Over the past three decades, management tools have become a common part of executives' lives. Whether trying to increase revenues, innovate, improve quality, increase efficiencies or plan for the future, executives have looked for tools to help them. The current environment of globalization and economic turbulence has increased the challenges executives face and, therefore, the need to find the right tools to meet these challenges.

To do this successfully, executives must be more knowledgeable than ever as they sort through the options and select the right management tools for their companies. The selection process itself can be as complicated as the business issues they need to solve. They must choose the tools that will best help them make business decisions that lead to enhanced processes, products and services and result in superior performance and profits.

Successful use of such tools requires an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each tool as well as an ability to creatively integrate the right tools, in the right way, at the right time. The secret is not in discovering one magic device, but in learning which mechanism to use, and how and when to use it. In the absence of objective data, groundless hype makes choosing and using management tools a dangerous game of chance.

To help inform managers about the tools available to them, in 1993 Bain & Company launched a multiyear research project to gather facts about the use and performance of management tools. Every year or two since, we've conducted research to identify 25 of the most popular and pertinent management tools. Over time, our research has provided a number of important insights:

• Overall satisfaction with tools is moderately positive, but the rates of usage, ease of implementation, effectiveness, strengths and weaknesses vary widely;
• Management tools are much more effective when they are part of a major organizational effort;
• Managers who switch from tool to tool undermine employees' confidence. Decision makers achieve better results by championing realistic strategies and viewing tools simply as a means to achieving a strategic goal;
• No tool is a cure-all.

We also found some new trends from the 2007 survey:

• Executives are recognizing the impact of soft issues, such as corporate culture and environmental issues, on their corporate success. It will be interesting to see how the current economic environment affects how companies address these soft issues;
• Companies are looking globally for growth-both through selling products to different markets and by making acquisitions in other parts of the world;
• Innovation continues to be one of the biggest challenges companies are facing. Executives know innovation is important, but continue to struggle with how best to do it.

Our efforts to understand the continually evolving management tools landscape have led us to add five new tools to this year's guide: Decision Rights Tools, Downsizing, Online Communities, Price Optimization Models and Voice of the Customer Innovation. Three of these tools are relatively new and two, Downsizing and Price Optimization Models, may be increasingly relevant to managers in the current economic environment.