Threats to Bill Gates and the internet
Can Microsoft maintain its dominance of the world computer market? Is there a long term future for the Internet unless it falls into the hands of a small group of firms?
Learning to define the core business
Ted Levitt’s challenge to “define what business you are in” was based in a fundamental confusion between industries and markets.
Privatised utility
A modest proposal for the founding of the “customer corporation” in utility industries.
The Customer Corporation
The stakeholding view of the nature and purposes of corporations applies most forcefully to monopoly public utilities. This essay analyses some of the problems of utility regulation and proposes a stakeholding alternative.
In out of the cold
Economists have walked out into the cold as far as business strategy is concerned. Slowly, they are starting to return.
The Structure of Strategy (Business Strategy Review 1993)
"The Structure of Strategy" is a summary of parts of my book, "The Foundations of Corporate Success", and was reprinted in "The Business of Economics"
Adding Value: April 1993
There are four perspectives on corporate performance and four ways of measuring capital costs. But in the long run, all these ways of measuring financial performance are equivalent. The different vantage points differ only in their timing.
The Economics of Mutuality
Much business is organized by mutual firms. My purpose here is to present a general economic framework for understanding the objectives of such businesses, and to identify some of the distinctive contributions which mutual organizations make, and the distinctive problems which they face.
Economics and Business: 1990
Economics has never been more relevant to business problems. The two key groups of question of interest to businessmen - the internal organization of the firm and its relationship between its suppliers and customers, and the nature of strategic interactions between small groups of firms - are clearly on the agenda of modern economics in a manner which has not been true for most of the last century.