During the past decade, the residential wood furniture industry has lost approximately one-third of its market share to imports. The problem is spreading to other wood-based industries such as kitchen cabinets, upholstered furniture, and wood office furniture. In this article, we discuss benchmarking activities undertaken to provide a basis for comparing the U.S. wood furniture industry with other nations that have a globally competitive furniture manufacturing industry. The second part of this paper discusses strategies to help the U.S. furniture industry survive and thrive in a global business environment. The challenge is to identify our competitive advantages and to mitigate our weaknesses. We make a case for a paradigm shift in the business of designing, manufacturing, marketing, and distributing wood furniture, as it is perhaps the most promising vehicle for our industry to sustain a prosperous U.S. manufacturing base into the future. Furthermore, we need a change in business models -(a paradigm shift) -to avoid cost-based competition with low-cost producers such as those located in Asia and South America.

Small firms, through their flexibility advantages and closeness to customers, potentially can increase their sales volume in economic downturns. The decline in U. S. housing construction (beginning in 2006) provided an opportunity to develop and test four hypotheses predicting the attributes and marketing actions associated with successful companies supplying housing markets. Smaller firms and those producing made-to-order products were most likely to have realized increased sales volume. These successful firms were not engaged in several marketing actions hypothesized to increase sales volume in a declining market. Small firm competitiveness was based more on working closely with customers to produce fully customized products.

Foresters and natural resource managers must balance conflicting objectives when developing land-management plans. Conflicts may encompass economic, environmental, social, cultural, technical, and aesthetic objectives. Selecting the best combination of management uses from numerous objectives is difficult and challenging. Multi-Criteria Decision Models (MCDM) provide a systematic means for comparing tradeoffs and selecting alternatives that best satisfy the decisionmaker's objectives. First developed during World War II by the U.S. military for strategic decisionmaking, MCDM have since been applied to such diverse fields as energy and financial planning, manufacturing, real estate investment, reservoir control, solid waste management, and water distribution. In recent years, the use of MCDM in forestry and natural resources management has generated a substantial body of literature. This annotated bibliography includes 124 important references ranging from theoretical studies to real-world applications of MCDM.

In many situations it is under legislative mandate to manage publicly owned forest resources for multiple uses (e.g., timber production, hunting, grazing). The major obstacle that has been encountered in applying previously developed mathematical programming procedures to multiple-use forest management has been the difficulty in assessing the appropriate criterion weights required. To avoid the criterion weight estimation problem, an interactive multiple-objective linear programming approach, which does not require criterion weights of any kind, was developed in response to the needs of the multiple-use forest management problem. The procedure uses a combination of linear programming and vector-maximum techniques. At each iteration the cone generated by the gradients of the multiple objectives is contracted. On the last two iterations the most acceptable efficient extreme point is identified with the aid of a filtering device. As illustrated, the method has been applied to prepare preliminary management plans for a 10,000-acre sub-unit of a national forest.

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