In 1984, Gert Wijnen, a management consultant at the Dutch consultancy firm Twynstra Gudde, wrote together with Peter Storm and Willem Renes 'Projectmatig werken' which dealt with management of unique assignments. The publication quickly became an accepted handbook for project management in the Netherlands. Wijnen regarded projects as...

Michael Porter's innovative research in the 1980's changed managers' perceptions of their own industry's importance as a factor for their company's strategy. Business unit managers would now have to study their industry's characteristics since an industry's structure determines its relative economic attractiveness and hence, the profit potential of all companies...

The Canadian academic, Henry Mintzberg, distinguished six coordination mechanisms from organisational design literature. Any group of individuals that needs to accomplish a complex task faces two opposing requirements: the division of labour of the task into subtasks to support specialisation, and the coordination of these subtasks to accomplish the overall...

In the early 1990's, the American marketing professor Thomas Ingram, co-developed the ADAPT questioning system to support relationship-based selling that requires a long term focus and spans multiple sales meetings. The method aimed first to identify the wider, organisational situation, then discover and explore customer needs. ADAPT is most effective for...