Single-mindedness may be a virtue.

Which type of corporate manager produces better results: one who is flexible and adapts quickly to the changing market, or one who doesn't veer from a chosen plan of action regardless of fluctuations in the business environment? According to business professors Joseph Porac and Jose Antonio Rosa, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the narrow-minded executive may be the most successful. The ability to formulate and carry out a focused strategy often is more important than adapting to market trends.

Corporate decline frequently is attributed to top management's inflexible view of the world. Managers get trapped into narrow interpretations of the environment that prevent them from perceiving new opportunities or threats.

Adapting to the market can be disastrous, though, if it doesn't mesh with a company's strengths, Porac cautions. Rather, managers should create their business plan based upon the company's areas of expertise, even if it means bucking current trends. Market dominance follows from creating a game and defining its rules in a way that best fits a firm's unique skills."

The most successful companies "shape" the market, rather than "adapt" to it. For example, by 1990, many technical experts believed that Intel's original CISC (complex instruction set computer) processors were inferior in speed, efficiency and size to the RISC (reduced instruction set computer) processors being developed by other companies...