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Quality for quality's sake has been debunked—everyone knows you have to tie it to the bottom line. What's new is that quality needs to go beyond the bottom line to tie into a company's strategy.

The window has opened: Now is the time to do business with Japan. The major hurdles companies will (ace are not any formal legal restrictions, but the complexity and high cost of doing business.

Success today is determined by the agility, flexibility, and versatility with which a company meets its customers' individual requirements. Here's how technology has fueled the shift from mass manufacturing to smaller scale, modular, information‐rich production.

Use it up, wear it out. Make it do, or do without. While the consumer hardships that inspired this Yankee saying have gone the way of flintlock firearms, the harsh conditions facing corporate America are far from history. ♦ In order to help planners cut costs, we searched everywhere to uncover the many overlooked ways that companies still waste money. We found corporations concerned with everything from floor space to fax machines, coffee to corporate locations, and time‐on‐hold to holding time. ♦ Many of the cost‐saving ideas we discovered are simply common sense. Others are more “New Age” in spirit. Some are downright Scroogely. ♦ To get yourself into a thrifty mindset, take a look at the gamut of cost cutting ideas and strategies on the following pages.

It's time we burst our own “bubble” view of Japanese business techniques: Everything they do is neither automatically right, nor comprehensively wrong. They are, well, uniquely Japanese—in every sense of the word.

This paper engages with the important work of Raškovic (2024). The authors agree with Raškovic’s (2024) argument that international business (IB) policy is well positioned to inform and address many of society’s wicked problems, including modern slavery. Beyond supporting this position, the purpose of this paper is to highlight IB’s internal and ongoing debate regarding multinational ownership and control, and how this unresolved theoretical issue can hinder the contribution of IB policy in addressing wicked problems.

By leveraging prior literature, this paper synthesises opposing views on the extent of control that multinational enterprises (MNEs) exert across global value chains (GVCs). The authors then demonstrate why these conflicting perspectives should be resolved to fully realise the task that Raškovic (2024) has laid out for IB policy.

This study argues that IB is steeped in a tradition where ownership has been a proxy for meaningful control. Rising GVCs have complicated this relationship, and while IB recognises this, the field remains short of explicating a set of robust conditions that can detect control in the absence of ownership. Given that responsibility is often based on an assumption of who has control, this ongoing and unresolved debate limits IB’s utility in advancing appropriate policy interventions to tame wicked problems.

This paper makes a contribution by bringing together diverse perspectives on the ongoing debate regarding MNE control in GVC. It demonstrates how this seemingly abstract debate can have significant implications for IB’s role in addressing society’s grand challenges. The authors further suggest that embracing interdisciplinarity and novel analytical tools can assist in demystifying the opaqueness of GVCs and resolving the control “fuzziness” that confuses responsibility boundaries across the GVC.

International business (IB) education typically focuses on the multinational enterprise (MNE) and how it navigates varying institutional setups for its own benefit. This reductionist and MNE-centric approach underplays the influence these firms have on the societal and environmental fabric of the geographies they are operating in. This paper aims to propose integrating systems thinking into IB education to address this shortcoming with the intention to setup IB education to engage with wicked grand challenges.

This conceptual paper offers an approach for integrating complexity, criticality and diversity into IB education through teaching systems thinking capabilities.

Integrating systems thinking into IB education allows for a more realistic appreciation of IB’s contribution to addressing grand challenges. The authors propose a systems thinking perspective to IB education and offer how systems thinking capabilities could be taught in IB.

Grand challenges are characterised by wicked problems. Addressing them requires a multilevel, cross-disciplinary approach that takes into consideration the inter- and intradependencies of all actors within a system.

A technology in search of a strategy? That's what we were starting to think about this whole Web‐'Net‐connect‐athon movement. It's certainly not everything it's cracked up to be—just ask the businessperson we know who spent a week in Chile and came back ready to trade her laptop for a homing pigeon. Her hotel's phone lines were incompatible with laptop modems. When she finally found an analog line, not only did the local Internet service number not work, but Santiago's long distance lines didn't stay clear long enough to send so much as one email.

It's probably been at least a decade since any strategist actually believed he'd spend the rest of his career plotting the campaign of a great corporate army—from a nearby ridge.

Judging from this group of books, the scholarship behind management literature has taken a giant—and welcome—leap forward. For the most part, these highly educated authors are working in the top intellectual planes in terms of vocabulary, references, metaphors, philosophy, and scientific discourse—all to illustrate and explain the complex dynamics behind various aspects of the thinking process, especially knowledge and creativity.