Use Of The Best Practices Technique In Business And Ways To Maximize Its Usefulness

The approach of identifying and learning from the best practices employed in an industry is popular in academic and professional business training. The concept of following the leader (similar to benchmarking) is a trusted tactic, if not a strategy, used in many industries. However, if the correct research method is not used to identify these practices, the outcomes can be ineffective as a result of using inappropriate techniques, or inefficient as result of using techniques that promise success yet result in failure. This paper discusses how best practices may sometimes be erroneously identified and provides guidance on how to avoid the error. The research is based on an experience with the hospice sector of the health care industry

Product-Market Strategies Among Development Firms

This study reviews important real estate and strategic management literature to examine the strategies that can help real estate development organizations improve performance and increase their chances of long-term survival. The study tests the applicability of a widely accepted strategy model, the Miles and Snow typology, to real estate firms. This model suggests that several product-market strategies can yield superior performance. While our findings generally support this model, one of Miles and Snow's strategic types outperforms the others for multifamily developers in this sample.

Information technology investments in purchasing: an empirical investigation of communications, relationship and performance outcomes

The present study draws on the information technology (IT), marketing, purchasing, and organization literatures to develop an integrated model of the antecedents and outcomes of IT investments in the context of organizational purchasing. We examine the role that IT investments play in enacting collaborative communications strategies, fostering improvements in interfirm relationships, and enhancing purchasing performance. Together, these factors comprise elements of our conceptual model that depicts the motivations for investing in IT and the underlying process by which IT influences purchasing performance. Our model draws on and extends the marketing communications literature to integrate two complementary views of how IT may influence performance. The first reflects the prevailing perspective from the IT literature, which views this technology as the locomotive that drives performance and productivity. The second, emerging view suggests that this technology can also be used to foster improved interfirm relationships. We present the results of an empirical analysis that tested our conceptual framework and found that IT indirectly effects performance, i.e., its effect is fully mediated by relationship quality.Information technology Collaborative communication Purchasing Performance Interfirm relationships