Research

Creating a great product or service is just the first step on a company's road to success. It's also necessary for your potential customers to know about that great product or service. So how does a company go about developing a successful customer focus strategy?

Last week's job growth report indicated that some 89,000 jobs were added to the economy nationally in August, and another 110,000 in September. That means the average monthly job growth for 2007 will hover around 125,000 per month — down from the 160,000 average in 2006 and 175,000 in 2005.

PetSmart was designed to be a category killer with dominant prices and dominant variety when it was founded in the late 1980s, and the concept worked well for the company's first decade. But by the late 1990s the company was losing steam.

The tentative contract agreement that assigned a role to the United Auto Workers in managing the healthcare costs of its General Motors members was a turning point in the relationship between business and labor — and a sign of things to come in a global economy.

Computer network problems cost American businesses $100 billion each year.

The ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite claims an impressive 95 percent market share. Yet since 2000, a free suite of software that includes spreadsheet and word processing programs similar to Excel and Word has evolved.

What will a typical supply management organization look like in 10 years? It's hard to say for sure, but it likely will be complex, high-tech, supplier network-driven, and spread out across the globe.

Climate change will cost us, and the bill is likely to be big, according to the recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Although the world economy is growing and markets in the United States have shown remarkable resilience, the U.S. economy has entered a period of great uncertainty, according to two of the country's leading economic forecasters. David A.

Next year will be marked by uncertainty, and that bodes ill for the Arizona economy. Lee McPheters, professor of economics and director of the JPMorgan Chase Economic Outlook Center at the W. P. Carey School of Business, and Elliott D. Pollack, President of Elliott D.