“Bain’s Global 2007 Management Tools and Trends Survey”
Strategy & Leadership
2007, Vol, 35, Issue 5, pp. 9-16
Since 1993, Bain & Company has surveyed executives around the world about the management tools they use and how effectively those tools have performed. The survey focuses on 25 tools.
This year, the most commonly-used tools are Strategic Planning (used by 88% of companies), Customer Relationship Management (used by 84% of companies), Customer Segmentation (used by 82% of companies), Benchmarking (used by 81% of companies), Mission and Vision Statements (used by 79% of companies) and Core Competencies (used by 79% of companies).
For the rest of the 25 tools, the percentages were: Outsourcing (77%), Business Process Reengineering (69%), Scenario and Contingency Planning (69%), Knowledge Management (69%), Strategic Alliances (68%), Balanced Scorecard (66%), Supply Chain Management (66%), Growth Strategy Tools (65%), Total quality Management (64%), Shared Service Centers (55%), Lean Operations (54%), Collaborative Innovation (53%), Loyalty Management Tools (51%), Mergers and Acquisitions (50%), Six Sigma (40%), Offshoring (37%), Consumer Ethnography (35%), Corporate Blogs (30%), and RFID (radio frequency identification devices, 23%).
The top 10 tools in terms of satisfaction with the tool were: Strategic Planning, Customer Segmentation, Mergers and Acquisitions, Customer Relationship Management, Core Competencies, Benchmarking, Total Quality Management, Mission and Vision Statements, Strategic Alliances, and Business Process Reengineering. However, the differences between the “top” satisfaction tools and the others were not especially large. On a 5-point scale, the top 10 ranges from scores of 3.77 to 3.93. The rest ranged from 3.55 to 3.75
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