Emerging findings in neuroscience research suggest why inspiring and supportive relationships are important — they help activate openness to new ideas and a more social orientation to others. Insights such as these may move a leader’s actions away from a results orientation and toward a relationship orientation. This article considers sophisticated research such as a study with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in order to explore building relationships, emotional contagion and empathy, and helping and inspiring others.

Millions of vehicles recalled due to quality problems, multiple lawsuits, government investigations, and a very public apology from the company’s president have seriously damaged Toyota’s once-unassailable reputation. What do these problems say about the famed Toyota Production System? What will these problems and the wider economic crisis bring for the country’s automotive industry more generally? These authors recently visited Toyota and a number of automotive systems suppliers in Japan. Their observations and assessments of how the industry will fare in the years ahead are the basis for this article, which details the internationalization of the Japanese motor industry, the increasing use of temporary workers at motor plants, compensation systems, and lifetime employment.

Although not all firms invest in sustainability, firms that do have happier customers, employees, and investors and are no worse off financially. These authors met with some of the leading practitioners of sustainability and identified how organizations can start building sustainability into everything from supply chain activities to HR practices. After defining business sustainability and explaining the process for identifying the top reasons why businesses aren’t more sustainable, the article details these reasons — such as confusion over how to measure sustainability, and lack of incentive from governments — and remarks on the approaching paradigm in which society and business are no longer separate.

Leadership, an act or series of acts that moves people in a certain direction, is not merely the domain of CEOs and heads of state. This article argues that we need to recognize that leadership can arise from anyone who displays it, even as an occasional, discrete act of influence. It explores the fixation on the traditional concept of the ideal leader and explains how providing direction — which can come from many sources — is the essence of leadership. Finally, it shows how leadership within an organization can be provided by employees who don’t necessarily decide a new direction but rather influence others to accept one.

Organizations that understand the key capability of social technologies to enable employees to connect with others to boost job and organizational performance will realize significant benefits. Accordingly, organizations need to think strategically about using these technologies to help transform themselves into truly collaborative workplaces. This article provides the background on MITRE — an R&D consulting firm with U.S. government clients — and explains the value proposition of social technologies at MITRE and how building social technologies at MITRE resulted in higher performance. Finally, it lists four key lessons learned from social technology, including integrating social technologies into existing work practices and experimenting with various technologies.

The powerful combination of youth, technology, and rising consumerism across the globe is creating opportunities and challenges for companies looking for new customers. This article stresses the importance of markets with young populations and explores the phenomenon of wikibrands, or products, services, and brand identities co-created with customers. It ends with some caveats on wikibranding, including risk and uncertainty in young markets.

Chinese companies are not the standard setters when it comes to corporate social responsibility. But contrary to many published reports, they are implementing and following best practices, some of which Western companies have been using for some time. This article offers an up-to-date assessment of the successes and frustrations of corporate social responsibility in China. In doing so, it examines the country’s governmental and industrial forces, as well as pressures from communities, media, civil society, and unions.

Yves Doz is Professor of Strategic Management and the Timken Chaired Professor of Global Technology and Innovation at INSEAD, and Visiting Professor at the Helsinki School of Economics. He was Dean of Executive Education (1998-2002) and Associate Dean for Research and Development (1990-1995) at INSEAD. He has also taught at the Harvard Business School, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Seoul National University, and Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. <br><br>This interview touches on globalization, Chinese and Korean companies, the decline in U.S. business influence, and innovation.

There has long been the need for a theory of leadership built on a scientific foundation. This author’s new book, Driven to Lead: Good, Bad, and Misguided Leadership, seeks to provide such a theory using neuroscience and evolutionary biology. This article discusses the evolution of decision making, the four basic drives of humans, and how firms can keep their decision-making processes on track.

Reliance Industries had evolved into a major player in the Asia Pacific region and had begun to make its presence felt in the global petrochemicals and refining business segments. It had also made forays into exploration and production for oil and gas in multiple regions worldwide. This case study addresses the evolution of the company from a fairly small-scale textile manufacturer to a global powerhouse. It provides insights into how the company was able to trade on its competitive advantages at home in building a global strategy. The case allows for a rich thematic discussion around understanding the modes of competition adopted by companies from newly industrializing contexts.

This case describes a series of events over an eight-year period involving a power plant project in the Caribbean. An executive from the project developer, PowerGen, is looking back over the period and thinking about what can be learned from the experience. The project experienced issues with site selection, the joint venture partnership, construction and equipment contractors, community relations, project financing, a nearby hotel, and project management. Going forward, what could be done differently in other projects to prevent similar problems from occurring?

Employers need not-and should not-wait for health care reform to be fully implemented. They already have the influence and the wherewithal to execute the single most effective reform strategy: prevention. That's what Johnson & Johnson has found as it continues to reap steady returns from its more than 30 years of investment in its well-honed employee wellness programs. Specifically, the company has made prevention efforts both effective and cost-efficient by targeting them to the health conditions that are the most devastating, cost the most to treat, and result in the greatest loss of productivity. It has ensured that its programs span the entire spectrum of wellness services. It has recognized the importance of personal, including financial, incentives for employees to engage in wellness activities. It has built a sustainable culture of health, starting at the top. And it has tracked progress by measuring real outcomes, not merely effort. The result of this comprehensive, multipronged approach: For every dollar J&J invests in workers' health, it gets a return of more than $4 in reduced health care costs, lower absenteeism, and improved productivity. From 2001 through 2009, the company avoided more than $21 million in health care expenditures. Numbers like those are hard to ignore.

Goldman Sachs was a bank, but it did not take deposits, issue credit cards, make mortgage loans, or interact with consumers. For most of its history Goldman was organized as a partnership and operated as an investment bank engaging in underwriting new securities to raise funds for corporations and public agencies, advising clients as in mergers and acquisitions, and managing assets for clients. It began to engage in securities trading and risk arbitrage in the 1950s, when it developed its philosophy of being "long-term greedy," which the bank understood as focusing on long-term profitability rather than short-term performance. Goldman went public in 1999, forecasting that its investment banking business would continue to provide most of its revenue and profits. Soon, however, its proprietary trading and trading on behalf of clients began to dominate both its revenue and profit streams. The leadership of the firm also shifted from investment bankers to traders, such as Henry Paulson and CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein. Goldman was a major player in the events leading to the financial crisis and was a major participant in the CDO market. As with most financial institutions Goldman was heavily criticized for its role in the crisis. The disclosure that Goldman had allowed an investor to select securities for inclusion in a CDO that the investor intended to short caused an uproar, particularly because the purchasers were not informed of the investor's role. The media covered the issue extensively, Congress held hearings, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Goldman, private investors filed lawsuits, and some issuers of securities shunned the company. Goldman's reputation was damaged. The company faced the decision of how to rebuild its reputation as it addressed new regulations on banks as a result of Dodd-Frank and Federal Reserve actions.

A short case recounting Caitlin Elliot's history at a company called Microenterprises Incorporated and her negotiation with its CEO, George Baker, about a promotion and a bonus. The case is good for discussion about what makes negotiating for oneself in an organization more difficult than negotiating on behalf of others. The video can be analyzed using a moves and turns framework and it ideal for management and leadership courses in addition to negotiation and conflict resolution courses.

The Brazilian government has just hired GCA to do the valuation of the pre-salt fields on their behalf. At this stage it is clear that Petrobras will go for an equity issue, but the conditions of it are not yet clear, as it depends on the negotiation for the transfer of rights for the new pre-salt oil fields. If successful closure is achieved on this negotiation, Petrobras will have to pay the government for the new pre-salt fields, in addition to getting external capital to support its investment plan 2010-2014. Learning objectives: The learning objectives focus on the approach to the negotiation.

The authors argue that today's leaders suffer from a common logical fallacy: they tend to see what they want to see and don't ask the harder questions that might lead in other directions. As a result, they fall victim to their own thinking -- to a willingness to 'mash together' competing logics without giving it a second thought. The remedy, they argue, is to dig deeper into the logic of opposing choices, to test your assumptions and explicitly seek to understand the ways in which conditions and consequences are linked. They explain how 'integrative thinkers' explicitly use the tensions between opposing ideas to generate new and better solutions.

Most of the problems we face in life are ill-defined, in that uncertainty is inherent not only in whether the goal can be reached, but in how best to conceive of the current state and the goal state. To deal effectively with such 'wicked' problems, the authors argue that thinkers must know how to develop a problem formulation that transforms the ill-defined problem into a well-defined one that can be tackled. Two widely researched approaches to achieving this are convergent thinking and divergent thinking. While these remain important, the authors argue that they are not sufficient to solve ill-structured problems. They propose that a third skill is imperative: the ability to 'break frame'. They describe all three of these thinking skills and show how a certain type of problem - the insight problem -- can be used to encourage the ability to break frame.

Leaders often focus on gaining employees' intellectual acceptance of a new strategy and view this as an early milestone in successful implementation. The problem is, this approach isn't working very well: study after study demonstrates that the 'knowing-doing gap' is alive and well, and that many carefully-constructed strategies continue to be ignored or dismissed by the employees whose behavior must change in order to make them work. The author argues that feeling strategy must accompany knowing it. She explains what it means to 'feel' strategy -- to experience it in an emotional as well as a cognitive way, and describes the four key components of fostering strategy as experienced in your organization.

In this interview, the author argues that 'winner's brains' - the brains of highly successful individuals in a wide range of fields -- operate quite differently than the average brain. He describes the five 'brain power tools' that are characteristic of the winner's brain, including an 'opportunity radar' and a 'goal laser'. He also explains how we can all take better care of our brains throughout our lives and work toward developing a winner's brain.

The author argues that the emerging discipline of Business Design requires a particular combination of mindsets, methods and thinking skills that exercise the 'whole brain' and help develop a well-rounded capacity for agile thinking and adaptive doing. She explains how a combination of the right mindset (being) and a rigorous methodology (doing) unlock a person's thinking and describes six skills under each of the three headings (being/doing/thinking) that foster bilateral thinking and create a platform for enterprise success.