Long-run Success Research Articles

Marketing Education and Marketing Success: Are they Related?

This article reports the results of a study which investigated the relationship between long-term career success in marketing and possession of a marketing and/or MBA education. Data gathered from a sample of over 1,000 marketing practitioners led the authors to conclude that for the long-run career success of marketing students, the performance of marketing educators may be highly suspect.

New industrial product performance: The effects of market characteristics and strategy

There's no need to state again the complexity of the problem of achieving high performance in the new product process. What we do need is a framework to help sort out the complexity, and that is what Eunsang Yoon and Gary Lilien provide in this article. They first differentiate between original and reformulated new products. Then they examine how patterns of R&D and marketing activities determine short and long-run success.

Barriers to Organizational Democracy in Public Administration

This essay explores the forms that organizational democracy might take in public administration and argues that organizational democracy need not be incompatible with principles of representative democracy. Democratizing work life in public organizations is viewed as a way to develop members' interpersonal skills, decrease buck-passing, increase job satisfaction, productivity, and public-bureaucratic contacts, recruit talented leadership, and engender more creative solutions to pubiic problems. Barriers to work democratization in public bureaucracy derive from the prevailing political arrangements; the needs, habits, and interests of organizational elites; the folkways and organizational ideologies found in public bureaucracies; the bureaucratic socialization and reward system; and the competitive impact of alternative "change models." Despite these obstacles, potential opportunities for structural change that may be unique to public as against large-scale private organizations are discernible, suggesting that a change strategy fostering organizational democracy by accretion or encroaching control has some likelihood of long-run success.

A Behavioral Model of Cost Reduction

Three aspects of bounded rationality seem important for decision theory: (1) the existence of goals, (2) the search for improvement, and (3) long-run success. Two important criteria of long-run success are (a) the probability of survival, and (b) the long-run average rate of growth of performance (relative to one or more goals). One obstacle to the development of mathematical theories of resource allocation based on bounded rationality has been the absence of a clear and precise formulation of what is meant by satisficing. In this paper I develop a few related mathematical models of satisficing in an uncertain environment, and apply them to the analysis of cost-reduction and technical change. An additional theme is that the allocation of resources in an organization is significantly influenced by the allocation of decision-making effort.

Profitable listening for manufacturers and dealers: How to use a communication system

Planning and maintaining an effective channel communication system should be a standard responsibility of management. Manufacturer-dealer relationships are like marriages of convenience; their long-run success depends upon whether each party considers the other's needs. If an adequate communication system unites the distributive network, the members can share data on needs, plans, results, and so on, and work together efficiently. Information concerning physical inventory, promotion, product, pricing, and market are most significant for coordination of intrachannel activities. The author's research findings show the importance of this information and indicate how the choices of the media for channel communication should be made.

Wages, Risk, and Profits in the Whaling Industry

I. Wages. — The lay system of wage payment, 641. — Partial shifting of industrial risk from entrepreneur to worker, but no corresponding change in the proportion of profits and wages, 644. — The fall of the fractional lay, 648. — Real wages further lowered by abuses and extortionate charges, 650. — Lack of incentive under the lay system, 651. — Cosmopolitan character of the whaling crews, 653. — Whaling properly regarded as a trade, 654. II. Risk. — The whaling entrepreneur preeminently a dealer in risks. — Three main types: labor, physical, and business risks, 655. — Extraordinary fluctuations in whaling cargoes, 657. — Measures designed to offset risks: the lay system, diversified ownership, marine insurance, 659. III. Profits. — Extreme fluctuations, 662. — Average profits, 663. — Normal rate of profit a modest one, 665. — Illustration of “prizes and blanks” theory, 666. — Relative proportions of profits and wages, 667. — Despite large element of chance, business ability essential for long-run success, 667.