【正文】 ions products and puters. It has consolidated its position in mainframe puters. It has moved beyond public switching and transmission to include such lifestyle products as mobile telephones, facsimile machines, and laptop puters bridging the gap between telemunications and office automation. NEC is the only pany in the world to be in the top five in revenue in telemunications, semiconductors, and mainframes. Why did these two panies, starting with parable business portfolios, perform so differently? Largely because NEC conceived of itself in terms of core petencies, and GTE did not. Rethinking the Corporation Once, the diversified corporation could simply point its business units at particular end product markets and admonish them to bee world leaders. But with market boundaries changing ever more quickly, targets are elusive and capture is at best temporary. A few panies have proven themselves adept at inventing new markets, quickly entering emerging markets, and dramatically shifting patterns of customer choice in established markets. These are the ones to emulate. The critical task for management is to create an anization capable of infusing products with irresistible functionality or, better yet, creating products that customers need but have not yet even imagined) This is a deceptively difficult task. Ultimately, it requires radical change in the management of major panies. It means, first of all, that top managements of Western panies must assume responsibility for petitive decline. Everyone knows about high interest rates, Japanese protectionism, outdated antitrust laws, obstreperous unions, and impatient investors. What is harder to see, or harder to acknowledge, is how little added momentum panies actually get from political or macroeconomic relief. Both the theory and practice of Western management have 3 created a drag on our forward motion. It is the principles of management that are in need of reform. NEC versus GTE, again, is instructive and only one of many such parative cases we analyzed to understand the changing basis for global leadership. Early in the 1970s, NEC articulated a strategic intent to exploit the convergence of puting and munications, what it called Camp。ll have to rethink the concept of the corporation itself. Consider the last ten years of GTE and NEC. In the early 1980s, GTE was well positioned to bee a major player in the evolving information technology industry. It was active in telemunications. Its operations spanned a variety of businesses including telephones, switching and transmission systems, digital PABX, semiconductors, packet switching, satellites, defense systems, and lighting products. And GTE39。ll be judged on their ability to identify, cultivate, and exploit the core petencies that make growth possible indeed, they39。s 1988 sales were $ billion, and NEC’s sales were considerably higher at $ billion. GTE has, in effect, bee a telephone operating pany with a position in defense and lighting products. GTE39。C Committee of top managers to oversee the development of core products and core petencies. NEC put in place coordination groups and mittees that cut across the interests of individual businesses. Consistent with its strategic architecture, NEC shifted enormous resources to strengthen its position in ponents and central processors. By using collaborative arrangements to multiply internal resources, NEC was able to accumulate a broad array of core petencies. NEC carefully identified three interrelated streams of technological and market evolution. Top management determined that puting would evolve from large mainframes to distributed processing, ponents from simple ICs to VLSI, and munications from mechanical cross bar exchange to plex digital systems we now call ISDN. As things evolved further, NEC reasoned, the puting, munications, and ponents businesses would so overlap that it would be very hard to distinguish among them, and that there would be enormous opportunities for any pany that had built the petencies needed to serve all three markets. NEC top management determined that semic