through customer value strategies requires committing major management attention to how best to create, deliver and communicate superior value to targeted customers.

With increasing competition in the global marketplace, a prime and basic question for many enterprises is how to construct a global strategy for existing product mixes through standardization or localization, so as to achieve success in regional or local markets. The purpose of this paper is to investigate customer value perceptions of products, to view what variables are important to consumers, and lastly to make comparisons via a cross‐cultural study. Using the same survey method to collect data from Taipei (Taiwan), Seoul (South Korea), Shanghai (China), and Tokyo (Japan), perceived customer values of products were collected together in a List of customer values. The results yielded a wide array of both crosscultural differences and similarities in East Asia.

Be wary of bandwagons, involving either trendy industries or hot business concepts. The fit is more important than the glitter. Be wary also, once a band‐wagon has been boarded, of jumping off too soon to ride one that looks newer or more attractive. Management by zigzagging around will eventually leave you and your company victims of terminal whiplash, an inability to maintain focus on any growth objective long enough to achieve it.

Questions the value of ‘morale boosting’ as a device for salesman improvement, concludes that attention to specific attitudes is likely to prove more rewarding. Specifies the improvement of sales‐force morale is often seen as vital to effective performance. Sheds light on the scarcity of research efforts and the inconclusiveness of available findings indicate the effects of job attitudes on sales performance are uncertain and, at best, are likely to be situation specific. Chronicles that this study was designed to contribute to a small but growing body of research efforts into the question of job attitudes and selling performance.

The need to maintain up-to-date technological skills despite an aging workforce makes it imperative that organizations increasingly focus on retraining older employees. This article develops an adult career model based on the acquisition of technological skills and gradual skill obsolescence. The model suggests the importance of retraining and provides practical implications to the development of retraining programs. Suggestions for future research are also offered.