Now that the global recession is officially over, multinationals are starting to weigh their options for foreign investment. But everywhere they look, negatives vie with positives, and government actions and contradictory economic trends confuse the picture: Brazil is planning to spend while Australia is cutting back. Trade tensions are rising between the United States and China. Indonesia tempts inflation by keeping rates low. Managers need a way to cut through the chaos and figure out which countries are the best bets and which pose the greatest risks. The authors, drawing on Eurasia Group's political analyses and on economic databases, have assigned scores to a selection of countries on the basis of their macroeconomic conditions and foreign investment environments. The result is a practical guide for determining where growth is likely, which governments are encouraging or impeding foreign investment, and which sectors provide the greatest opportunities. Some of the results are surprising.

After working with hundreds of leaders in a wide variety of organizations and in countries all over the globe, the authors found one very clear pattern: When it comes to meeting their leadership potential, many people unintentionally get in their own way. Five barriers in particular tend to keep promising managers from becoming exceptional leaders: People overemphasize personal goals, protect their public image, turn their competitors into two-dimensional enemies, go it alone instead of soliciting support and advice, and wait for permission to lead. Troy, a customer service manager, endangered his job and his company's reputation by focusing on protecting his position, not helping his team; when a trusted friend advised him to change his behavior, the results were striking. Anita's insistence on sticking to the tough persona she'd created for herself caused her to ignore the more intuitive part of the leadership equation, with disastrous results-until she let go of the need to appear invulnerable and reached out to another manager. Jon, a personal trainer who had virtually no experience with either youth development programs or urban life, opened a highly successful gym for inner-city kids at risk; he refused to be daunted by his lack of expertise and decided to simply "go for it." As these and other examples from the authors' research demonstrate, being a leader means making an active decision to lead. Only then will the workforce-and society-benefit from the enormous amount of talent currently sitting on the bench.

Within a period of 23 months, Lois Quam found herself with a dizzying level of responsibility, both at work-as research director at UnitedHealthcare and head of the company's public-sector services division-and at home, with newborn twins and a toddler. But rather than bend under the weight of either pressure, Quam found ways to thrive in both areas of her life. Namely, she focused on big-picture goals, doing what was required to be the kind of mother and manager she wanted to be. She wasn't shy about letting her worlds overlap, taking her children to work and even allowing their visibility to work in her favor as she advocated for affordable health care for families. Now head of her own successful company, Quam carved out a place for herself as a successful working mother before work/life balance was a corporate buzzword.

Many luxury brands are able to command high prices because of their excellent quality, solid reputation, and limited availability. But it can be tricky both to maintain that cachet and continue to grow if the next generation of consumers is completely priced out of your market. Fictional winemaker Chateau de Vallois, a traditional estate with centuries of experience in producing luxury wines, faces that dilemma and is now considering whether to launch an affordable brand. A new wine of good quality at a lower price could attract younger fine-wine drinkers who might then upgrade to more expensive wines later on. On the other hand, the estate must be careful to preserve its exclusive image and avoid damaging the perceived value of its existing high-end wines. Should Chateau de Vallois stick with what it does best or branch out and begin producing a new brand? The authors of this fictional case study are Daniela Beyersdorfer, who is a research associate at Harvard Business School's Europe Research center, and Vincent Dessain, the center's executive director. Commentary is offered by Corinne Mentzelopoulos, the owner and CEO of Chateau Margaux, a first-growth estate in the Bordeaux region of France; Philippe Sereys de Rothschild, the vice chairman of Baron Philippe de Rothschild, a family firm that manages both first-growth and branded wines; and HBR's readers.

Wynton Marsalis grew up in a family of New Orleans jazz musicians and received his first trumpet as a sixth birthday present from bandleader Al Hirt. At 14 he debuted with the Louisiana Philharmonic; at 17 he moved to New York, where he attended Juilliard, joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, assembled his own band, and began a prolific composing and recording career. He talks here about leadership and creativity.

Many luxury brands are able to command high prices because of their excellent quality, solid reputation, and limited availability. But it can be tricky both to maintain that cachet and continue to grow if the next generation of consumers is completely priced out of your market. Fictional winemaker Chateau de Vallois, a traditional estate with centuries of experience in producing luxury wines, faces that dilemma and is now considering whether to launch an affordable brand. A new wine of good quality at a lower price could attract younger fine-wine drinkers who might then upgrade to more expensive wines later on. On the other hand, the estate must be careful to preserve its exclusive image and avoid damaging the perceived value of its existing high-end wines. Should Chateau de Vallois stick with what it does best or branch out and begin producing a new brand? The authors of this fictional case study are Daniela Beyersdorfer, who is a research associate at Harvard Business School's Europe Research center, and Vincent Dessain, the center's executive director. Commentary is offered by Corinne Mentzelopoulos, the owner and CEO of Chateau Margaux, a first-growth estate in the Bordeaux region of France; Philippe Sereys de Rothschild, the vice chairman of Baron Philippe de Rothschild, a family firm that manages both first-growth and branded wines; and HBR's readers.

Many luxury brands are able to command high prices because of their excellent quality, solid reputation, and limited availability. But it can be tricky both to maintain that cachet and continue to grow if the next generation of consumers is completely priced out of your market. Fictional winemaker Chateau de Vallois, a traditional estate with centuries of experience in producing luxury wines, faces that dilemma and is now considering whether to launch an affordable brand. A new wine of good quality at a lower price could attract younger fine-wine drinkers who might then upgrade to more expensive wines later on. On the other hand, the estate must be careful to preserve its exclusive image and avoid damaging the perceived value of its existing high-end wines. Should Chateau de Vallois stick with what it does best or branch out and begin producing a new brand? The authors of this fictional case study are Daniela Beyersdorfer, who is a research associate at Harvard Business School's Europe Research center, and Vincent Dessain, the center's executive director. Commentary is offered by Corinne Mentzelopoulos, the owner and CEO of Chateau Margaux, a first-growth estate in the Bordeaux region of France; Philippe Sereys de Rothschild, the vice chairman of Baron Philippe de Rothschild, a family firm that manages both first-growth and branded wines; and HBR's readers.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. To understand the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of business analytics, MIT Sloan Management Review, in collaboration with the IBM Institute for Business Value, conducted a survey of more than 3,000 business executives, managers and analysts from organizations located around the world. The survey was part of the 2010 New Intelligent Enterprise Global Executive Study and Research Project, which attempts to understand better how all organizations are trying to capitalize on information and apply analytics today and in the future. One of the most significant findings is that there is a clear connection between performance and the competitive value of analytics. Survey respondents who agreed that the use of business information and analytics differentiated them were twice as likely to be top performers. Three stages, or capability levels, of analytics adoption emerged from the research: aspirational, experienced and transformed. The article provides a comprehensive description of each, enabling organizations to identify where they fall in the continuum. In addition, the authors include suggestions for the best entry points and techniques for each level, and measures to avoid the most common pitfalls. Based on insights from the survey, case studies and interviews with experts, the authors also describe an emerging five-point methodology for successfully implementing analytics-driven management and rapidly creating value -as leading businesses are already managing to do. These include (1) focus on the biggest and highest data priorities, (2) within each of those priorities, start by asking questions, not by looking at the available data, (3) embed insights into business processes to make them more understandable and actionable, (4) keep existing capabilities and tools while adding new ones and (5) develop an overarching information agenda that enables decision making and strategy for the future.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Credit insurance and debt protection product seller Assurant Solutions ran a classic customer service call center -operationally optimized, "skills-routed,"managerially enlightened. But when it explored analytics-based approaches to rethinking how the center worked, a strange thing happened: The success rate for customer interactions tripled. According to Cameron Hurst, vice president of Targeted Solutions at Assurant, the result surprised them. "We learned that operational efficiency and those traditional metrics of customer experience like abandon rate, service levels and average speed to answer are not the things that keep a customer on the books."They found instead that technology could assist the company in retaining customers by leveraging the fact that some customer service reps are extremely successful at dealing with certain types of customers. Matching each specific in-calling customer to a specific customer service rep made a huge difference. Science and analytics couldn't quite establish why a particular rapport would be likely to happen, but they could look at past experience and predict with a lot of accuracy that a rapport would be likely to happen. In this SMR case-study interview, Hurst explains how Assurant Solutions figured out the right questions to ask, used analytics to focus on new ways to match customers with reps and figured out the best ways to solve the problem of conflicting goals.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In industry after industry, managers have taken deliberate steps to separate their value chains and shift important activities and functions to outside suppliers. But what happens when companies become too dependent on outside suppliers and cede them too much control when they lack the same degree of understanding and awareness about how important product or service elements fit together and what's necessary? How can they go about reestablishing critical internal levers? These questions arose during a multiyear research project examining supply strategy relating to new product development at a major European automotive company. In the late 1980s, the company -the authors call it Alpha -had direct supply relationships with more than 3,000 suppliers, most of them small companies that were involved in component production. In the early 1990s, however, management began shifting increasing amounts of design and engineering work to suppliers -a trend that was hastened by the proliferation of electronics in cars. By the mid-1990s, Alpha began to outsource the design of complete systems, such as dashboards, seats and safety systems. Alpha management hoped to increase flexibility, reduce lead times and cut development costs while improving product quality. But as the internal engineering teams got smaller and less up to date on the specific design and technical issues, problems emerged with integrating systems and making decisions about trade-offs. The article examines the difference between integrating physical systems and integrating the performance of such systems. The authors found that successful new product development depends on three main factors: component-specific knowledge; learning by doing; and technological renewal. Modular product architecture may make good sense for dealing with physical integration, but it is not adequate for resolving issues of performance.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The increase in outsourcing and offshoring of complex work has resulted in innovation efforts that require coordination across cultural, geographic and legal boundaries. If that coordination is mishandled, companies can find themselves needing to make multimillion- or even billion-dollar changes. The authors show how problems often arise along the boundaries between organizations and activities -with the likelihood of trouble increasing with the complexity of the work being done. Then they provide guidance on how to define boundaries. Specifically: What activities to combine/ separate; what should be in-sourced or outsourced; and what to onshore or offshore. Once boundaries have been established, the authors explain how they can be spanned by rules, technology and people. Even so, the complexity of the task makes midcourse corrections likely. Managers must anticipate and adapt their processes in order to reduce risk and, ultimately, cost.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Historically, most managers equated innovation primarily with the development of new products and new technologies. But increasingly, innovation is seen as applying to the development of new service offerings, business models, pricing plans and routes to market, as well as new management practices. There is now a greater recognition that novel ideas can transform any part of the value chain -and that products and services represent just the tip of the innovation iceberg. This shift of focus has implications for who "owns"innovation. It used to be the preserve of a select band of employees -be they designers, engineers or scientists -whose responsibility it was to generate and pursue new ideas, often in a separate location. But increasingly, innovation has come to be seen as the responsibility of the entire organization. For many large companies, in fact, the new imperative is to view innovation as an "all the time, everywhere"capability that harnesses the skills and imagination of employees at all levels. Making innovation everyone's job is intuitively appealing but very hard to achieve, but many companies have tried -and nearly all believe that's it's critical to continue trying. To understand these challenges, and to identify the innovation practices that work, the authors spent three years studying the process of innovation in 13 global companies. Many of the standard arguments for how to encourage innovation in large organizations were confirmed, but some surprises were uncovered as well. In this article the authors focus on the key insights that emerged from their research, organized around five persistent "myths"that continue to haunt the innovation efforts of many companies. The five myths are: (1) The Eureka Moment; (2) Built It and They Will Come; (3) Open Innovation Is the Future; (4) Pay Is Paramount; and, (5) Bottom Up Innovation Is Best.

In earlier work, the author has argued for the concept of open innovation -that companies should both organize their innovation processes to be more open to external knowledge and ideas and also let more of their ideas and knowledge flow to the outside when not being used internally. Yet initial discussion of open innovation contrasted it to traditional R&D and product development; this had the effect of placing the focus more on product and technology innovation than on service innovation. Open innovation works somewhat differently in service businesses, in part because the role of the customer is different; in a service business, the customer is often involved in an iterative process with the company that results in a customer experience. In addition, innovation processes work differently in services. Few companies have formal R&D operations for the services they provide, and the customer may need to participate throughout the service innovation process. Some of the concepts of open innovation apply readily to service innovation. For example, Amazon. com has not only created open service innovation by bringing the "outside in"-think of customer reviews on Amazon.com and third parties selling products via Amazon's site -but also by taking the"inside out,"by, for example, using internal knowledge and infrastructure to create a business selling cloud computing services to other companies. Companies interested in moving toward open service innovation can try techniques such as working closely with customers to develop new solutions for them; focusing offerings on utility for customers, rather than on products; and embedding the company in a customer's organization. Companies that have traditionally been product oriented may need to make some organizational changes, such as changing service pricing, as they move to a more service-oriented approach.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. MIT Sloan Management Review's second annual Sustainability & Innovation survey -exploring the current and projected sustainability-related practices of organizations and executives -was fielded during a year of bad public news for sustainability advocates. Between last year's much-publicized delay in reaching an international agreement on climate change in Copenhagen and the continuing economic malaise, it was hard to predict how sustainability would fare as a management priority. Would companies begin to scale back their efforts to adopt more efficient business practices and become less focused on sustainability-related issues? Would they put existing programs on hold? What assessments would they make about the implications for managers of the changing sustainability landscape, and how were their strategic plans for competing in the future being affected by sustainability concerns? This article is a first look at the results of the 2010 Sustainability & Innovation Executive Study -focusing especially on 12 top-line observations drawn from the survey data and separate in-depth executive interviews. The survey respondents included more than 3,107 managers and executives, representing every major industry and region of the world. This article offers answers to such questions as, Where does sustainability now fit on top management's agenda? Do top-performing companies see things differently? Who drives the agenda within companies? What does the C-suite think? And how do top managers go about making sustainability-related investment decisions when tangible information for weighing costs and benefits is often lacking?

During the recession, companies like Procter & Gamble, Hyundai, and Best Buy used adaptive pricing strategies, such as introducing lower-priced versions of products and adapting products to maintain affordability, to avoid across-the-board price cuts that can be difficult to reverse later. Now, as we wait for the economy to return to full speed, smart companies will learn from these strategies and develop plans to help their own businesses regain lost ground.

By now everyone is familiar with the glass ceiling, the informal barrier that keeps women out of top positions. Newer research has focused on why women have a better chance of getting a top job when an organization is facing a crisis-a phenomenon called the glass cliff. Two recent studies suggest that women are more likely to be promoted into these perilous positions in organizations with a history of male leadership, partly because stereotypically female attributes, such as communication and team-building skills, are especially valued during turbulent times.

Consumers and businesses alike are flocking to sites like Groupon, the web-based social media service that offers deep discounts if a certain number of users sign up. But there's a weak link in the value chain: employees. Many businesses fail to anticipate how the rush of customers will affect staff, and if staff are unhappy, customers are apt to have a bad experience. You should prepare your employees when planning a special offer and compensate them for the lower tips and longer hours they typically endure.

What is the secret sauce for the ideal employee? Stanford Business School professor Francis J. Flynn believes that it's guilt. According to his research findings, guilt-ridden employees are hardworking high performers who get the big picture. In other words, they're leaders.

Technology itself has become the great general manager. It can monitor performance closely, provide instant feedback, and even create reports and presentations. That leaves people with general management skills in a very vulnerable position. They must make two crucial investments: the first in acquiring and building knowledge or competencies that are valuable and rare; the second in developing new areas of proficiency throughout their working lives.

Though all decisions involve opportunity costs, most companies don't factor them into their marketing messages. A few firms, however, have found that pointing out trade-offs to consumers is an effective way to influence their purchasing choices.