New strategies

The management sage Peter Drucker used to say that companies should worry less about improving what they do and more about whether they ought to be doing it in the first place. It's a simple, powerful -- even revolutionary -- idea.

Ric Merrifield, an in-house intellectual at Microsoft, expands on this idea in his new book, which urges managers to weigh what matters to their businesses, what they do well, and what might be better off jettisoned instead of merely made more efficient. The idea is to focus on what Merrifield calls the "whats" of a business rather than the "hows." While the author sometimes seems to have a hard time distinguishing one from the other, the overall message is sound.

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