Company and Industry Research: Strategies and Resources is a five-chapter book published by Business Expert Press in 2016 and written by Hiromi Kubo, business and economics librarian at California State University, and Thomas J. Ottaviano, business and economics librarian at Cornell University's Mann Library. The focus of the book is to provide practical guidance for conducting effective business research. The authors describe important characteristics of research and emphasize the need for evaluating information gathered. They review several sources of business, industry, and general research. They also offer practical insight into the elements of a business plan. Chapter 4, Further Resources for Business Research (16 pages), reviews additional sources for information. The authors review sources of economic data and information, consumer and marketing research, and international business information. Specific sources include Federal Reserve Economic Data, World Bank Data, SimplyMap, and CIAWorld.

Company and Industry Research: Strategies and Resources is a five-chapter book published by Business Expert Press in 2016 and written by Hiromi Kubo, business and economics librarian at California State University, and Thomas J. Ottaviano, business and economics librarian at Cornell University's Mann Library. The focus of the book is to provide practical guidance for conducting effective business research. The authors describe important characteristics of research and emphasize the need for evaluating information gathered. They review several sources of business, industry, and general research. They also offer practical insight into the elements of a business plan. In Chapter 5, Business Plans (20 pages), the authors offer practical tips for creating an effective document. They review common elements of a business plan and offer insight into developing each section and what information to include. The common components covered include: executive summary, company description, description of products/services, industry analysis, market analysis, organizational structure, a marketing plan, an operations plan, other key strategic plans, financial analysis, and request for assistance. The authors explain that although there is not one way to write a business plan, researchers should consider all of the elements listed.

Coley Andrews could never have anticipated when he cofounded Pacific Lake Partners, a search fund investment firm, in 2009, that he would spend as much time managing people as he would the firm's investment strategy. Pacific Lake had grown its portfolio to include 30 operating companies plus 30 active search funds in the six years since its launch, and Andrews interacted regularly with many of the CEOs, either as a board member or as an informal advisor. Though several of Pacific Lake's transactions involved complex financial structures, Andrews had learned that few issues were more difficult than some of the interpersonal challenges that confronted him from time to time. In the first vignette, Andrews learns that a searcher with whom Pacific Lake has made a soft commitment to invest has falsified part of his resume. Andrews and his partner, Jim Southern, decide to withdraw their commitment from the searcher and send a letter out notifying the investor group of the news. Andrews must prepare for how to respond to what will inevitably be an onslaught of calls. In the second vignette, Andrews learns that a fellow board member has withheld knowledge about serious indiscretions committed by the CEO, including sexual harassment and relations with a female employee. Andrews must decide how to best confront his board member with this disturbing news.

Start-ups seem to be getting bigger faster than ever--Uber is just one example of today's "unicorns," or private, venture-backed companies valued at a billion dollars or more. But is that really true, and does rapid growth lead to greater long-term success? Researchers at the Silicon Valley consultancy Play Bigger examined these questions and came up with some intriguing findings. Among them: Today's start-ups are growing about twice as fast as those founded a decade ago (as measured by market capitalization). However, there's no relationship between amount raised prior to IPO and growth in market cap afterwards. Age at IPO does seem to be predictive--companies that go public between the ages of six and 10 years generate 95% of all value created post-IPO. And most value creation comes from "category kings"-- companies, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, that carve out entirely new, winner-take-all niches. Tech start-ups are in a race to define new product categories, and in recent years the pace has quickened. Simply raising more money isn't enough to win the race--and going public too early or too late may limit success. Even for unicorns, the path forward is challenging.

New studies reveal that symbols and sayings that broadcast your morality may shield you from being asked to do something unethical.

Here are three examples of visualizations that can help viewers grasp colossally large or infinitesimally small numbers.

Few CEOs of large companies leverage the power of Twitter to the fullest extent. As of September 2014, only 42 Fortune 500 CEOs had Twitter accounts. The authors argue that rather than waiting for impressions to be driven by the media or by individuals with ulterior motives, CEOs can use Twitter to help shape their public image and that of their companies. The authors studied the Twitter activity of 25 CEOs of publicly traded companies who were active on Twitter and identified common patterns and themes. Based on the type of content tweeted most often, the authors classified the CEOs they studied into four groups: Generalists, Expressionists, Information Mavens, and Business Mavens. Generalists used Twitter to share a wide range of content. At times they tweeted about personal opinions and interests; other times, they tweeted information closely related to the business (for example, strategy, existing products and services, customer references, etc.). However, on average they had the smallest networks among the groups of CEOs, perhaps because they were not sharing information that was unique. Expressionists used Twitter extensively for non-business content sharing. These CEOs shared their opinions about events and politics and gave their followers an insight into their daily lives. In many ways, they used Twitter as a brand-building platform for themselves as they do for their companies. Information Mavens frequently shared links to information, news, and other happenings. However, they did not generally tweet information specific to their company, acting more like curators of content. As a result, relatively few people retweeted or "favorited"their tweets. Business Mavens used Twitter extensively and primarily shared business-related content. In contrast to the other CEO groups that the authors identified, Business Mavens often shared new product announcements, information about existing products, customer references

Today's rapid technological changes have transformed the role of global IT outsourcing in companies'strategies. Traditionally viewed as a cost-saving measure, IT outsourcing is also increasingly being leveraged as a strategic tool for acquiring cutting-edge innovation. This pursuit of emerging technologies and capabilities, however, has elevated the complexity of managing supplier portfolios. In this article, the authors introduce the "long-tail"strategy, an innovative IT outsourcing model that combines a few key partnerships with a dynamically changing number of smaller contracts with other suppliers that can deliver specific value propositions beyond the capabilities of the key partners. Representing a dynamic, diversified, yet disciplined approach toward outsourcing, the long-tail strategy embraces and even fosters a flow of new suppliers, so companies are continually acquiring new capabilities that enable them to prosper in turbulent business environments. The authors'extensive in-depth interviews with major companies in financial services, business services, technology, manufacturing, and energy suggest that the long-tail strategy can help diverse organizations achieve their business goals. For example, the long-tail strategy helped a major global bank establish and maintain technological leadership in the financial-services industry, and allowed Toyota Motor North America to realize rapid innovation. In order to implement the long-tail strategy successfully, companies should institute five key practices: (1) distributing responsibility within the company for scanning for new technologies; (2) nurturing relationships with new "long-tail"suppliers; (3) encouraging sales pitches from suppliers; (4) governing the entire outsourcing portfolio; and (5) designing for integration. When implementing these practices, organizations should seek to create a more proactive, entrepreneurial, and dynamic culture in IT outsourcing.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. When Martha Payne, a 9-year-old student in Argyll, Scotland, started a blog in April 2012 to photograph and rate her school lunches, she had no idea of the stir she would cause. The blog logged 2 million hits in its first six weeks. When the local area council asked her to stop, an online firestorm ensued and the council reversed its decision. It's a familiar story -every day, images or events with the potential to incite passions get captured digitally, posted to the Web, and "go viral."With social media, people share their experiences with friends or followers, who share with more people. Seemingly insignificant occurrences can strike a nerve with a nascent virtual community, and unsuspecting parties must respond to a dicey new problem. The capacity to generate causes and controversies almost instantly may be the most salient aspect of what authors Robert D. Austin and David M. Upton call the "super-transparent society." Historically, the authors explain, people in a particular community were the only ones who paid attention to the local goings-on. When information moved outside of that environment, it was due to deliberate action: some identifiable person or organization moving it. If you wanted to guard information, you built a barrier. Many things have changed, particularly the volume of information. The article suggests several steps that can help managers meet the new expectations for transparency, including the following: Examine your assumptions about how you can keep information contained. Review your strategy for dealing with vulnerability to unintended transparency. Review operations for issues that might be problematic if revealed. Assume that others will put out information about your organization for their own reasons and that you won't be able to prevent it. Recognize that new information flows change what people consider to be fair.

Science-based industries such as biotechnology offer the potential of high growth, but they are fraught with risk. The payoffs can take many years to materialize or may never come. Even though the traditional venture capital/entrepreneurial model has been shown to stimulate innovation in a wide range of technology settings (software, computers, Internet, electronics, etc.), it wasn't designed to deal with the costs, risks, and slow payout of science-based industries. Although venture capital continues to flow into industries like biotechnology, there has been a significant shift away from funding ventures at the earliest stages. A key concern is that lack of availability of future rounds of financing can shut off the flow of venture capital funding abruptly. In this article, authors Andrew W. Lo and Gary P. Pisano draw on comparisons to projects in the moviemaking industry and propose the project-focused organization (PFO) as an alternative structure for undertaking long-term, high-risk, highly capital-intensive R&D programs in science-based industries such as biotech. PFOs are entities created to conduct a specific R&D project. The authors discuss how they could work in practice, using the example of biopharmaceutical R&D. Researchers innovating in a science-based context must overcome two specific challenges. First, they need to raise sufficient capital to fund a long-term, highly risky, and very expensive project. Second, they must have a governance mechanism for allocating capital (human and financial) and conducting projects. The authors propose that governance centered on the project rather than the company may be a more efficient way to organize innovation in science-based industries. To reduce overhead, they propose contracting out for resources as necessary. As with movie projects, investors could choose projects they want to invest in, with the understanding that they will receive returns only if those projects succeed.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Large companies frequently exploit their vastly superior legal resources and capabilities to the disadvantage of smaller competitors. The mere threat of litigation and the prospect of a prolonged lawsuit are often all that is necessary to persuade a smaller business to acquiesce to the larger competitor's legal demands. The author writes about a defensive strategy he calls "lawsourcing"that turns the tables on large companies by gathering public support, typically through social media and public relations. The idea of lawsourcing -which is a variation of what has become known as "crowdsourcing"-isn't completely new. Back in 1984, when Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc. was a six-year-old upstart in the ice cream business, Pillsbury (then the owner of the Häagen-Dazs ice cream brand) attempted to pressure some of its distributors not to handle Ben & Jerry's products. Ben & Jerry's fought back hard, with a scrappy campaign built around the slogan "What's the Doughboy Afraid Of?" Well-executed lawsourcing campaigns can deliver significant benefits to companies, including greater brand awareness and loyalty and increased sales. The author cites a number of examples, including: Hampton Creek Foods Inc., a small San Francisco-based food producer. In the fall of 2014, Unilever, owner of the Hellmann's brand of mayonnaise, filed suit against Hampton Creek for using the word "mayo"to describe its vegan mayonnaise substitute, called Just Mayo. Hampton Creek fought back by commenting about the lawsuit on Twitter and Facebook and engaging with media sympathetic to its plight. Unilever withdrew its lawsuit. Vermont artist Bo Muller-Moore, who sells T-shirts adorned with the slogan "Eat More Kale."Atlanta-based fast-food chain Chik-fil-A Inc. claimed that Muller-Moore's slogan infringed upon its federal trademark rights to the phrase "Eat Mor Chikin."After a spirited social media campaign, Muller-Moore got his own trademark.

Narrow-mindedness holds back many organizations in their efforts to turn global presence into a real source of competitive advantage. In this article, the authors explore the manifestations and costs associated with what they call the "headquarters knows best"syndrome, as well as ways companies can address the problem. Many of the things companies have done are fairly predictable, such as decentralizing global responsibilities, changing the reporting relationships, internationalizing senior management, and creating cross-national teams. At Irdeto B.V., a Dutch developer of security software for digital media, the remedy was more extreme: It elected to create two headquarters, one in the Netherlands and the other in China. While this was expensive -and something the CEO's successor ultimately did away with in 2015 -the decision to operate out of dual headquarters helped the company realign its focus, and it had significant positive effects on Irdeto's performance. The authors argue that many corporate executives aren't aware that the "headquarters knows best"syndrome exists. Typically, top executives interact with executives from the subsidiaries that are closest to headquarters (in terms of geography, economic development, and culture); the executives'frame of reference is based on subsidiary managers who benefit from ample attention, autonomy, or influence. Executives from peripheral subsidiaries are the ones who are most likely to be affected and least likely to be heard. In addition, the value of missed opportunities and lost talent is hard to assess, and headquarters executives can easily invoke contextual factors (such as competition for labor) to explain problems. They can also try to pin blame on the local entities. After establishing its dual headquarters in 2007, the authors note, Irdeto saw measurable improvements on four fronts: increased top management attention, greater subsidiary contributions, richer lateral exchanges,

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The Chinese technology company Xiaomi cultivates a close connection with its customers through a product development process that invites user participation -as well as through social media and fan clubs.

While global supply chains are expected to be lean, agile, and sustainable, they have also become the focus of growing attention from a variety of external stakeholders seeking information that includes and frequently exceeds what the company is legally obliged to disclose. In this article, the authors discuss the pressures on companies to disclose supply chain information, the drivers and impediments to such disclosure, and the types of supply chain information typically made available to the public. The article identifies the broad disclosure strategies companies can use to release supply chain information and offers managers guidance on designing the optimal disclosure strategy for their company. In addition to exploring the topic with examples from companies including Nike Inc., WD-40, and Patagonia Inc., the authors take a detailed look at how Apple's approach to supply chain disclosure has evolved since 2009. In considering how to manage supply chain information disclosure, the authors argue that managers must appreciate the diverse forces and actors driving and enabling this trend. Aside from internal governance and risk concerns, external pressure has come from government regulations, best practices of peers, changing expectations from salient stakeholder groups, and, of course, external events (such as the 2013 Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh). The authors note that improving transparency can be expensive. The lack of standardized reporting systems, the absence of a common technology platform, ill-defined standards, and a lack of supplier education can also pose serious hindrances to companies wishing to improve their supply chain transparency. The authors identify four common types of supply chain information that tends to be publicly disclosed: supply chain membership, provenance of materials, environmental information, and information on social impacts such as working conditions.

Eden McCallum is a Management Consulting firm founded by two ex-McKinsey partners. It has offices in London, Amsterdam and Zurich, and is planning further expansion. The company is founded using a distinctive new business model, based on operating a pool of experienced, freelance consultants. Hence, it operates as a double-sided market. Eden McCallum's 15 partners secure client projects and then assemble teams of consultants to work on these projects. They screen consultants extensively before admitting them into their pool. Furthermore, the company provides office space, a team of analysts, and operational assistance (in terms of IT, legal, billing, etcetera). The case stimulates discussion in terms of how the company might grow, whether its value proposition can remain distinctive as it expands, and how it can attract and retain the people in the various markets - independent consultants, partners and staff - needed to make further growth a success. In particular, the case explores business model innovation by creating a novel value proposition for employees, i.e., by giving management consultants more control over their time and lives.

This case focuses on the Unilever Foundry, a platform for Unilever to engage with start-ups and entrepreneurs, providing them with access to Unilever's brands as a means of enabling their growth while bringing innovative technology back to the company. The case provides a brief description of Unilever's evolution from the mid-1990s to 2016, focusing on its various attempts to make the business more innovative and agile. With the arrival of Paul Polman as CEO and his "sustainable living plan", the impetus to innovate was once again very high and a number of initiatives were launched to help the company move beyond its traditional ways of working. In May 2014 the Foundry was launched to create commercial opportunities by connecting Unilever businesses with start-ups. Through a licensing mechanism, the start-up would make its technology available to Unilever to bring innovation to its brand or get the rights to use a Unilever brand within certain guidelines. The Foundry was essentially a platform for collaboration. The case explores how the Foundry functioned and evolved both within Unilever and in the collaborations with external start-ups. By December 2015 its leader, Jeremy Basset, had a team of seven people and operated in several locations across the world. The case closes with various issues facing Jeremy - whether to raise greater awareness of the Foundry within Unilever; how to scale it to make a difference within the huge organisation that was Unilever; and ultimately, where to go from here?

In the fall of 2012 the author decided he needed to do some soul searching. The start-up he'd founded six years earlier had grown into a global company with more than $300 million in revenue, and it was still delivering on its promise to donate a pair of shoes for every pair sold, but Mycoskie felt disillusioned. His days were monotonous, and he had lost his connection to many of the executives in charge of daily operations. He and his wife moved to Austin, Texas, so that he could take a sabbatical. He dedicated a lot of time to private contemplation, but he also spoke regularly with his executive coach, entrepreneur friends, and business nonprofit leaders he admired. He traveled to conferences around the country to learn from experts in social enterprise and international development. And he read "Start with Why," by Simon Sinek, about leaders who inspire action and companies that create compelling products. All this, combined with a chance conversation about the coffee trade in Rwanda, led to the creation of TOMS Roasting--which, like TOMS Shoes, would have a one-for-one model: For every bag of coffee sold, the company would provide a week's worth of clean water to a person in need. As TOMS approaches its 10th anniversary, the author writes, he feels more energized and committed than ever.

U.S. public companies are dying at faster and faster rates; in fact, they have a one in three chance of being delisted in the next five years. Why? They are failing to adapt to the growing complexity of their environments, the authors argue--misreading those environments, selecting the wrong approaches to strategy, or failing to support a viable approach with the right behaviors and capabilities. Drawing on their research at the intersection of business strategy, biology, and complex systems, BCG's Martin Reeves and Daichi Ueda, along with Princeton biologist Simon Levin, describe six principles that confer robustness in what's known as "complex adaptive systems"--principles that are directly applicable to business. Firms should: (1) Maintain heterogeneity of people, ideas, and endeavors; (2) Sustain a modular structure of loosely connected components; (3) Preserve redundancy among components; (4) Expect surprise, but reduce uncertainty; (5) Create feedback loops and adaptive mechanisms to ensure the variation, selection, and propagation of innovations; and (6) Foster trust and reciprocity in their business ecosystems. Rising corporate mortality is an increasing threat, and the forces driving it are likely to remain strong for the foreseeable future. Understanding and implementing the principles that create robustness in complex adaptive systems can mean the difference between survival and extinction.

Most companies don't realize how central emotions are to building the right culture. They tend to focus on cognitive culture: the shared intellectual values, norms, artifacts, and assumptions that set the overall tone for how employees think and behave at work. Though that's incredibly important, the authors' research shows that it's only part of the story. The other critical part is emotional culture, which governs which feelings people have and express at work. Barsade and O'Neill have found that emotional culture influences employee satisfaction, burnout, teamwork, and even "hard" measures such as financial performance and absenteeism. So when managers ignore or fail to understand it, they're glossing over a vital component of what makes organizations tick, and their companies suffer as a result. By not only allowing emotions into the workplace but also consciously shaping them, leaders can better motivate their employees. This article describes some of the ways emotional culture manifests at work-for instance, in the form of joy, companionate love, and fear-and the impact it can have in a range of settings and industries. It also suggests ways of creating and maintaining an emotional culture that will help you achieve your company's goals.

Empathy is all the rage pretty much everywhere. It's touted as a critical leadership skill, one that helps you influence others in your organization, anticipate stakeholders' concerns, respond to social media followers, and even run better meetings. But it has its limits. Empathy taxes us mentally and emotionally, and can even impair our ethical judgment. It's also a finite resource: The more we spend on one person or group, the less we have left for others. Expecting employees to continually drain their reserves can impair individual and organizational performance. Managers can prevent the ill effects of empathy and promote the good by using a few simple strategies. First, have people focus on certain sets of stakeholders, rather than asking them to understand and empathize with anyone and everyone. Second, help them meet others' needs in ways that also address their own so that they don't end up feeling depleted by every interaction. And third, give them empathy breaks, where they focus strictly on their own personal needs, to allow them to replenish their reserves.