Know: ‘timing is everything.’

98
Marketing Insights from A to Z

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anagement
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Management is the task of making trade-offs and juggling contra-
dictions. Harvard’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter observed: “The ulti-
mate corporate balancing act: Cut back and grow. Trim down
and build. Accomplish more, and do it in new areas, with
fewer resources.”
Everyone in a company has a different agenda. The advertising
manager sees the company’s salvation as being in more advertising;
the sales manager wants more salespeople; the sales promotion
manager wants more money for incentives; and the R&D depart-
ment wants more money for product improvement and new prod-
uct development.
The problem is that if every department only does its own 
job well, the company will fail. Departments have individual agen-
das, not company agendas. The gift of reengineering thinking is 
to switch the focus away from departments toward managing 
core processes. Each core process—product development, cus-
tomer attraction and retention, order fulfillment—requires team-
work from several departments. Increasingly major company
initiatives are launched as interdisciplinary team projects, not de-