Showing posts with label McKinsey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label McKinsey. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Travel Business - From Channel to Customer Focus


It’s among the biggest e-commerce markets, and maybe its most turbulent. To compete, players must define their place in travel’s next wave.

FEBRUARY 2012 • Robert Carey, David Kang, and Michael Zea
Source: Travel, Transport, & Logistics Practice
A decade after the Internet spurred airlines, hotels, and other travel players to sell directly to customers, the sector’s ecosystem is fracturing. Companies are abandoning the systems that are supposed to provide consumers with one-stop shops to book flights, accommodations, and other services. Lawsuits are being filed. And the very people whose interests should be paramount—customers—are being caught in the cross fire. That’s giving newcomers a chance to swoop into a sector that today boasts annual online sales of almost $100 billion, around a third of all global e-commerce activity.
This turbulence isn’t a bad thing: the travel sector has reached the next phase in its evolution, and some creative destruction is necessary. In fact, companies are already investing billions of dollars in the next wave of travel e-commerce, from revamping Web sites to changing the technology infrastructure. Consolidation is also creating opportunities that didn’t exist before. But the critical question is whether the sector’s players can find a sustainable path forward before new rivals blaze the trail for them. To name just two candidates: Google recently paid $700 million for ITA Software, whose algorithms form the backbone of 65 percent of flight sales by carriers, while Apple has filed a series of patents for a mobile-device application called iTravel.
The bottom line is that travel suppliers, aggregators, and service providers each need to define the sector’s next wave quickly. We suggest that industry incumbents move away from a model focused almost exclusively on reducing channel costs and toward one that seeks to maximize returns by best serving customer needs. And the incumbents must understand that the customer experience not only begins before the time of sale—and even before the time of search—but also extends well after purchase and travel. The changes we recommend don’t require reinventing the wheel: many solutions already exist, but the sector’s myopic focus on costs rather than returns prevents their implementation. Balanced business models that give all value-adding players a seat at the table are what’s needed.
A troubled history
For a long time, suppliers in the travel sector regarded themselves as service providers and let distributors handle the technology-intensive process of actually selling airline seats or hotel rooms. The airlines facilitated this approach in the 1960s by creating global distribution systems such as Apollo and Sabre—used by travel agents to search inventory across the world—only to spin them off in the late 1990s, when cash got tight and valuations looked rich.
As with many other sectors, the Internet’s arrival changed everything. Online travel booking took off as aggregator sites, such as Expedia, began to give consumers a one-stop shop, in return demanding commissions that forced airlines and hotel operators to rethink their hands-off strategy. US airlines responded by creating a rival online travel agency, Orbitz, but their return to the distribution business was short lived: as financial pressures on the airlines’ core business continued to build, they spun off Orbitz. Recognizing the low-cost direct sales model offered by the Web, the airlines set about redirecting shoppers from aggregators’ sites to their own.
American Airlines (AA), for example, withdrew inventory from Orbitz in late 2010; in solidarity with Orbitz, Expedia fired back by removing AA’s listings (the airline is now back on both sites). Enterprise Rent-A-Car also left Orbitz, citing high costs, while US Airways piled onto AA’s disputes by filing suit against Sabre on antitrust grounds. Such disputes are common whenever industries confront the problem of who owns the content and who owns the customer: cable television companies, for example, regularly battle networks over channel-access issues, and insurers have created their own Internet portals to combat the brokers’ entrenched power.
The travel sector’s problem, however, is that the underlying model is fracturing. Traditional travel agencies now tend to tailor their services to business travelers, rather than provide options and products for a broad set of customer segments. Suppliers are making huge investments to lure customers to their direct channels, inadvertently reducing return on investment (ROI) by lifting costs with little immediate increase in revenue. Online aggregators are not only pushing suppliers out and undermining their one-stop-shop proposition, but also digging their heels into a format that emphasizes price as the primary product differentiator. Fundamentally, and most damagingly, consumers increasingly find that they don’t have what they really want: all travel options at their disposal in one place. If this problem persists, they will become more willing to consider superior alternatives.
The path ahead
So what should be done? We have identified four imperatives for travel companies: making customers the strategic focus, using data to understand them, serving them better through partnerships, and providing the best end-to-end experience to promote both sales and ongoing loyalty.
1. Focus on customers, not channels
The travel sector’s approach for two decades has been to push customers toward lower-cost yet more uniform distribution channels. We believe this is the wrong response to a growing mandate for product differentiation: while some customers value price above all else, that attitude is far from universal. Travelers differ in clear ways when it comes to their requirements—both in their traveling needs (which inform product design) and their shopping needs1 (which inform merchandising design and are relevant for distribution). Suppliers should shift from a business-to-business, channel-centric approach to a decidedly customer-centric one: the overarching goal should be to win customers, not to fight a zero-sum game with intermediaries (for more on how to win customers, see the below interactive exhibit, “Understanding travel’s core customers”).
Understanding travel’s core customers
Suppliers should address a variety of wants and needs.
Launch Interactive
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In an ideal world, suppliers would tailor services to each individual. Reality makes that goal almost impossible to achieve, but travel companies can and should craft focused solutions for a range of broad customer segments. Price-driven leisure travelers, for instance, are drawn to transparency and comparability above all else, shopping at an average of three to four Web sites before making a purchase. So why don’t airlines, hotels, and car-rental companies bring price comparability to their own sites? This is exactly the model adopted by US insurance companies that quote competitors’ prices alongside their own. While there is some risk of customer defection—especially among price-focused travelers—that’s mitigated by the fact that this approach helps earn customer trust and draws valuable insights (about consumer preferences and behavior) that enable more effective merchandising.
Customers in another segment—unmanaged business travelers—are too small to justify the expensive services of large travel-management companies. However, less costly and more efficient technologies make it easier to service this “long tail” of corporate travelers, and suppliers and travel-management companies alike recognize the potential ROI of moving them to online channels. Unmanaged business travelers seek less expensive versions of the services received by larger accounts, such as expense-management tools, profile management, and company loyalty programs. Meeting this demand will be complicated, but in industries such as banking and telecommunications we see a potential answer by combining a customized product offering with a different sales model. Consortiums and partnerships are likely to be the key to success—for example, imagine deploying a sales force to sell airline product bundles to small- and medium-sized businesses, empowered by the latest external advances in tracking and reporting tools.
A channel-based mind-set limits the willingness of players, particularly suppliers, to make such moves. Instead, they tend to focus on market share targets for channels (and attempt to achieve these targets with initiatives such as Web site overhauls), without considering what it takes to shift preferences by consumer segment. New capabilities, not cosmetic changes, are what are really needed. Focusing on customer-based ROI rather than on channel targets forces executives to ask themselves how much they are going to invest—in which capabilities and targeting which customer shopping needs—to produce which results.
2. Win in the era of ‘big data’
Travel companies have access to mind-boggling customer data: everything from basic personal information to preferred airline seats, in-flight-entertainment preferences, meals at hotels, and credit card usage. They have the means to paint detailed pictures to drive marketing initiatives that more deeply engage customers, yet few—if any—of them truly maximize the potential of the data at their disposal. There’s no doubt that the synthesis of sales, pricing and revenue management, loyalty, and IT required to deliver on data’s promises is daunting. But there’s equally no doubt that companies from outside the travel sector specifically tooled to make the most of data are going to figure things out, enter the market, and try to steal customers.
Amazon.com, for example, became the thorn in the side of every bookseller—and, eventually, every retailer—by mining data to craft individualized customer experiences full of conversion-ready streams of recommendations. Amazon is notably absent from travel, at least for now. Google, however, has tens of billions of dollars in cash reserves and hundreds of employees whose job description is data mining. And its acquisition of ITA, a critical airfare search provider, already allows Google to provide users with instant travel itineraries and links to purchase (to see it in action, simply Google “NYC to LAX”).
Meanwhile, suppliers are moving slowly. British Airways recently announced that it would equip flight attendants with iPads rather than paper manifests. This provides a way to capture and use unprecedented levels of customer data, but this capability is only a small step forward—in many ways, incumbents remain squarely on the back foot in the emerging era of big data. It’s not too late: suppliers have a wealth of information and resources they could use to test new ideas. But they need to ask themselves which data they could be collecting, which existing data are not being mobilized, and which capabilities they should be building (or partnering to acquire) to compete on the big data battlefront.2
3. Unlock the power of partnerships
Imagine if you could type (or speak) the following instruction into your smartphone: “Book my usual flights from Dallas to New York, out Monday and back Wednesday, usual hotel, rental car”—and quickly receive an itinerary compliant with your corporate travel policies. What would it take to achieve that? We see far too many travel companies seeking to undertake local, discrete tasks well and not simultaneously thinking broadly about the kinds of solutions that really engage and stimulate customers. Considering a customer’s mind-set and thinking more creatively about products and services should be a priority, and that may require working with, as well as against, competitors. One good example of this approach is the recently launched hotel search and booking site, RoomKey.com, founded by Marriott International, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Corporation, InterContinental Hotels Group, Choice Hotels International, and Wyndham Hotel Group.
In the world of consumer packaged goods, we’ve seen such partnerships take off: retailers and manufacturers now share unprecedented levels of information across their supply chains, enabling far more effective merchandising decisions and physical-distribution and logistics outcomes. Yet the most public dispute in travel—among AA, Expedia, and Orbitz—is the equivalent of a consumer-packaged-goods company pulling its products from a retailer’s shelves: it benefits no one.
Our point here is twofold. First, creating new technologies is not necessarily the answer to all the challenges in travel today; indeed, the technical capacity to deliver what consumers need arguably exists already, dispersed in pockets across a dysfunctional ecosystem. Second, the potential of partnerships—lateral (supplier–supplier), vertical (supplier–aggregator–provider), or with companies beyond the travel sector—remains to be unlocked. Succeeding here may be more about identifying companies with similar interests and synergistic capabilities than about throwing new money and new technology after problems rooted in structural issues of coordination.
4. Master the entire customer experience
Selling a product isn’t the beginning of a company’s relationship with customers; that starts when they first become aware of its brand. Equally, the relationship doesn’t end at the point of sale, because every interaction with customers is an opportunity to foster their loyalty or lose their future business.3 Customer solutions in the travel industry often span multiple players, providing each with an opportunity to showcase its strengths and make a case for becoming a traveler’s favorite. Some companies are actively seeking to forge tighter bonds with customers: for example, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines will soon launch a service that allows its passengers use their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles to choose seatmates on upcoming flights. Malaysia Airlines is releasing a Facebook service that lets travelers check if friends are on their same flight or headed to their same destination. Like British Airways’ use of the iPad, these innovations deploy technology to shape the customer experience, not just to conduct booking and customer service transactions.
A critical prerequisite for influencing the customer experience is the dissolution of organizational barriers—not only budgets and planning processes but also ownership of information—to gain a comprehensive view of the customer journey. There should be a single customer databank, not separate ones for information on loyalty, transactions, and pricing. And to make the customer-centric approach a reality, unprecedented levels of coordination among multiple business units (including those responsible for loyalty programs, pricing, sales, marketing, and information technology) are also required. Far too few companies in the travel sector have taken the steps needed to achieve this level of unification.
The digital revolution has upended business as usual in almost all industries, and travel is no exception. Consumers are empowered by information: they have near-instant access to their flight, hotel, and car-rental options; virtual price transparency; and the ability to play suppliers off against one another. The game is now about delivering a superior customer experience. If players can do that, the investment returns will follow.
About the Authors
Robert Carey is an associate principal in McKinsey’s Atlanta office, where David Kang is a consultant; Michael Zea is a principal in the Stamford office.

The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of Andrew Curley, Alex Dichter, and Bryan Hancock to the development of this article.

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Thursday, December 1, 2011

Inside P&G’s digital revolution


CEO Robert McDonald wants to make the consumer goods giant the world’s most technologically enabled company. Here’s how.

NOVEMBER 2011
Robert McDonald is a CEO on a mission: to make Procter & Gamble the most technologically enabled business in the world. To get there, the 31-year company veteran and former US Army captain is overseeing the large-scale application of digital technology and advanced analytics across every aspect of P&G’s operations and activities—from the way the consumer goods giant creates molecules in its R&D labs to how it maintains relationships with retailers, manufactures products, builds brands, and interacts with customers. The prize: better innovation, higher productivity, lower costs, and the promise of faster growth.

McKinsey’s Michael Chui and Thomas Fleming recently sat down with McDonald at P&G’s Cincinnati headquarters to talk about the nature and progress of the company’s digitization initiative, as well as its implications for P&G’s people and culture. An edited summary of the interview follows.
In the accompanying sidebar “‘My leadership philosophy’,” McDonald reflects on how his experiences as a US Army Airborne Ranger inform his approach to leading P&G.
Real-time insights
Our purpose at P&G is to touch and improve lives; everything we do is in that context. With digital technology, it’s now possible to have a one-on-one relationship with every consumer in the world. The more intimate the relationship, the more indispensable it becomes. We want to be the company that creates those indispensable relationships with our brands, and digital technology enables this.
One way is through consumer feedback. In 1984, when I was the Tide brand manager, I would get a cassette tape of consumer comments from the 1-800 line and listen to them in the car on the way home. Then, back at the office, I’d read and react to the letters we’d received. Today that’s obviously not sufficient—you’ve got blogs, tweets, all kinds of things.
And so we’ve developed something called “consumer pulse,” which uses Bayesian analysis to scan the universe of comments, categorize them by individual brand, and then put them on the screen of the relevant individual. I personally see the comments about the P&G brand. This allows for real-time reaction to what’s going on in the marketplace, because we know that if something happens in a blog and you don’t react immediately—or, worse, you don’t know about it—it could spin out of control by the time you get involved. The technology also lets us improve things that are working. For example, we’re rolling out a product called Downy Unstopables, a fragrance addition you can add to your wash, and the real-time comments from consumers about the product’s characteristics are helping us figure out how best to join in the discussion through our marketing efforts.
From factory to shelf
From an operational standpoint, we also believe that to be successful we’ve got to continue to improve productivity, and being digitally enabled allows for that as well. So we’re digitizing our operations everywhere—from our manufacturing plants to the stores where consumers purchase our products. We believe digitization represents a source of competitive advantage.

In our manufacturing plants, for example, we have systems that allow people to use iPads to download data off the production line in real time and communicate that to a place where we roll the data up. We’re not there yet, but we envision a system where I could literally see, on my laptop, any product at any moment as it goes through the manufacturing line of any one of our plants. And what I’d love to be able to do is see the costs of that product at the same time. It’s challenging because accounting systems aren’t designed today for operations—they tend to look backward—but we’re working on integrating our operational system with the financial system to move in that direction.
In transport and logistics, we created a digitally enhanced operational program we call Control Tower that lets us see all the transportation we’re doing: inbound, outbound, raw materials, finished product. We’re probably the second- or third-largest user of trucks in the United States, and through this technology we’ve been able to reduce “deadhead” movement1 by about 15 percent. This reduces costs and carbon monoxide. In circumstances where we use distributors, a similar interface, called Distributor Connect, lets us link directly with them and help them run their business. This benefits all of us by improving service and reducing inventory across the supply chain.
We want to be digitally connected to retailers too. For example, we use and support GDSN,2 which is basically a standardized data warehouse that allows us to do commerce with our retail partners in a totally automated way, with no human intervention. The industry association GS1 did a study a few years ago that found that 70 percent of orders between retailers and suppliers had errors. But if everyone used a common data warehouse like GDSN—where the data are kept dynamically correct—that number goes down to virtually zero, and it saves millions of dollars in doing commerce together.
Another thing we do is to use our scale to bring state-of-the-art technology to retailers that otherwise can’t afford it. Imagine a small store in the Philippines, for example—a country where I used to live. We can provide sophisticated ordering applications to help people there run their businesses better than they would be able to otherwise. We have mobile-phone applications that allow retailers to order from us wirelessly or, if they don’t have a wireless capability, to order when they go back to their office and set the phone in a base. It’s very easy to use.
We also have performance standards that retailers in developing markets can visualize on their phones. For example, we believe you should arrange your store in a certain way to maximize consumer sales. If you have a store that partners with P&G on this, you can call up the performance standards on your phone, hold it up, look around your store, and compare it with what you see. Eventually, I want to be able to take a picture of the shelf, have it digitally compared, and then automatically send action steps back to the retailer to help rearrange the shelf for maximum consumer sales. That’s where we’re going.
In fact, some applications like these will probably come back to the developed world as improvements because they’ll be simpler—there’s no question that progress will be accelerated by the leapfrogging of technology. Inevitably, everything’s got to be usable on the smallest, cheapest device possible because that’s what’s going to get the broadest distribution in a developing market.
Digitizing innovation
Data modeling, simulation, and other digital tools are reshaping how we innovate. The way we used to do innovation research required a lot of work and time setting up consumer panels—you need the right distribution of races, ages, and so forth to make them representative. Now, with the amount of data we have available, the “n” is so large that by definition we can immediately have a representative group.
When you design a disposable diaper the traditional way, for example, by the time you get to the point where you make a prototype, the prototype itself has cost thousands of dollars, if not more, and it was all made by hand. Now, using modeling and simulation, you can go through thousands of iterations in seconds. The key is that you’ve got to have the data. So the advantage for P&G is our scale. We have operations in around 80 countries, our products are sold in almost every country, and we touch more than four billion consumers every day. Imagine all those data points. We can literally fit any virtual diaper to any baby anywhere in the world.
We’re even digitizing the creation of molecules. For example, in the research and development for our new dishwashing liquid, we used modeling to predict how moisture would excite various fragrance molecules so that throughout the dishwashing process you get the right fragrance notes at the right time. We did that all virtually.
I think that digital technology will even help us identify new service components to our consumer products that wouldn’t otherwise be immediately obvious. For example, say you’re a consumer concerned about the environment. You go to one of our packages and photograph the QR3 code. We then could download for you all the ingredients in the product and their biodegradability—or tell you where the product was produced, the quality of the water, or how we’ve reduced carbon emissions in the plant. We can’t do that today, but it’s an aspiration.
Improve data at the source
P&G employees have a “cockpit” interface on their computers that they help design. It has certain tolerances for the metrics that are important to them. When we go outside those tolerances, either negatively or positively, an alarm goes off. Then we can click down and understand what’s going on and react to it, because we feel that time compression—or operating in real time—is a competitive advantage.
Similarly, every Monday morning we have a meeting with our leadership team all over the world—physically and virtually—where we review the business for the previous week and click down on all this data. And everyone signs up for the principles behind this—it’s real time and continuous; it gives us the ability to click down to find causality, make decisions, and then move on.
As we apply those principles each week, the challenge becomes the data source. I’ll use the Philippines again as an example. If a company we buy syndicated data from goes into stores in the Philippines once every two months and does a handheld questionnaire audit, then it doesn’t matter if we meet every Monday or not. Our data’s not going to be very good. So we’ve been working with all our data partners to help them understand that our need is for real-time data. For us it’s really constraint theory—understanding where the constraint in our data is and pushing it all the way to the data source. Then, change the data source.
For companies like ours that rely on external data partners, getting the data becomes part of the currency for the relationship. When we do joint business planning with retailers, for example, we have a scorecard, and the algorithm is all about value creation. Getting data becomes a big part of the value for us, and it’s a big part of how we work together. We have analytic capabilities that many retailers don’t have, so often we can use the data to help them decide how to merchandise or market their business in a positive way.
It would be heretical in this company to say that data are more valuable than a brand, but it’s the data sources that help create the brand and keep it dynamic. So those data sources are incredibly important. Therefore, we go to the extreme to protect whatever consumer data we get. It’s a board-level enterprise risk-management issue for us. We have very clear firewalls between one retailer and another and strict policies—for example, about how long a “cooling off” period you need to have when working on projects with different retailers. All of this comes with our strategy of being the most digitally enabled company in the world. We can’t do that without being an industry leader on data security and privacy.
The digital workforce
When I started with P&G, in 1980, almost nothing was digital. Back then, our Management Systems Division—as we called it then—had mainframe computers, but our people did more work on phone systems than on computers. And whenever I would get together with them, I would ask, “How many of you have coded BCD?”4 or, “Have you ever done a Monte Carlo simulation?” Nobody would raise a hand. They didn’t have those kinds of skills.
More than two decades later, as vice chairman of global operations, I and my colleague Filippo Passerini, who today is the CIO of P&G,5 began to put together some very clear strategies to hire people with different skills. We needed people with backgrounds in computer modeling and simulation. We wanted to find people who had true mastery in computer science, from the basics of coding to advanced programing. When you’ve actually done a simulation, you truly realize the importance of the data; it’s classic “garbage in, garbage out.”
We’ve come a long way toward meeting our goals today, but we still have further to go. For example, we established a baseline digital-skills inventory that’s tailored to every level of advancement in the organization. We have a training facility to make sure that if you’re in a particular area, you’re competent on the systems for that area. This goes for senior managers too; we have an area in the facility where we can pull the curtains, so to speak, and work with senior managers privately so we don’t embarrass anyone. But we’ve got to have the standards for everyone because otherwise we’ll dumb the organization down to the lowest common denominator.
Ultimately, though, P&G has been pretty good about hiring for analytical thinking. We hire very good people and then train them. I remember the day I joined the company and one of the managers a few levels up said, “Throw away your MBA textbooks and we’ll teach you; we’ll give you another MBA.” And I think that’s still practical and relevant today. Nonetheless, analytical-thinking skills have become even more important to this company. We need to come up with the ideas to innovate, and those innovations are always informed by data.

About the Authors
Michael Chui is a senior fellow of the McKinsey Global Institute and is based in McKinsey’s San Francisco office; Tom Fleming is a member of McKinsey Publishing and is based in the Chicago office.
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Saturday, October 29, 2011

In less than 20 years, the Internet has transformed the way we shop, socialize, and communicate. What’s next?


Audio interview with Mark Helprin
By Mark Helprin
11 November 2009
Writer and novelist Mark Helprin drew the ire of hundreds of thousands of readers when he argued for the extension of copyright laws in a New York Times op-ed article two years ago. His recent book, Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto, fleshes out his key arguments in defense of authors’ rights.
Creative Commons: Enabling the next level of innovation
By Joi Ito
30 October 2009
Here’s a thought experiment: try to imagine what it would have been like to create Google before the era of the Internet and open standards. You would probably have had to pay millions of dollars to create the necessary software on a proprietary operating system.
Zipcar: selling cars, one ride at a time
By Scott Griffith
27 October 2009
Technologies such as high-speed Internet, mobile broadband and GPS are enabling new ways of providing value to customers. In this article, Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar, describes the relationship between technology and his company’s innovative business model.
Using technology to improve workforce collaboration
By James Manyika, Kara Sprague and Lareina Yee
27 October 2009
Knowledge workers fuel innovation and growth, yet the nature of knowledge work remains poorly understood—as do the ways to improve its effectiveness. The heart of what knowledge workers do on the job is collaborate, which in the broadest terms means they interact to solve problems, serve customers, engage with partners, and nurture new ideas.
Investigative reporting in the Web era
By Paul Steiger
14 October 2009
On Sunday, July 12, 2009, the Los Angeles Times published on its front page and on four full inside pages an article headed, “Problem nurses stay on job as patients suffer”. Of the many extraordinary things about this story, one stands out: it was written and principally reported by two reporters, Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, who do not work for the Times. They work at ProPublica, a New York–based nonprofit and nonpartisan team of investigative journalists founded in 2008 and funded by philanthropy, including major support from the Sandler Foundation.
Crossing the burning bridge
By Tom Curley
14 October 2009
The marketplace for news content is growing. More people in more places seek out news more often than ever. Yet we, the creators of that content, don’t get paid appropriately for our hard work and the risks we take.
Transparency is the new marketing
By Clay Shirky
26 February 2009
When organizations think about strategy, it’s often in the context of their own objectives. But when the surrounding reality changes—as it is doing in the media landscape—both strategy and goals need to adjust.
Citizen journalists: Online Paul Reveres
By Arianna Huffington
26 February 2009
At the moment, all the talk in media circles is about the death of newspapers. These obituaries strike me as extremely premature.
Participatory technocracy
By Craig Newmark
26 February 2009
Americans are increasingly using the Internet to participate directly in democracy. And over the next 20 years, our governance will include forms of direct democracy that have never before been possible.
The collaborative company
By Yochai Benkler
26 February 2009
“Peer production”—large-scale distributed action by many individuals—is transitioning from a curiosity to a general phenomenon.
Beyond the Sloan Age
By Jacques Bughin, James Manyika, and Roger Roberts
26 February 2009
Until recently, the core principles of management had hardly changed since the innovations conceived by former General Motors chairman Alfred Sloan. Over the last decade, however, the stable environment in which companies have flourished has been changed by technological innovations, globalization, and continued specialization.
And now from our readers
By Thomas L. Doorley, III
26 February 2009
As the global economic slowdown hits government revenues hard, the natural tendency will be to seek fresh sources of revenue such as higher sales taxes. Look out, Internet!
Get ready for a new economic era
By Paul Saffo
26 February 2009
The consumer economy that was born in the 1950s is lurching to an end, and a new “creator economy” is emerging. This shift represents the third economic turning in just over a century. A look back at its antecedents reveals much about what to expect.
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