During high technology’s boom years in the late 1990s, companies across many sectors tried to emulate their high-tech counterparts. The business models, the creativity and innovation, the speedy decisions, the headlong growth in revenues, profits, and shareholder value—slower-growth industries aspired to all of these blessings.

But now, with no technology rebound in sight, high-tech vendors must look to the business practices of their former admirers in slower-growth industries such as retailing and banking. There they will find lessons about increasing productivity and using the improvement strategically to expand their market share and better their financial performance. The challenge goes beyond simple cost cutting; it’s about changing the ratio of inputs to outputs—the value of what companies put into a production process compared with what they get out (see sidebar, "Defining productivity"). High-tech companies have always focused on product innovation, and the economics of producing and selling technology in a high-demand environment enabled them to increase the value of their output for a given amount of labor, capital, and purchased goods and services. Now they must put a similar effort into delivering the same or greater output with fewer inputs and developing innovative operational processes, not just...