Technological and scientific innovation in recent years has opened up much research and development into renewable and alternative energies. Increasing pressure from environmental and governmental groups has led to the investigation of new and cleaner energy sources for the future. This case looks specifically at developments surrounding hydrogen-generated energy, focusing particularly on the possible benefits and market potential of such innovation and the challenges the industry might expect to encounter going forward.

Technological and scientific innovation in recent years has opened up much research, development and debate on the possibilities of colonizing other worlds. This case looks specifically at developments in the exploration of Mars, focusing particularly on the idea of inhabiting the planet, and the benefits and challenges this concept poses for the industry going forward.

A golden statue of a winged youth once perched on the roof of AT&T's old headquarters. But when AT&T lowered the 24-foot-high statue for regilding so that it could be placed in the company's new headquarters, the chairman was shocked to discover that the figure was anatomically correct. So he decreed that it also be gelded. The altered "Golden Boy" thus became a metaphor for AT&T's recent embattled history, and it serves as a cautionary symbol for all companies operating in today's brutal business environment, where perception can be as important as reality. While image consultants and executives work to gild a company's image, special interest groups and the media can geld a company with countless little cuts. The author, a former executive vice-president of public relations for AT&T, provides an insider's view of some of the company's most painful public relations scrapes. The author offers four lessons: Don't become hypnotized by your own buzz; understand the way the business media think; address the needs of all your stakeholders; and be sensitive to the possible emotional resonance of what appear to be straightforward facts.

The past decade may well be remembered as the era of the high-flying, aggressive leader. Corner-office titans like Kenneth Lay, Dennis Kozlowski, and Bernard Ebbers graced the covers of business magazines. Then scandal set in, and the stars fell to earth. In this article, social psychologist Roderick M. Kramer asks an important question: Why do so many leaders--not just in business, but also in politics, religion, and the media--display remarkable adeptness and ability while courting power, only to engage in even more remarkable bouts of folly once that power has been secured? Kramer, who has spent most of his career researching how leaders get to the top, says that the systems through which we select our leaders force executives to sacrifice the attitudes and behaviors that are essential to their survival once they have reached the top. Society has learned to consider risk taking and rule breaking as markers of good leadership. As a result, leaders come to believe that normal limits don't apply to them and that they are entitled to any spoils they can seize. The leaders who do remain grounded exhibit five common psychological and behavioral habits: They simplify their lives, remaining humble and "awfully ordinary." They shine a light on their weaknesses instead of trying to cover them up. They float trial balloons to uncover the truth and prepare for the unexpected. They sweat the small stuff. And they reflect more, not less.

As China's economy grows and opens further, the opportunity it presents to multinationals is changing. Foreign companies are moving to country development and new strategic choices. Now, foreign firms can actually go after the Chinese domestic market, and it's worth going after. Improvements in China's infrastructure, workforce, and regulatory environment are making it possible for companies to lower their costs to reap new competitive advantages. However, the reforms required for admission into the World Trade Organization will be politically difficult for China to implement, and its progress will be slowed by the scarcity of resources for the country's shaky banking system, the inadequacy of the social safety net, environmental problems, and local governments' cash shortage, among other things. But for at least the next ten years, multinationals should be the biggest winners in China. To reap the benefits, a multinational must properly nest its effort into its overall organization, show "one face to China" at the national level but also tailor local strategies, be wary of joint ventures, and mitigate risk, in particular the theft of intellectual property.

Most Westerners preparing for a business trip to China like to arm themselves with a list of etiquette how-tos. Such advice can help get companies in the door and even through the first series of business transactions. But it won't sustain the prolonged, year-in, year-out associations Chinese and western businesses can now achieve. During the authors' work with dozens of companies and thousands of American and Chinese executives over the past 20 years they have witnessed communication breakdowns between American and Chinese businesspeople time and time again. The root cause: the American side's failure to understand the much broader context of Chinese culture and values. Americans see Chinese negotiators as inefficient, indirect, and even dishonest, whereas the Chinese see American negotiators as aggressive, impersonal, and excitable. Such perceptions have deep cultural origins. Yet those who know how to navigate these differences can develop thriving, mutually profitable, and satisfying business relationships. Four cultural threads have bound the Chinese people together for some 5,000 years and these show through in Chinese business negotiations: agrarianism, morality, the Chinese pictographic language, and wariness of strangers. Ignore them at any time during the negotiation process, and the deal can easily fall apart.

Most multinational corporations are fascinated with China. Carried away by the number of potential customers and the relatively cheap labor, firms seeking a presence in China have traditionally focused on selling products, setting up manufacturing facilities, or both. But they've ignored an important development: the emergence of Chinese firms as powerful rivals--in China and also in the global market. In this article, Ming Zeng and Peter Williamson describe how Chinese companies like Haier, Legend, and Pearl River Piano have quietly managed to grab market share from older, bigger, and financially stronger rivals in Asia, Europe, and the United States. As the government's policies about the private ownership of companies changed from forbidding the practice to encouraging it, a new breed of Chinese companies evolved. The authors outline the four types of hybrid Chinese companies that are simultaneously tackling the global market. China's national champions are using their advantages as domestic leaders to build global brands. The dedicated exporters are entering foreign markets on the strength of their economies of scale. The competitive networks have taken on world markets by bringing together small, specialized companies that operate in close proximity. And the technology upstarts are using innovations developed by China's government-owned research institutes to enter emerging sectors such as biotechnology. Zeng and Williamson identify these budding multinationals, analyze their strategies, and evaluate their weaknesses.

During the soar-and-swoon days of the late 1990s, many people believed that information technology, and the Internet in particular, were "changing everything" in business. A fundamental change did happen in the 1990s, but it was less about technology than about competition. Under Director Diana Farrell, the McKinsey Global Institute has conducted an extensive study of productivity and its connection to corporate IT spending and use during that period. The study revealed that IT is important--but not central--to the fate of industries and individual companies. The primary factors in the productivity surge were competition and innovation. In those industries that saw increases in competitive intensity, managers were forced to innovate aggressively to protect their revenues and profits. Those innovations--in products, business practices, and technology--led to the gains in productivity. In fact, a critical dynamic of the new economy--the real new economy--is the virtuous cycle of competition, innovation, and productivity growth. During the 1990s, IT was a particularly powerful tool for three reasons: IT enabled the development of attractive new products and efficient new business processes, it facilitated the rapid industrywide diffusion of innovations, and it exhibited strong scale economies.

Companies selling multiple products in multiple territories face the difficult question of how to allocate marketing resources. But comparing the profit potential of, say, razors in Germany with batteries in the United Kingdom is a difficult analytical task that demands reams of data. Finding the optimal answer is only half the battle. The rest involves the political and organizational challenge of shifting the money around. One company, Samsung, overcame these challenges by using hard data, not intuition, to allocate its marketing dollars. Marketing executives undertook an intensive 18-month project to gather diverse and detailed information about more than 400 possible product-category and country combinations. It collected all that data in a single, easy-to-access site and used the software's analytical power to predict the impact of different allocation scenarios. Such what-if testing enables management to find the budget allocation that will yield the highest total marketing ROI. Samsung also worked to anticipate and defuse organizational resistance to change.

Jefferson Pilot Financial (JPF), a life insurance and annuities firm, was looking for new ways to grow. Its top managers recognized that JPF needed to differentiate itself in the eyes of its customers, the independent life-insurance advisers who sell and service policies. To establish itself as these advisers' preferred partner, it set out to reduce the turnaround time on policy applications, simplify the submission process, and reduce errors. JPF's managers looked to the "lean production" practices that U.S. manufacturers adopted in response to competition from Japanese companies. Lean production is built around the concept of continuous-flow processing--a departure from traditional production systems, in which large batches are processed at each step. JPF appointed a "lean team" to reengineer its New Business unit's operations, beginning with the creation of a "model cell"--a fully functioning microcosm of JPF's entire process. This approach allowed managers to experiment and smooth out the kinks while working toward an optimal design. The team applied lean-manufacturing practices, including placing linked processes near one another, balancing employees' workloads, posting performance results, and measuring performance and productivity from the customer's perspective. The results were so impressive that JPF is rolling out similar systems across many of its operations.

Bryant Pharmaceutical's flagship product, a popular arthritis medicine called Seflex, is selling well--but not well enough. With generic versions due on the shelves in a couple of years, the drug company is looking for a dramatic sales increase. VP Laura Goldenberg knows she has to reach more consumers, but in an environment where people bombarded with advertising are using devices such as TiVo to skip ads, her job has suddenly taken on a new intensity. In search of a new, gangbuster campaign, Laura and her ad agency come up with the idea of product placement--not your typical integration of a product into a television or movie script, but a less traditional approach. Their idea is to hire a much-loved, elderly actress to extol the virtues of Seflex on a morning news program. The news segment would be about arthritis, and Seflex would be casually mentioned during the interview. The company would have to pay the actress $1 million, and there are risks: What if it gets out that Bryant is paying her? What if the actress errs and says something about Seflex's side effects? Should the company green-light Laura's plan? This fictional case study looks at the pros and cons of traditional product placement and newer, more subtle alternatives to advertising. Commenting on the case in R0310A and R0310Z, are Bob Gamgort, president of Masterfoods USA; Michelle R. Nelson, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; FTC commissioner Mozelle W. Thompson; and Mike Sheehan, president and CEO of Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos.

Bryant Pharmaceutical's flagship product, a popular arthritis medicine called Seflex, is selling well--but not well enough. With generic versions due on the shelves in a couple of years, the drug company is looking for a dramatic sales increase. VP Laura Goldenberg knows she has to reach more consumers, but in an environment where people bombarded with advertising are using devices such as TiVo to skip ads, her job has suddenly taken on a new intensity. In search of a new, gangbuster campaign, Laura and her ad agency come up with the idea of product placement--not your typical integration of a product into a television or movie script, but a less traditional approach. Their idea is to hire a much-loved, elderly actress to extol the virtues of Seflex on a morning news program. The news segment would be about arthritis, and Seflex would be casually mentioned during the interview. The company would have to pay the actress $1 million, and there are risks: What if it gets out that Bryant is paying her? What if the actress errs and says something about Seflex's side effects? Should the company green-light Laura's plan? This fictional case study looks at the pros and cons of traditional product placement and newer, more subtle alternatives to advertising. Commenting on the case in R0310A and R0310Z, are Bob Gamgort, president of Masterfoods USA; Michelle R. Nelson, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; FTC commissioner Mozelle W. Thompson; and Mike Sheehan, president and CEO of Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos.

Bryant Pharmaceutical's flagship product, a popular arthritis medicine called Seflex, is selling well--but not well enough. With generic versions due on the shelves in a couple of years, the drug company is looking for a dramatic sales increase. VP Laura Goldenberg knows she has to reach more consumers, but in an environment where people bombarded with advertising are using devices such as TiVo to skip ads, her job has suddenly taken on a new intensity. In search of a new, gangbuster campaign, Laura and her ad agency come up with the idea of product placement--not your typical integration of a product into a television or movie script, but a less traditional approach. Their idea is to hire a much-loved, elderly actress to extol the virtues of Seflex on a morning news program. The news segment would be about arthritis, and Seflex would be casually mentioned during the interview. The company would have to pay the actress $1 million, and there are risks: What if it gets out that Bryant is paying her? What if the actress errs and says something about Seflex's side effects? Should the company green-light Laura's plan? This fictional case study looks at the pros and cons of traditional product placement and newer, more subtle alternatives to advertising. Commenting on the case in R0310A and R0310Z, are Bob Gamgort, president of Masterfoods USA; Michelle R. Nelson, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; FTC commissioner Mozelle W. Thompson; and Mike Sheehan, president and CEO of Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Some observers see outsourcing as a key trend (perhaps even the key trend) shaping the future of human resources. They envision HR departments focused entirely on strategic activities, leaving all the transactional and administrative activities to vendors. But, the author cautions that outsourcing any business activity creates potential risks as well as benefits: Companies can find themselves overly dependent on suppliers, and they can lose strength in strategically core competencies. The author synthesizes the strongest of the available research on the outsourcing decision and identifies the six key factors that companies should consider when making important outsourcing decisions. The framework, which helps assess the pros and cons of outsourcing, can be applied specifically to HR functions. In particular, it can help explicate the managerial issues of outsourcing agreements such as the recent landmark deal between BP and Exult Inc. That $600 million, seven-year arrangement provides a window into the many opportunities--and complexities--of HR outsourcing.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Over the past decade, companies have become increasingly aware of the social and environmental pressures facing business. Many management scholars and consultants have argued that these new demands offer terrific opportunities for progressive organizations, and innovation is one of the primary means by which companies can achieve sustainable growth. But, say the authors, the reality is that managers have had considerable difficulty dealing with sustainable-development pressures. Specifically, their innovation strategies are often inadequate to accommodate the highly complex and uncertain nature of these new demands. In response, the authors propose the concept of sustainable-development innovation, or SDI. In contrast to conventional, market-driven innovation, SDI considers the added constraints of social and environmental pressures. SDI is, therefore, usually more complex, because there is typically a wider range of stakeholders, and more ambiguous, as many of the parties have contradictory demands. Furthermore, sustainable-development pressures can be driven by science that has yet to be accepted fully by the scientific, political, and managerial communities. Organizations that fail to understand such issues could well find themselves making costly mistakes in bringing new technologies to market.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Corporate America has spent the last few years in restructuring mode, drastically reorganizing processes to wring profits from a battered economy. However beneficial these efforts may be to the bottom line, say the authors, a reliance on restructuring has had unintended negative side effects, as hierarchies that once controlled the direction of many companies become less relevant, and loyal employees become increasingly disheartened by disruptive--and often short-sighted--strategies. In response, companies resort to even more restructuring, frequently with less than optimal results. The authors recommend that companies shift away from knee-jerk responses such as restructuring and hierarchy building toward a transformation of established corporate structures, a wider distribution of knowledge, and the use of modern performance measurement systems and technologies. Citing examples at BP, North Carolina's Duke Power, and W.L. Gore, the authors claim that only companies developing their advantage on the agility and flexibility of their processes, people, and technologies can build lasting value for their company, customers, and employees.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. If a brand fails to develop or maintain differentiation, consumers have no basis for choosing it over others. The product's price will then be the determining factor in a decision to purchase. Absent differentiation, says the author, the core of any brand and its associated business--a loyal customer base--cannot be created or sustained. In a time when the competitive terrain for most brands is difficult to brutal, the author describes a new tool that can help companies maintain an advantage: the branded differentiator. A branded differentiator can be a feature, service, program, or ingredient. It must be meaningful to customers; that is, it must be both pertinent and substantial enough to matter when people are purchasing or using the product or service. It must also be actively managed (and, thus, be able to justify the investment of management time) over an extended period--years or even decades--so that it does not become stagnant. Explores the different types of branded differentiators, the pros and cons of developing them internally vs. looking outside for them, and questions about managing these brands-within-brands.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Most consumption experiences are the routine stuff of life--filling the gas tank, buying groceries, grabbing a quick lunch. Such tasks for the most part are neither fun nor painful; they're simply things that need to get checked off the list. Indeed, the authors say, they are so neutral that people often choose the seller with little thought and forget the experience in a matter of hours. Some providers of neutral services want to keep things that way. They want to be so convenient and reliable that people continue to use them unthinkingly. For certain mature service businesses, however, the addition of fun can be an important differentiator. The authors present three case studies taken from industries not known for fun--furniture retailing, consumer banking, and the grocery business--to show how it can be turned to profitable advantage. Jordan's Furniture, Commerce Bank, and Stew Leonard's operate their basic business models at a very high standard of excellence. But they also have what it takes to make a routine experience into something positive: strong leadership, a clear vision, a discriminating filter for new employees, a focus on hiring for attitudes rather than skills, and the ability to come up with the unexpected. The authors offer some general guidelines and cautionary notes to help managers who may want to try to emulate these successful companies.

Unifine Richardson is a food manufacturer with 110 employees. The company's sole supplier of honey announced that effective immediately it was no longer able to supply Chinese honey. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency had rejected the importation of Chinese honey due to recently found traces of an antibiotic chemical. China had provided 20 per cent of the world's honey supply. Faced with escalating prices, issues with customers' preferences and possible product recalls, the purchasing manager must determine the company's next step. International sourcing, supply disruptions, supply chain management and quality issues must be considered.

Quinte MRI is a small service provider of medical diagnostic technologies. After just six weeks in operation at a medical centre, the company developed an extensive waiting list, and physicians began referring patients to competing facilities. Quinte MRI's business development coordinators must provide recommendations and an action plan to deal with this process and productivity problem in a setting with extreme variability.