If a brand is the relationship between a business and its customers, the retail space is its most visceral conversation. Considering a shopper's context is the key to understanding their motivations and making green products and services more relevant to them. By better understanding what shoppers desire from green offerings and what matters in the context of their shopping experience - i.e. time and convenience - products and services can connect with people in a more relevant way. The authors, from leading design firm IDEO, describe four strategies for engaging shoppers with products that encourage a sustainable lifestyle for all.

Cities have an unprecedented opportunity to change the way they supply and use energy. New eco-cities such as Dongtan in China are leading the way, even as existing cities turn to technologies rooted in the past - from adobe architecture to passive solar heating. When complemented by conservation, more-efficient technologies, and new decentralized, small-scale energy services, these efforts can help cities confidently navigate the challenges ahead while reducing the impact of climate change. The authors show that, done right, energy transformation in cities can be the doorway to security and vitality in urban life.

The time has come to develop new mental models that reflect the complex inter-linkages between modern consumers and business. The lines between consumer and industrial marketing are blurring in five important ways, including the blurring of B2B and B2C marketing and the blurring of value chains. The author describes each, along with the implications they contain for bridging disciplinary silos and rethinking our approach to the roles of market research, customer experiences, metrics and dashboards.

Canada's Outstanding CEO of the Year for 2007, Gord Nixon of RBC Financial Group, talks to Roger Martin about some of his biggest challenges and opportunities as chief executive of Canada's largest bank. The interview touches on the effects of global financial turmoil on the bank and the opportunities such turmoil presents; his predictions for global banking in the near term; and why Newsweek named RBC the top large company in the world at effectively managing environmental risks.

The Clarinda Company is struggling and may go under. Its main customer has just pulled out, taking a quarter of the typesetting firm's revenues with it, and David, Clarinda's president, has had to lay off 20% of his workforce. What's more, he's also had to fire Dan, his longtime partner and mentor, for drunkenness. How much of this should David share with the others in his small customer base? He'd like to get their help in selling the firm - but will they all bail if they know just how leaky the ship has become? In R0805A and R0805Z four experts weigh in on this case study, based on the author's real-life entrepreneurial travails, recounted in his recent book, Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars. Tell all, says Jim Marsh, drawing from his own experience as CEO of a division of Cable & Wireless. By sharing both financial information and a turnaround plan, Marsh gained the trust and support of major customers, who gave his unit a second chance. Don't panic, says Rick Rickertsen, a principal at a private equity firm, and don't necessarily sell the business. Share only what will become common knowledge, ask no favors, and don't mention Dan. Instead, get back on your horse and try to save the company. Don't lie, says British publishing executive Richard Charkin, but don't tell the whole truth, either. Sell, by all means: Tell customers you're looking to refinance the company (selling is a form of refinancing) and invite them to take a stake. Don't tell customers everything, says professor Kimberly D. Elsbach, who has taught Silverman's book in her first-year MBA classes at the University of California, Davis. Elsbach suggests that David is misguidedly inclined to reveal all because he is confusing competency-based trust with interpersonal trust.

Advances in neurobiology have demonstrated that the brain is so sensitive to external experiences that it can be rewired through exposure to cultural influences. Experiments have shown that in some people, parts of the brain light up only when they are presented with an image of Bill Clinton. In others, it's Jennifer Aniston. Or Halle Berry. What other stimuli could rewire the brain? Is there a Boeing brain? A Goldman Sachs brain? No one really knows yet, says Medina, a developmental molecular biologist, who has spent much of his career exploring the mysteries of neuroscience with laypeople. As tempting as it is to try to translate the growing advances to the workplace, he warns, it's just too early to tell how the revolution in neurobiology is going to affect the way executives run their organizations. "If we understood how the brain knew how to pick up a glass of water and drink it, that would represent a major achievement," he says. Still, neuroscientists are learning much that can be put to practical use. For instance, exercise is good for the brain, and long-term stress is harmful, inevitably hurting productivity in the workplace. Stressed people don't do math very well, they don't process language very efficiently, and their ability to remember - in both the short and long terms - declines. In fact, the brain wasn't built to remember with anything like analytic precision and shouldn't be counted on to do so. True memory is a very rare thing on this planet, Medina says. That's because the brain isn't really interested in reality; it's interested in survival. What's more, and contrary to what many twentieth-century educators believed, the brain can keep learning at any age. "We are lifelong learners," Medina says. "That's very good news indeed."

Multiplayer online role-playing games are sprawling cybercommunities that offer a sneak preview of tomorrow's business environment. Players who lead teams in these online worlds hone the skills that they will need as business leaders in the future. Games also provide an environment that makes being an effective leader easier and that today's businesses might try to replicate selectively in their own organizations. Those are the principal findings by Reeves, of Stanford University; Malone, of MIT's Sloan School; and O'Driscoll, of North Carolina State. As part of an analysis conducted by Seriosity, a company that develops game-inspired enterprise software, the authors studied people who headed up teams in online games. They also sought the insights of gamers who have led real-world business teams at IBM. The authors identified three distinctive characteristics of leadership in online games that, as workplaces and the overall business climate become more dynamic and gamelike, will be essential for tomorrow's leaders: speed, risk taking, and acceptance of leadership roles as temporary. The most important finding, say the authors, is that getting the leadership environment right can be as important as choosing the right leader. They point out two aspects of game environments that companies might consider adopting: One, nonmonetary incentives built into a game economy strongly motivate individuals to accomplish group aims. Two, hypertransparency of information about, for example, team members' capabilities and teams' real-time performance makes it simpler to match people with tasks and to empower individuals to manage themselves.

From December 2000 to February 2008, the top 15 companies in the pharmaceutical industry lost roughly $850 billion in shareholder value. Although a number of factors - including the rise of generics, pricing pressures, regulatory requirements, and legal entanglements - are to blame, Garnier, the CEO of GlaxoSmith-Kline, believes that declining R&D productivity is his industry's primary problem. The way to solve it, he says, is to return power to the scientists - by reorganizing R&D into highly focused groups headed by inspirational leaders, seeking the best science outside as well as inside a company, fixing broken processes, and promoting a strong culture of innovation and passion for excellence. GSK has replaced its organizational pyramid with 12 "centers of excellence." The company has worked to untangle the quest for breakthrough drugs from the effort to develop best-in-class offerings and has overhauled incentives for the scientists who actually make discoveries. It has also pursued contractual relationships with academia and biotech companies in a bid to secure the best science, wherever it may reside. When the company began a sweeping reengineering of its R&D, it had only two products in late-stage development. Today it has 34 - the most in the industry. But much more remains to be done, the author says. Significant cost efficiencies could be achieved by offshoring clinical trials. Development of new blockbuster drugs could be simplified and accelerated if researchers targeted only a limited segment of the potential patient population and then expanded to others over time. The innovation malaise in pharmaceuticals is not unique, Garnier says. Many other industries face the same challenges. A cultural revolution and a broad transformation of the organization are necessary first steps to rebuilding the R&D engine.

In the heat of competition, executives can easily become obsessed with beating their rivals. This adrenaline-fueled emotional state, which the authors call competitive arousal, often leads to bad decisions. Managers can minimize the potential for competitive arousal and the harm it can inflict by avoiding certain types of interaction and targeting the causes of a win-at-all-costs approach to decision making. Through an examination of companies such as Boston Scientific and Paramount, and through research on auctions, the authors identified three principal drivers of competitive arousal: intense rivalry, especially in the form of one-on-one competitions; time pressure, found in auctions and other bidding situations, for example; and being in the spotlight - that is, working in the presence of an audience. Individually, these factors can seriously impair managerial decision making; together, their consequences can be dire, as evidenced by many high-profile business disasters. It's not possible to avoid destructive competitions and bidding wars completely. But managers can help prevent competitive arousal by anticipating potentially harmful competitive dynamics and then restructuring the deal-making process. They can also stop irrational competitive behavior from escalating by addressing the causes of competitive arousal. When rivalry is intense, for instance, managers can limit the roles of those who feel it most. They can reduce time pressure by extending or eliminating arbitrary deadlines. And they can deflect the spotlight by spreading the responsibility for critical competitive decisions among team members. Decision makers will be most successful when they focus on winning contests in which they have a real advantage - and take a step back from those in which winning exacts too high a cost.

When products become commodities, manufacturing companies may seek to differentiate themselves with value-added services - a potentially profitable strategy. Unfortunately, companies often stumble in the effort. Reinartz and Ulaga conducted in-depth studies of 18 leading companies in a broad variety of product markets to learn what distinguished the successes from the rest. They discovered four steps to developing a profitable services capability. Recognize that you already have a service company. You can identify and charge for simple services - as Merck did when it stopped quietly absorbing shipping costs. Switching services from free to fee clarifies their value for managers as well as for customers. Industrialize the back office. To prevent delivery costs from eating up service-offering margins, build flexible service platforms, closely monitor process costs, and exploit new technologies that enable process innovations. The Swedish bearings manufacturer SKF provided off-site access to an online monitoring tool that could warn of potential failure in customers' machines. Create a service-savvy sales force.Services require longer sales cycles and, often, decisions from high up in a customer's hierarchy; what's more, product salespeople may be inimical to change. Schneider-Electric did a major overhaul of its sales organization and trained its people to switch from cost-plus pricing to value-based pricing. Focus on customers' processes and the opportunities they afford for new service offerings. You may need to acquire new capabilities to take advantage of those opportunities: The industrial coatings specialist PPG had to learn how painting robots function after it offered to take over Fiat's Torino paint shop. Services can both lock in customers and help acquire new accounts. They should be developed with care and attention.

In today's complex world, companies often find themselves facing confounding strategy problems. These issues are not just tough or persistent; they're "wicked" - a label used by urban planners for problems that cannot be definitively resolved. Poverty and terrorism are classic examples. A wicked problem has innumerable causes, morphs constantly, and has no correct answer. It can be tamed, however, with the right approach. In this article, Camillus, a professor at the Katz Graduate School of Business, explains how executives can tell if they're dealing with a wicked strategy problem. In a 15-year study involving 22 companies, he identified five key criteria. If a problem involves many stakeholders with conflicting priorities; if its roots are tangled; if it changes with every attempt to address it; if you've never faced it before; and if there's no way to evaluate whether a remedy will work, chances are good that it's wicked. According to the author, the need for faster growth is, in all likelihood, a wicked issue for Wal-Mart. Traditional linear processes - identifying the issue, gathering data, studying all the options, choosing one strategy - don't work with wicked problems. They instead demand social processes that constantly engage stakeholders, explore related issues, reevaluate the problem's definition, and reconsider the assumptions of stakeholders. A strong corporate identity is essential: It serves as a rudder that helps the enterprise navigate a sea of choices. Because it's impossible to tell which options are appropriate, executives should stop analyzing them and start experimenting with actions. Eventually they will make progress by muddling through. Envisioning possible futures and identifying moves that will realize the one the company hopes for will uncover promising remedies. That's how PPG Industries, a 100-year-old manufacturer, has successfully coped with its wicked strategy issues.

We all know that people "hire" products and services to get a job done. Surgeons hire scalpels to dissect soft tissue. Janitors hire soap dispensers and paper towels to remove grime from their hands. To find ways to innovate, it's critical to deconstruct the job the customer is trying to get done from beginning to end, to gain a complete view of all the points at which a customer might desire more help from a product or service. A methodology called job mapping helps companies analyze the biggest drawbacks of the products and services customers currently use and discover opportunities for innovation. It involves breaking down the task the customer wants to accomplish into the eight universal steps of a job: (1) defining the objectives, (2) locating the necessary inputs, (3) preparing the physical environment, (4) confirming that everything is ready, (5) executing the task, (6) monitoring its progress, (7) making modifications as necessary, and (8) concluding the job. Job mapping differs substantively from process mapping in that the goal is to identify what customers are trying to get done at every step, not what they are doing currently. For example, when an anesthesiologist checks a monitor during a surgical procedure, the action taken is just a means to the end. Detecting a change in patient vital signs is the job the doctor is trying to get done. Within each of the discrete steps lie multiple opportunities for making the job simpler, easier, or faster. By mapping out every step of the job and locating those opportunities, companies can discover new ways to differentiate their offerings.

Measuring the effectiveness of marketing investments can be frustrating - especially if a company focuses on a long-term outcome like increasing customer equity. Though there are decision-support models to help marketers allocate their budgets, until recently such models aimed to maximize near-term sales, which aren't always consistent with long-term brand health. Now, however, Wachovia has created a model that helps it make customer-equity-driven marketing-mix decisions. The model's architects - Hanssens, a professor at UCLA; Thorpe, a senior vice president at Wachovia; and Finkbeiner, an executive VP at TNS - began by parsing customer equity, or the lifetime value of customers, into three measurable components: customer acquisition, customer retention, and share of wallet. They then assembled data on past marketing activities and changes in the components - a daunting task, given the decentralized nature of previous investments. Once the database was created, a model of how investments affected outcomes could be built and used to design equations focusing on marketing-mix questions. Wachovia now has, for example, an equation to estimate how an increase in cable TV advertising will affect customer acquisition in a market. Just as important, the model highlights how much factors beyond the control of marketing, such as economic swings, affect outcomes. After Wachovia began using the model, it found, as suspected, that a marketing mix with maximum short-term impact would not achieve the biggest increase in customer equity. Wachovia learned that it was overinvesting in traditional channels and underinvesting in emerging ones. The introduction of this decision-making tool has also supported a broader cultural shift at the company toward competing on analytics.

The Clarinda Company is struggling and may go under. Its main customer has just pulled out, taking a quarter of the typesetting firm's revenues with it, and David, Clarinda's president, has had to lay off 20% of his workforce. What's more, he's also had to fire Dan, his longtime partner and mentor, for drunkenness. How much of this should David share with the others in his small customer base? He'd like to get their help in selling the firm - but will they all bail if they know just how leaky the ship has become? In R0805A and R0805Z four experts weigh in on this case study, based on the author's real-life entrepreneurial travails, recounted in his recent book, Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars. Tell all, says Jim Marsh, drawing from his own experience as CEO of a division of Cable & Wireless. By sharing both financial information and a turnaround plan, Marsh gained the trust and support of major customers, who gave his unit a second chance. Don't panic, says Rick Rickertsen, a principal at a private equity firm, and don't necessarily sell the business. Share only what will become common knowledge, ask no favors, and don't mention Dan. Instead, get back on your horse and try to save the company. Don't lie, says British publishing executive Richard Charkin, but don't tell the whole truth, either. Sell, by all means: Tell customers you're looking to refinance the company (selling is a form of refinancing) and invite them to take a stake. Don't tell customers everything, says professor Kimberly D. Elsbach, who has taught Silverman's book in her first-year MBA classes at the University of California, Davis. Elsbach suggests that David is misguidedly inclined to reveal all because he is confusing competency-based trust with interpersonal trust.

The Clarinda Company is struggling and may go under. Its main customer has just pulled out, taking a quarter of the typesetting firm's revenues with it, and David, Clarinda's president, has had to lay off 20% of his workforce. What's more, he's also had to fire Dan, his longtime partner and mentor, for drunkenness. How much of this should David share with the others in his small customer base? He'd like to get their help in selling the firm - but will they all bail if they know just how leaky the ship has become? In R0805A and R0805Z four experts weigh in on this case study, based on the author's real-life entrepreneurial travails, recounted in his recent book, Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars. Tell all, says Jim Marsh, drawing from his own experience as CEO of a division of Cable & Wireless. By sharing both financial information and a turnaround plan, Marsh gained the trust and support of major customers, who gave his unit a second chance. Don't panic, says Rick Rickertsen, a principal at a private equity firm, and don't necessarily sell the business. Share only what will become common knowledge, ask no favors, and don't mention Dan. Instead, get back on your horse and try to save the company. Don't lie, says British publishing executive Richard Charkin, but don't tell the whole truth, either. Sell, by all means: Tell customers you're looking to refinance the company (selling is a form of refinancing) and invite them to take a stake. Don't tell customers everything, says professor Kimberly D. Elsbach, who has taught Silverman's book in her first-year MBA classes at the University of California, Davis. Elsbach suggests that David is misguidedly inclined to reveal all because he is confusing competency-based trust with interpersonal trust.

In September of 2001, 24 Calgary firefighters ended up in hospital with throat and eye irritations, severe breathing problems and headaches after fighting a fire at a battery plant. The blaze looked like a routine fire; the industrial fire was seen as just another assignment that needed to be taken care of. The working atmosphere at the fire hall was impacted. Some firefighters commented that they had expected to be better looked after, that they did not have enough information about what was inside the burning plant. Where had things gone wrong? What specific lessons should be carried forward?

Facebook was one of the many social networking Web sites (such as MySpace.com) that launched in 2004. A free-access site that allowed users to connect and interact with other people, Facebook was immensely popular, having millions of active users. Of course, putting questionable content on one's Facebook page could become a source of embarrassment. In this case, consulting firm manager Miranda Shaw is trying to decide between two highly qualified applicants for a position in her company. She's leaning toward hiring one candidate until she finds photos on his Facebook page of him partaking in unsuitable activities (smoking pot, etc.) during college. Shaw is no longer certain about her decision. This case provides a brief and simple way to look at the issues, privacy and others, of social networking sites.

Miranda Shaw had decided to do a Google search on the two finalists for the open position in her company. Based on the photos she saw on her preferred applicant's Facebook page, she decided to hire the other applicant, whose Internet search returned no controversial results. But Shaw found herself wondering if it had been ethical for her to base her decision on a Facebook page, because she had not told either applicant that she would be using the Internet to research them.

This case details the various issues, dilemmas, and complexities of immigration as it relates both to business and American society in general. MegaBank manager Judson Dillon is on the verge of finalizing a $65 million equity investment in the world's largest tomato greenhouse, HydroFruit, Inc., which he believes is an attractive investment opportunity. At the same time, he suspects that the company is an employer of illegal immigrants. Immigration was currently a politically, socially, and legally hot topic in the United States. Laws had been enacted to ensure that employers did not hire illegal immigrants, yet many in the United States said that getting rid of all illegal immigrants was an impossible and, for the U.S. agricultural economy, destructive move. On the surface, HydroFruit was in compliance with all minimum legal requirements, but that didn't mean that some illegals didn't slip through the cracks, and the company's CFO had admitted to Dillon one night that "Without illegals, our industry stops dead." In Dillon's mind, this comment reinforced his suspicion that HydroFruit was no different from many other employers in the agricultural industry, as well as his belief that it simply wouldn't be practical for Congress to disrupt such an important segment of the U.S. economy. Yet MegaBank could not invest in a company that it knew-or suspected of-acting illegally.

This case describes the leadership initiatives of two of General Electric’s (GE) chief executive officers: Jack Welch and Jeffrey Immelt. Under Jack Welch’s leadership, GE, one of the most admired firms in the world, began its transformation from a manufacturing conglomerate to one that focused on services. Welch’s stature as a management leader grew as GE’s stock price increased. Many of Welch’s management practices were adopted by U.S. and global organizations. While his changes resulted in excellent financial performance sustained over a long period of time, not everyone in GE agreed with his methods. Welch’s departure in 2001 triggered a steep decline in GE’s stock price. His successor, Jeffrey Immelt, took over the company days before the terrorist attacks in September 2001 and spent the following years preparing the firm for its next stage of growth.