A “postcompany” school of experts says information technology is enabling a new world of seamless collaboration among businesses. They recommend that executives tear down the “walls” and merge their companies into amorphous “enterprise networks.” Nick Carr counters that new technologies will never conquer cutthroat competition and shows why managers need to be wary of alliances that foreclose opportunities for advantage.

The increasingly common practice of migrating business processes overseas to locales such as India, the Philippines and China is often seen as a negative phenomenon that suppresses domestic job markets. On the contrary, says the author, offshoring is a critical component of next-generation business design, a dynamic process of continually identifying how to deliver superior value to customers and shareholders.

For managers seeking to abandon follow-the-pack IT investment, the author offers the example of Inditex Group, a clothing manufacturer in northwestern Spain, best known for its Zara stores. Inditex demonstrates that a company can select, adopt and leverage IT while spending very little on it. He lays out five general principles that underlie Inditex’s remarkable success with targeted technology spending.

Companies should focus less on marketplace premiums for their innovations and more on opportunistically exploiting subsidies for innovations. Thus Microsoft’s Windows 95 development effectively garnered a $900 million subsidy by drawing upon a valuable technical population to test and help improve the system. An innovation subsidy, says the author, is individuals’ and institutions’ cost-effective bartering of resources to reduce risk.

Investments in customer-relationship software or loyalty programs rarely bring promised gains. The reason? A superficial understanding of customer focus. True customer focus involves comprehensive organizational change and outlook, not just thinking up things, such as new technologies, products and services. The author’s research shows how 10 breakthroughs in attitude improve growth and profitability in ways competitors find hard to copy.

By one estimate, intangible assets such as patents, copyrights and trademarks comprise three-quarters of the Fortune 100’s market capitalization. That’s why senior managers, not just technology managers or legal staff, must be involved in intellectual-property management. By answering six critical questions, the author says, companies such as Nokia, Motorola, Novo Nordisk and Leo Pharma are getting full IP value today.

Research at 130 companies shows that only 17% are at the advanced, or synchronized, stage of IT portfolio management, meaning the rest are not optimizing IT investments. The authors note that in synchronized companies, senior business managers understand how IT affects strategy and the bottom line, and CIOs have learned to communicate IT goals in terms non-IT executives understand.

Why do previously successful individuals often fail quickly as CEOs? It is only partly their doing, the authors say. New research fingers the predecessor CEO’s actions, the succession process itself — especially if the board fails in oversight — and the new CEO’s often narrow expertise. The authors offer advice to outgoing CEOs, directors and incoming leaders for optimizing transitions.

Toyota has developed interorganizational processes that facilitate the transfer of both explicit and tacit knowledge. With Toyota’s help, its suppliers have fine-tuned their operations until, compared with their work for Toyota’s rivals, they have 14% higher output per worker, 25% lower inventories and 50% fewer defects. The authors contend that knowledge sharing with partners can make any company more competitive.

When companies act dishonestly, the psychological costs outweigh any short-term gains. Dishonesty ultimately decreases repeat business and increases worker turnover and employee theft. Degradation of a company’s reputation, adverse effects on employee values and increased surveillance of workers through expensive new systems eat at an organization’s health. The authors offer proof that honesty is still the best policy.

Consumer-centered product design can confer competitive advantage by bringing to light the emotional meaning of ordinarily unemotional products and services. The authors discuss how Master Lock, Procter & Gamble, BMW and Cambridge SoundWorks are employing design research, multidisciplinary teams and a variety of ethnographic and psychophysiological techniques to help everyone in their organizations identify with customers’ needs and aspirations.

Often companies’ budgeting processes don’t result in capital being invested optimally. The reason may be that strong personalities trump even well-designed systems. The authors profile five archetypes of bad behavior that line managers use to subvert logical decision making in order to grab resources. They also show how to counteract such behavior and instill values that lead to better use of investment capital.

Many companies have developed strong leaders for business units but have overlooked developing people who act in the interest of the whole organization. Understanding three issues can help: What are the key elements of the enterprise leader’s job? Why is learning to lead at the enterprise level so challenging? What can companies do to identify and develop enterprise leaders?