CUSTOMERKNOWLEDGE

AND BUSINESSSTRATEGY

The mastery of pattern thinking can lead to dramatic improvements.

By Eric Almquist and Andrew Pierce

As corporations "discovered the customer" in the late 1970s, the marketing

research field promised to connect business strategy to knowledge of the customer marketplace. But marketing research

largely failed to fulfill this promise, partly because it evolved into a field that conducts mostly tactical studies. These

often-narrow studies, based on interviewing, focus groups, and surveys with customers, tend to focus on past or present

customer attitudes and behavior rather than anticipating the future. In general, marketing research is not a field that

holistically links broad customer knowledge to the strategic-planning process.

Although many marketing researchers have training in survey research, social science, and interviewing—all impor-

tant and relevant fields—many have little experience in business disciplines. And the vast majority of marketing

researchers have little experience with strategy development, perhaps the most important discipline in these days of

breathtakingly rapid change in the age of the Internet.

Photo by Bill Miles/The Stock Market

niariieting research 9

E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y

A fundamental disconnect exists between marketingresearch and strategy development relating to the strategiccontext in which research is conducted, and in today's mar-ketplace, the strategic context of marketing research beenchanging more rapidly then ever. With this in mind, theauthors contend that pattern thinking represents a new"sense-and-respond" approach that's effective in character-izing strategic risk and identifying and exploiting new profitopportunities.

Yet an even more fundamental disconnect exists betweenmarketing research and strategy development relating to thestrategic context in which research is conducted. Never has thestrategic context of marketing research been changing morerapidly. Take the electric-power industry; customer research isheavily devoted to customer-satisfaction issues, [ust as the tidalwave of deregulation is speeding toward its markets. Like telecom-munications executives in the 1980s, electric-power executives willbe applauding higher customer-satisfaction scores iust as theirmost profitable customers are cherry-picked away by unregulatedcategory killers. This is a bit analogous to conducting customer-satisfaction research on the Titanic as it embarked on the fatefulvoyage. The risks of missing the strategic context are staggering.

The good news is that strategic context is largely knowable,in fact, strategic-business patterns already occurred and areoccurring, according to the book Profit Patterns: 30 Ways to /Knlicipateand Profit from Strategic Forces Reshaping Your Business, by AdrianSlywotzky, David Morrison, and other colleagues at Boston-basedMercer Management Consulting Inc. The book, which outlines amethod for understanding the strategic context of business deci-sions, explains that the primary task of senior executives seekingsustained value growth can be succinctly described as the man-agement of risk for the shareholders' benefit.

Risk is an essential element of any strategy; take on too littleor too much and the returns aren't there. The business lexicon isfilled with terms that reinforce this connection, such as "bet thecompany," "risk/reward tradeoff," and "calculated risk." In fact,entire industries, representing much of what we know as theinsurance, financial services, and operations consulting sectors,have evolved to help companies manage hazard risk, financialrisk, and operational risk. To enable companies to pool hazardrisk with other firms, insurers created property and casualty,health, and liability insurance. Financial services companieshave developed techniques and financial instruments to helporganizations dampen or hedge against the impact of financialrisk, such as fluctuations in exchange rates or input costs. Andconsulting firms have devised ways for businesses to minimizeinformation, systems, and business process risks—or opera-tional risk—which might include systems failures that interruptthe flow of information within a company.

But these risks pale in comparison to strategic risk, whichcan bring a corporation to its knees, and which must be borne

directly by management and shareholders. The risk is particularlygrave because the typical strategic-planning process Is com-pletely unsuited to uncovering and overcoming strategic risk.Pattern thinking represents a new sense-and-respond approachthat's more effective in characterizing strategic risk and identify-ing and exploiting new profit opportunities.

STRATEGIC RISKStrategic risk is concerned with one overriding question: Can

the firm's business design deliver sustained, above-averagegrowth in shareholder value? This question is equally relevant toestablished companies with historically successful businessmodels, and to start-ups that are making bets on new ones. In aworld in which business designs lose their customer relevanceand profit power more quickly than before, strategic risk is mani-festing itself abruptly and dramatically.

When investors spot strategic risks that threaten a com-pany's health, they react swiftly and decisively, at times, with dev-astating results. As shown in Exhibit I, over the 5-year periodthat ended in May 1999, 10% of Fortune 1000 companies lost—atleast once—a quarter of their shareholder value within onemonth, A Mercer study found that the stock drops almost allwere triggered by reduced quarterly earnings or reducedexpected future earnings. And the maiority—58%—of these earn-ings shortfalls were caused by strategic risk factors such as adrop in customer demand, channels misaligned with customerpriorities, or increased competitive pressure. In addition. 31% ofthe earnings shortfalls were the result of operational risk, and 6%were the resuit of financial risk. Interestingly, traditional hazardrisk triggered none of the stock price drops.

In the future, sophisticated companies will understand theimpact and interrelationship of these four types of risk (hazard,financial, operational, and strategic) and manage them as awhole—a process known as enterprise risk management. At theheart of this discipline, however, is a keen and detailed under-standing of strategic risk, which, while posing the most seriousthreat to a company, can, like the others, be avoided or managedif anticipated.

Mercer research indicates that almost one-third (30%) of thenoted companies with stock-price drops could have avoidedthem with a better understanding of changing customer priori-ties in their marketplaces. A mismatch between an enterprise'scurrent business design and the current strategic landscape ofchanging customer priorities and competitive business designsis at the core of strategic risk. Depending on both the degree ofthat mismatch and the power of competitive business designs,strategic risk can manifest itself in value collapse, value stagna-tion, and polarization.

VALUE COLLAPSEThe firm's shareholder value simply evaporates when weighed

down by low customer relevance and besieged by more nimblecompetitors with better business designs. Mercer research showsan increasing number of companies that lose more than half oftheir value in five years or less (see Exhibit 2 on pg, 12). ServiceMerchandise Company Inc, a Brentwood, Tenn.-based retailerspecializing in jewelry and housewares that had been the nation's

10 Sprini!2000

EXHIBIT 1 Value collapse: The Fortune 1000

25

20

24

Top 100

10

5

0

Over the last five years, 10% of the Fortune 1000 lost more tfian 25% of its sfiaretiolder valuewitfiin a one-monlh period, fvlost of these losses can be attributed to strategic missteps.

11

Competitive | Wrongproducts

Customerlasses

R&Ddelays overrun management

0 0

Foreign High interest Lawsuits Naturaleconomic input rates

issues prices

Demand Merger Pricing Reguiation Supplier Accounting Supplystiorttall problem pressure prcbiems problems ctiain issues

Strategic 58% H Operational 31%

disasters

Hazard 0%

top catalog-showroom seller, lost 80% of its value by seeing theworld too narrowly. As the most successful player in a decliningsegment, it focused on optimizing its current position instead ofmoving its brand decisively into new and growing areas. Otherexamples include Marvel Entertainment Group Inc., a New York-based publisher of comic books, and CML Group, a Chaska, Minn.-based company that designs exercise equipment-

Marvel Entertainment hoped to emulate the Walt Disney Co.by turning its trove of popular comic book characters into block-buster businesses through movies, products, and licensing. Itproved unable to follow up on the success of its relaunch ofSpiderman, and value collapsed, as the company was no longerable to meet its debt service obligations, CML Group lostSt.5 billion by ignoring customers' desires for smaller andcheaper alternatives to its exercise product, the NordicTrack,

VALUE STAGNATIONMore subtle than value collapse, value stagnation is the

absence of any sustained growth in shareholder value. The com-pany, in effect, economically treads water. This phenomenon isparticularly striking when compared to the extraordinary perfor-mance of the stock market as a whoie over the past decade inwhich "holding your own" means losing ground (see Exhibit 3 onpg. 12). Whirlpool Corp., the Benton Harbor, Mich.-based pro-ducer of home appliances, missed the shift in major appliancevalue from products to downstream activities (e.g., financing andservice), ceding a great value creation opportunity to retailerssuch as Sears Roebuck and Co., Circuit City Stores Inc., andBest Buy Co, Inc. Other examples include Newell RubbermaidInc, and U.S. Steel. Newell Rubbermaid, the Freeport, 111,-basedmaker of housewares including Rubbermaid plastic products.

failing to anticipate increasing customer consolidation, founditself unable to pass on cost increases to powerful channel play-ers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel,despite a wrenching overhaul in the 1980s that left it a leanerbusiness with improved products, failed to craft a businessdesign that would overcome the problenns of industry volatilityand cheap foreign competition.

POLARIZATION GAMEBefore, the largest player in an industry was the most valu-

able. That firm moved down the experience curve fastest, leadingto the lowest-cost position, the highest profitability, and thedeepest pockets for ongoing investment. Value proportionalitywas the rule: A company's share of total industry value was indirect proportion to its size.

But over the past couple of decades, the rules have changed:now biggest is not necessarily best. The highest valuations go tocompanies with the most powerful business designs solidly posi-tioned to mine the potential of their industries' "profit zones."where customers allow enterprises to earn returns above the costof capital. But that isn't the only change. In addition, the winningbusiness designs are winning big. In fact, investors reward themwith a disproportionate share of industry value.

We refer to this new disproportionality as "polarization."With polarization, the gold medalist captures the greatest shareof industry value, while the silver medalist—often a strong valuegrowth performer itself—is worth only one-third to one-twenti-eth of the value of the winner. While the silver medal still hasvalue, it represents a disappointing consolation prize (seeExhibit 4 on pg. 12). Pepsi-Cola Co.'s strong value growth wasdwarfed by that of Coca-Cola Co. Why? Because Coke under-

niarketine research I!

EXHIBIT 2 Value collapse: Service Merchandise Co.

$1.2CDEQ

re.sCO

$1.0

$0.8

$0.6

$0.4

$0.2

$0.09/1/93 6/1/94 3/1/95 12/1/95 9/1/96 6/1/97 3/1/98

Source; Metcer Value Growth Database

Value stagnation: Whirlpool Corp.

S&P500

93 94 95 96

Note: Dividends reinvested, total return basis

Source: Mercer Value Growth Database

98

EXHIBIT 4 Polarization

Coke vs. Pepsi

$175

Shareholder value $134 BB

Coke

80 82 84 86 88 90 92 94 96 98

Source: Mercer Value Growth Database

stood that restaurants, vending machines, and internationalexpansion were the profit zones in the beverage industry andmoved aggressively to capture them. Other examples abound:Cisco Systems Inc. vs. Bay Networks Inc., Wal-Mart vs. KmartCorp., Intel Corp, vs. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD|.

The process of polarization typically unfolds in two phases.First, multiple competitors make the investments and businessdesign moves they hope will match customers' priorities mosteffectively. Competitors appear at parity as legitimate con-tenders for leadership. Beneath the surface lies a different real-ity. One competitor "gets it," and armed with this superior cus-tomer and strategy understanding, makes the crucial moves andcountermoves to win. In the second phase, these moves arerewarded as value polarizes and the gold medalist reaps thebenefits. By the time the success of the moves becomes widelyknown, it's generally very difficult for rivals to catch up, until thelandscape shifts again and even the winning player must rethinkits business design.

As the manifestations of strategic risk illustrate, the impactof such risk can be more catastrophic than most of the tradi-tional perils against which we insure and hedge. Yet few execu-tives and board members have adequately evaluated and pre-pared forthis risk.

MAKING STRATEGIC PLANNING STRATEGICBut surely, isn't this the iob of a company's strategic-planning

group? The answer is a resounding "Yes, but. - ."Yes, if they havethe right tools and mind-set, but it's important to keep in mind twopitfalls: "it's a status quo mind-set," and "it's everyone's job."

1. It's a Status Quo Mind-set. Many strategic-planning groups'marketing researchers tend to think incrementally and inparts rather than expansively and holistically. Enmeshed inthe comforting linearity of spreadsheets and crosstabs, theytoo frequently settle for continuous improvement and focuson percentage-point gains in revenue, margin growth, ormanufacturing efficiency when the customers outside thewalls will experience a change in strategic context. Many mar-keting researchers also tend to focus too much on currentindustry definitions, categories, and competitors rather thanon expanding the horizons.

2. It's Everyone's |ob. Assessing and responding to strategicrisk is every manager's responsibility. Thinking about discon-tinuous change is hard and data-intensive. No single depart-ment might have access to all the data necessary to identifyevolving strategic risk. Research can help, but it's only onepiece of the puzzle.

What's required is no less than a completely differentapproach to risk and opportunity identification and to strategysetting. Today, the crucial task for executives is managing strate-gic risk: identifying the potential for value collapse while there'sstill time to avert it; recognizing that value stagnation is a givenin the absence of a different approach to the market; and evaluat-ing the likelihood that even a fast-growth business might forgothe polarization premium. Using "pattern thinking" combined

12 Spriiis2000

with marketing research can help companies avoid many path-ways towards market capitalization outflow.

A STRATEGIC SHORTCUTPattern recognition is a fundamental cognitive skill.

Because languages are patterns of sounds and characters, com-munication and comprehension invoive developing a skill forpattern recognition.

Pattern recognition is atso crucial to many sciences.Genetics, seismology, medicine, and meteorology all harnesspattern thinking to understand and predict complex phenomena.Harnessing patterns is even central to the games we play: Theblackjack player uses them in deciding whether to take a card orto hold, the American football quarterback to interpret the oppo-nent's defense and evaluate potential plays, and the chess grand-master to envision possible endgames.

Our research suggests that the same is true of business.Great managers are skilled at pattern recognition. Every industryis reshaped by patterns of strategic change that can drasticallyshift profit and power across the landscape. Sometimes the pat-terns build slowly and sometimes they move rapidly, but changealways is occurring. The ability to anticipate how and why a com-pany's strategic landscape is changing, to connect symptoms tocauses, then to create strategies that lead to significant, sus-tained value growth is an art and a skill that everyone in businessand investment can profitably cultivate.

It s also a crucial skill in a world in which the half-lives ofbusiness designs are growing shorter. In this environment, execu-tives don't have time to exhaustively evaluate the likelihood ofeach potential option for industry evolution. Managers need ashortcut that allows them to speed up the process and identifytheir portfolio of options on the fly. OthenA'ise, they're like novicesat speed chess, still evaluating moves when their time is up.

The good news is that all business people already areengaged in pattern thinking. From CEOs to middle managers tomarketing researchers, marketing researchers already traffic inpatterns as basic tools of their work and their strategic thinking,Many managers can describe and apply the "consolidation andshakeout" pattern. Many can articulate the characteristics andconsequences of the "commoditization" pattern, the "disinterme-diation" pattern, or the "deregulation" pattern.

Even if patterns aren't new, they're growing in importance.Compared with the late 1980s, the number and complexity of thepatterns required to excel in business have grown. Back then,managers operated—either explicitly or implicitly—with a dozenor so strategic patterns at their fingertips. Today, business peo-ple must know several times as many, and the list is growing.

Pattern recognition is part of a process Mercer terms "strate-gic anticipation," It's not about predicting the future with certainty;it's about being prepared to exploit change and making informeddecisions as to the best moves and countermoves for the busi-ness. It's about moving the management team up the strategicanticipation spectrum from "I'm totally oblivious to the potentialchanges that might transform my industry" to "I see it coming."

In the late 1980s. Armonk, N.Y.-based International BusinessMachines Corp- (IBM| found itself in the unfortunate position ofbeing the first major victim of a relatively new pattern, the "dein-

tegration of the value chain." Others had profited before throughdeintegration. For example, in the 1960s Toyota Motor Corp, dis-pensed with the integrated automotive model of the "Big Three"and focused the company on only those aspects of the valuechain critical to satisfying the most important priorities of cus-tomers, while outsourcing the rest. Yet this pattern sweptthrough the computer industry far more quickly and with greatervalue-destruction power than it had elsewhere.

In the glory days of the mainframe, an integrated modeldrove IBM's success. IBM created the hardware and wrote thesoftware, and its legendary sales force was the channel. With theadvent of the persona! computer, IBM executives recognized thata fully integrated approach would not work in the higher-volume,lower-margin persona! computer business. They did not. how-ever, recognize that they would need to harness a different profitmode! in a world in which the microprocessor and the operatingsystem became the proprietary value added and were out ofIBM's control (see Exhibit 5),

IBM understood the priorities of personal-computer cus-tomers, who wanted inexpensive computer power and compati-bility. By endorsing Intel Corp.'s microprocessor and MicrosoftCorp.'s operating system, IBM sought to drive unit volume byestablishing an open standard for personal computing, in allow-ing other firms to own those steps of the value chain most rele-vant to customers, however, it shut itself out of the industry'slargest profit zone. Its business design choices set in motion adramatic flow of shareholder value—something Adrian Slywotzky(see Additional Reading, page 16) has called "value migration "—

EXHIBIT

($BB)*

5 De-integration: A $1.3 trillion

value chain pattern

Cisco Dell Microsoft220 125 475

IBM225

Intel

275

Custo

Custo

'As of August 1999Source: Mercer Value Growtti Database

1 ?

across a no-longer integrated computing value chain Valueflowed to the businesses that owned the standards (Intel andMicrosoft) and away from just about everybody else, with IBMalone ceding SlOO billion in market value from 1985 to 1992. In1986, IBM owned 55% of the shareholder value in computing. Bythe end of 1997. IBM retained less than 13%, while Microsoft hadcaptured nearly 20%, and Intel held more than 14% of the sector'svalue (see Exhibit 6).

The point is not that pattern thinking alone would haveenabled IBM to avoid its vertiginous value collapse. The deinte-gration pattern was too new and the discipline of pattern think-ing only nascent. Deintegration will happen again. There areearly signs of it in telecommunications, chemicals, and utilities.Are executives in these and other industries that will experiencethis pattern better prepared than IBM to benefit from it?

PROFIT PATTERNSMercer's research to date has described 30 patterns, a num-

ber expected to increase as new patterns are discerned and vari-

ants of existing patterns are catalogued. Patterns can characterizeboth the ways industries evolve, as well as the winning businessdesign moves that have been proven time and again in differentindustries. These patterns are organized along two dimensions:incidence, and type (see Exhibit 7). Incidence captures the factthat, while some patterns have been seen over and over again,others just are emerging. Type expresses the primary areas of thepattern's impact. These patterns are the distillation of severaldecades of observing and crafting winning business strategies.Seven discrete pattern types currently in existence are;

1. Mega Patterns: These play out across many areas of businessover long periods, often decades. Examples include conver-gence, in which multiple industries merge into one. Another iscollapse of the middle, in which markets where dominantbusiness designs serving average customers tend to polarizeinto businesses serving price-oriented segments at the lowend and specialty business designs at the high end. Those"caught in the middle" tend to lose market value (e.g,, Kmart).

EXHIBIT 6 Computing Value Migration: 1986-1998

$136BB $172BB $ig3BB $232BB $370BB $782BB $1550B$169BB $159BB $202BB $296BB $588BB $1005BB

ServiceNetworks

0%

Software

Chips

Hardware

86Q4 87 88 89

Source: Mercer Value Growth Database

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98Q4

14

EXHIBIT 7 The evolving patterns architecture

MOetinJIjon CompressioiK Blockbuster

Pyramid

Product locusto niBr

Operations toknowledge

Finvenllonalilo digital I

ilegraium profit shin ^ncentratlon^

Mega Value Chain Customer Channel Product Knowledge Organizational

2. Value Chain Patterns: Industry value chains used to beincredibly stable. Today, they're compressed, broken, andput together again. Examples include deintegration; andstrengthening the weak link, in which a stronger value chainparticipant removes impediments to satisfying customers bybuying or helping weaker value chain participants.

3. Customer Patterns: Customers are the ultimate arbiters ofvalue. The results of their constantly shifting priorities are valuecreation and value destruction. One example is the profit-shiftpattern, in which increasingly divergent customer segmentsyield extraordinary variation in customer profitability.

4. Channel Patterns: As power and influence have shifteddownstream and closer to customers, the distribution chan-nel has become more important because of its proximity tocritical information on customer preferences and behaviorExamples are compression, in which upstream players godirectly to the customer by assuming some or all of the func-tions previously controlled by the channel; and multiplica-tion, in which entirely new players such as Amazon.com usenew channels to capture extraordinary value through innova-tion and customer knowledge.

5. Product Patterns: In recent times, profit and value havebegun to migrate away from "products" in several directions.The common denominator among these patterns is that thevalue that existed in the product itself has moved next-door,economically speaking, to new scarce assets such as brands,blockbusters, and solutions.

6. Knowledge Patterns: Knowledge can be disorganized, dissi-pated, and squandered. Or it can be organized and focused.

to the profit of both supplier and customer As the economycontinues to shift from the manufacturing of goods to theapplication of useful ideas, this category of patterns willincrease in importance. One important example is the knowl-edge to product pattern in which scarce, labor-intensiveexpertise is crystallized into a product form.

7. Organizational Patterns: There has been much innovationin organizational systems in response to the increasingdynamism and complexity. Firms increasingly wiil need to bemore observant of and responsive to the needs of customersand top employees, both current and prospective. For exam-ple, the promise of digital technology to revolutionize therelationship with both of these stakeholders has triggered anemerging pattern, conventional to digital business design.Digital business designs will be the foundation of what is nowcalled the New Economy.

STRATEGIC-PATTERN RECOGNITIONAlthough pattern recognition still is more of an art than a

science, managers can take specific steps to improve theirchances. They can increase their working repertoire of identifiedpatterns, not only the 30 described in the book Profit Patterns, butalso others that management teams themselves have discerned.As exercises, managers should evaluate their weekly businessreading through the lens of patterns; read about developmentsin other industries, which might find application in theirs; or tryrecasting their company's history in pattern terms.

With a foundation of pattern knowledge, strategists andresearchers can employ a process of strategic-pattern recogni-tion that directly relates to customer issues. The four stages ofthis process are;

mari^elini; research 15

1. Scanning the strategic landscape by collecting and analyzingdata on the three categories of leading indicators: dysfunc-tionality (such as mismatches between the priorities offuture-defining customers and the offerings of current suppli-ers); variability (such as important differences among cus-tomer segments in priorities and profitabilityl; and shifts inthe rate or direction of change (such as rapidly changing cus-tomer priorities).

2. Comparing the leading indicators you've identified withyour library of patterns, looking for those patterns most likelyto unfold.

3. Assessing the likelihood and impact of these patterns' occur-rence, then considering an array of strategic responses, basedon the type of pattern and how early in the life cycle it hasbeen spotted.

4. Beginning to understand the consequences of patterns forchanging customer priorities and the business designs thatwill transform customer behavior. Include this knowledge inthe design of any marketing research that is conducted toassist strategy development. This will help marketingresearch incorporate future strategic contexts into itsresearch implications.

This process can set a new agenda for the integration of market-ing research and strategic planning. You must know what patternsare at play in your marketplace before marketing research can haverelevance in a rapidiy changing world. Ensuring that your planningprocess and marketing research includes this kind of thinking repre-sents a significant competitive advantage. So much of the strategyliterature glorifies the great visionaries, and as such is interesting,but not actionable. Likewise, millions of dollars of marketingresearch has little impact because the context of profit patterns ren-ders this research at best, useless, or at worst, misleading.

Pattern thinking, when rigorously applied, allows every man-ager to think like a grandmaster As in chess, one does notbecome a grandmaster overnight; however, the movement alongthe early learning curve is quick, and mastery of the basic pat-

terns can lead to dramatic performance improvements in a shortperiod. And because the game of business is becoming more likespeed chess, "getting it" early is essential. Managers who learnthis discipline and act before the ground shifts beneath them canstake out the next profit opportunity again and again, therebybeating competitors who don't see the patterns. •

ADDITONAL READINGSlywotzky, Adrian and David Morrison (1999), Profit Patterns: 30

Ways to Anticipate and Profit from Strategic Forces Reshaping YourNew York: Random House.

Eric L. Almquist is a vice president and member of the board ofdirectors of Mercer Management Consulting Inc , and member ofthe firm's strategic capabilities group, specializing in customer-focused business strategies in such industries as telecommuni-cations, financial institutions, Internet companies, industrialmanufacturers, and utilities. He has contributed to numerouspublications including the \ournal of Brand Management, and theEconomic History Review. He speaks on the topics of customer-driven strategies and corporate brand strategies. He received aBA from Stanford University and MA and PhD degrees in anthro-pology from Boston University.

Andrew D. Pierce, a vice president in the customer group atMercer Management Consulting Inc.. specializes in brand strat-egy, new product development, and marketing resource allocationfor clients in consumer services and packaged goods. Previously,Pierce was a principal at Marketing and Planning Systems (MaPS),a strategic research and consulting firm, where he focused ondeveloping global brand strategies. He also worked at Bronner,Slosberg Humphrey, where he developed and implemented com-plex direct marketing programs. Pierce has spoken on the topicsof global brand management and managing brand equity, andrecently contributed to Customer Connections, a Harvard Press bookpublished in 1997. He holds an MBA from NorthwesternUniversity's 1. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management and anArtium Baccalaureus (AB) from Dartmouth College.

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16 Spring 2000