In the face of challenging economic headwinds, consumer goods manufacturers have focused on cutting costs and optimizing working capital. Those routes still offer opportunity, but recent analysis indicates that traditional assumptions regarding tradeoffs among costs, inventory and service don't always hold true, and leading companies are using new, customer-centric levers to unlock value. These actions could yield a potential value of nearly $50bn industrywide, according to research conducted by The Boston Consulting Group on behalf of the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA).

Indonesia is at the early stages of a period of strong economic growth, creating a wave of new middle-class and affluent consumers (MACs) that will grow in size and purchasing power through 2020, according to a report by The Boston Consulting Group.

Consumers are much more interested in free delivery and lower prices than in the same-day delivery of goods ordered online, according to a survey conducted by The Boston Consulting Group. Only 9 percent of the 1,500 U.S. consumers surveyed cited same-day delivery as a top factor that would improve their online shopping experience, while 74 percent cited free delivery and 50 percent cited lower prices.

Why have companies been so slow to apply lean principles and techniques to service processes such as finance, human resources, accounting, health care, and customer service? One reason is that the waste and inefficiency that can interfere with services are rarely obvious.

More than 80 percent of U.S. consumers and, perhaps more surprising, over 60 percent of Chinese consumers say that they are willing to pay more for products labeled "Made in USA" than for those labeled "Made in China," according to research by The Boston Consulting Group.

Manufactured exports - a bright spot of the U.S. economy in recent years - are set to surge. Combined with jobs created as a result of reshoring, higher U.S. exports could add 2.5 million to 5 million jobs by the end of the decade, as manufacturers shift production from leading European countries and Japan to take advantage of substantially lower costs in the U.S., according to new research by The Boston Consulting Group.

Ever since Frederick Taylor's early writing on industrial efficiency - followed by the work of Peter Drucker, Alfred Chandler, and others - the modern Western corporation has been managed according to a tightly defined set of rules and norms. A clear corporate strategy calls for earning at least the cost of capital, growing at a higher rate than the overall market, and managing the portfolio to a "logic" - periodically pruning poorly performing businesses. And with Wall Street analysts ready to applaud CEOs for making their numbers or pulverize them for a one-cent per share miss, there is often little opportunity to change course.