All articles by Tim Laseter

Keeping up with the growing volume of e-commerce will require delivery companies to disrupt their long-standing business model.

As Amazon and Walmart disrupt the grocery industry, smart retailers can compete by plying their wares in a technologically enabled way.

You can identify early signs of failure or success from a prospective CEO’s behavior.

To serve online shoppers effectively, companies need to make complex trade-offs among speed, variety, and convenience.

To stave off online competitors, supermarkets should work with their suppliers and get back to personalized service.

Future leaders will succeed by being entrepreneurial and by rethinking the balance between financial and social goals.

Excitement about any new technology should be balanced with the application of time-tested forecasting tools.

By linking customers and capabilities, companies can generate the momentum for sustainable growth.

In the face of disruptive change, higher education needs a new, more innovative business model.

Decision makers struggling with uncertainty can choose from a trio of probabilistic models to match the type of risks they face.

Emulating the methods used to transform production quality could clean up the Internet — and might even pay for itself.

The next wave of online business models must focus narrowly, rather than blindly pursuing scale.

For consumer durables, environmental sustainability starts with discarding conventional wisdom.

How intelligent forecasting can lead to better decision making.

Though often missing, a formal operations strategy can guide the crucial decisions that build competitive advantage.

Companies and industries are often driven by implicit formulas. Questioning their validity can lead to breakthroughs.

When you adapt your sourcing strategy to a more diverse world, everybody benefits.

To consistently turn out profitable new offerings, companies must integrate three distinct innovation portfolios.

Firsthand observation on the front lines can offer the critical insights that make for inspired — and inspiring — leadership.

How ecommerce, globalization, and outsourcing, are changing the production and distribution of products and services.

Smaller bets can make the next technological boom more productive and enduring.

Organizational network analysis is helping companies share knowledge worldwide, one natural broker at a time.

Internet retailers are finally learning why books and luggage make money online — while shoes and toys don’t.

The Nobel Prize–winning German economist says understanding hindsight will improve foresight.

Balancing relationship building and opportunism leads to a strategy for all seasons.

Gung ho for going global? Make sure to look beyond labor costs.

A new form of decision analysis is helping executives reevaluate risk management.

Not all products are created equal, so supplier integration schemes must be flexible.

And what other e-tailers might learn from make-to-order pioneers.

Business model innovation is overrated. Customizing conventional services online offers the surer path.

Once used largely for nonessential, tactical activities, partnering now covers core operations, transforming entire industries.

Purchasing can deliver ongoing benefits, but only if it cycles through a series of linked disciplines.

Marketers worry about top-line revenue, while operations people fret about cost. Differentiated Service Policies allow them to coexist.

Business-to-business e-commerce is fraught with peril for buyers and sellers alike. An exclusive survey of 1,800 e-Marketplaces shows what it takes to win.

"Common-goods" e-tailers are collapsing because they ignored an iron law of retailing: New formats win only by offering better prices, not better service.

E-tail intermediaries may do what Kozmo and Webvan could not.

Online's biggest retailer aims to serve the offline retailers it once threatened. The shift may be Amazon's best hope for prosperity.

Internet auctions create losers as well as winners. Game theory shows companies how to improve their chances.

Once considered the domain of tacticians, operations now resides at the forefront of business strategy. Consider the saga of Web-based delivery services.

Is Urbanfetch's demise a harbinger of doom for other Web-based delivery services? Maybe not, depending on their willingness to change and investors' willingness to wait.

Investors have risked billions on Webvan, Urbanfetch, and other same-day transporters. The economics, though, show they won't deliver for long.

The inefficient, tradition-bound, $4 billion trade-book industry is using the Internet to unlock an additional $2 billion-plus.

At the heart of best practice in purchasing is a set of skills. One of the most important is the one that enables managers to understand what determines cost.

This third article in a series on balanced purchasing focuses on target costing and recommends a five-step process to optimize the cost of product designs still in development. A hypothetical development effort for a sports watch is used to demonstrate the process. If carried out properly and at the right level of detail, target costing can insure competitiveness without jeopardizing supplier cooperation.

Size comes in three flavors — scale, scope, and network. Choose wisely from the menu.

Answer: When companies take to heart its three underlying principles.