Most corporate failures result from a few flawed decisions rather than outright competence. Yet most corporate governance systems allow the board or shareholders to speak up or step in only when managers have clearly failed.

Customers. Whether consumers or businesses, do not want more choices. They want exactly what they want, and technology now makes it possible for companies to give it to them. But few companies are exploiting that potential. In "Do You Want to Keep Your Customers For-ever?" B. Joseph Pine II, Don Pep-pers, and Martha Rogers contend that companies should use technology to become mass customizers that efficiently provide individually customized goods and services, and one-to-one marketers that elicit information from each customer about his or her specific needs.

By acquiring new businesses in the 1970s and 1980s, Great Britain's Imperial Chemical Industries increased the complexity of an already hard-to-manage portfolio. Changes in markets and technologies had ovcrtaken the logic that once bound ICI's businesses to the corporate parent.