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Idea 33  -  Market segmentation There's much blog-talk of the death of the mass market these days. In which case, it has been a long time a-dying. The mass media, cardiograms of the mass market, have been losing viewers and readers since the 1970s - at least in the US, where the mass market was invented. It's true, none the less, that a proliferation of new media has forced the pace of its decline in recent years. And the zoom factor of market segmentation, the opposite of mass marketing, has been closing in on individual consumers with the persistence of a spy satellite. The mass market was created by American companies like Sears Roebuck, DuPont and General Electric, hand in hand with the march of the railroads and the telegraph. It grew rapidly between the 1880s and the 1920s. Mass marketing, on the other hand, only got into its stride from 1920 onwards with the spread of 'sound-receiving devices' - the radio. Television arrived shortly before the Second!

Idea 32  -  Management by objectives Management by objectives is such a classic principle that many who couldn't care less about business will still recognize the phrase. It was introduced to the language by that most enduring of classic business thinkers, Peter Drucker, in his milestone 1954 work, The Practice of Management. Management by objectives (MBO) is about making sure that you can see the wood for the trees. Drucker noticed that managers could get stuck in what he called an 'activity trap', getting so wrapped up in their daily tasks that they overlooked the reasons why they were doing them. MBO calls for a focus, not on activities, but on results. Which is why it's sometimes called management by results. Drucker tells us that setting objectives is the first of the five essential operations for managers. (The others are to organize, to motivate and communicate, to measure and, finally, to develop people - including themselves.) One of the keys to MB

Idea 31  -  Loyalty Management consultants devote many long hours, days and months hunting the snark - hoping for a better management idea, an undiscovered causal link between how businesses do what they do and the size of the bottom line. Frederick F. Reichheld and his colleagues at Bain &: Company came up with a winner when they identified close connections between customer retention, growth and profits. They called it 'loyalty' and discovered that, in the best-performing companies, it was intertwined with employee and investor loyalty. Each one reinforced the others. All those loyalty and rewards cards you don't know where to keep, from shops you can't remember visiting? Blame Reichheld. Loyalty programmes are nothing new, but his 1996 book, The Loyalty Effect, made them a competitive must-have as companies scrambled to put his ideas to work and retain their best customers. For those who thought that loyalty had died along with chastity and good manners,

Idea 30  -  The long tail The Internet changes everything, they used to say in the 1990s. That was just before they discovered that it didn't. But it changes quite a lot of things and one of them - according to the long tail theory - is the ability, over time, to make money out of very small niches. There was a time when the profitable niche was commonplace, but the age of mass production and mass marketing has crowded it out, most notably in consumer markets. Consolidation has produced powerful retailers. They choose to stock only those items that sell in large numbers, and have reduced the variety of their ranges accordingly. Many small producers have fallen by the wayside in the process. This phenomenon has been especially visible in the media and entertainment industries - in book and music publishing and in film production. We live in the world of the bestseller, the blockbuster, the hit. The argument of the long tail is that, in an Internet world, niche product

Idea 29  -  The learning organization The world is speeding up, as it gets more wired and as people get more demanding - I want exactly what I want, and I want it now. But I might want something different tomorrow. As markets fragment and change accelerates, business has to keep up or die. That's why the continuous improvement that started on the factory floor is now reflected in the notion of continuous change, company wide. The ability to rethink, continually, your purpose and methods is the most important single source of competitive advantage, says Dutch writer and ex-corporate planner Arie de Geus. But individuals can only change through learning, which makes learning the capital of the future. Hence the evolution of the 'learning organization', which is not entirely the same as one that trains its people well - though it does that too. The organization itself learns and keeps learning, over and above its individuals. MIT lecturer Peter Senge has made much o