Abstract

Management tools such as strategic planning, benchmarking, pay-for-performance, outsourcing, customer segmentation, reengineering, balanced scorecard, and total quality management garner considerable attention in the popular management literature. Companies throughout the world spend millions of dollars each year implementing a dozen or so of these tools. This survey examines the usage of these tools over a seven-year period, assesses user satisfaction with the tools, and attempts to correlate tool usage with company performance. It identifies tools that have been consistently used over time as well as those that seem to have been passing fads.