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It's a fact of organizational life: some employees are more talented than others. Douglas Ready explains how to retain your 'high-potentials' (HiPos), who represent the top three-to- five per cent of your organization's workforce on two key dimensions: performance and living the company's values. He also discusses some of the downsides of being labeled a HiPo.

The good news is, more and more workplaces are embracing flexible work arrangements. The bad news is, employees aren't. The authors explain why this is, and delve into the 'class' issues associated with workplace flexibility. They also show that employees classified as 'professionals', 'the working poor' and the 'missing middle' face significantly-different challenges in their quest for work/life balance.

All day long, we are creating frames for what we see, hear, and experience, and those frames both inform and limit the way we think. In most cases, we don't even consider these frames-we just assume we are looking at the world with the proper set of lenses. The author shows how mastering the ability to reframe problems can unlock a vast array of solutions to problems big and small.

Levels of stress, exhaustion, and burnout have become increasingly problematic for employees and organizations alike. Understanding how employees recover from the demands of work is therefore increasingly important. The author focuses on a little-discussed area of resource renewal: within-workday breaks. He argues that not all work breaks are created equal: an individual's personality and job design determine whether a break will lead to increased productivity or not.

Harvard Professor and Thinkers50 member Amy Edmondson introduces the concept of 'teaming' and discusses the critical importance of embracing it and adopting a mindset of 'execution as learning'. She defines teaming and also indicates the importance of continuous learning to effective teaming.

Repatriation of the previously off-shored call center operations of the US Airlines was being completed in the summer of 2011. Reservation Director of the East Region considered this to be an opportunity to high quality and faster service to the "preferred customers" by establishing a preferred customer desk at the Winston-Salem Center. The headquarters has asked the director to provide an in-depth analysis of the proposal's costs and benefits before it can be approved. The wider question of the case is to cogitate whether this initiative has merit. Is it likely to provide enough advantages (both quantifiable such as shorter average wait times and non-quantifiable such as the perception by the customers of the service quality) to justify any additional personnel costs? The call centers operate 24/7 and experience varying call volumes. This causes the required number of agents to economically achieve some targeted average wait times to greatly fluctuate during each time increment (e.g., each hour). Therefore the case, more narrowly, focuses on the challenges of (1) the fundamental trade-off between wait times and agent utilization; and (2) scheduling of the start times of the standard 8-hour shifts to provide adequate coverage during each period. The Instructor's manual provides extensive analyses based on multiserver queuing models and linear programming of these technical issues. In addition, the case provides rich opportunities to discuss human resource strategies and their role in securing competitive advantage.

Netshoes is the largest online specialty retailer in Brazil, with sales approaching R$1b ($512m USD) in 2012, and annual growth next to 30%. With over 70% of its sales concentrated in the south of Brazil, the company has decided to expand internationally simultaneously starting operations in Argentina and Mexico. Both countries have in common a passion for soccer, economic affluence, and urban density, and large populations. The fact, however, that there is a large unexploited market at home works against the internationalization decision. The competition by several larger players seeking to increase their scale of operations (brick and mortar, flash fashion sales), and the possibility of foreign players (e.g., Amazon.com) entering Brazil via acquisition represents a major competitive risk for Netshoes.com. In addition, the challenge is trying to recreate the customer experience and launch a new positioning strategy to compete in the multi-screen retail world.

As her top 60 executives arrived in London for the first strategic planning meeting after Ahrendts took the helm, she noticed that not one of them was wearing a Burberry trench coat, despite the damp, gray weather. It was a sign of the challenges the company faced. Even in a burgeoning global market, Burberry was growing at only 2% a year. It had lost focus in the process of global expansion: Each of the 23 licensees around the world was doing something different. Ubiquity was robbing the brand of its luster. Ahrendts realized that if Burberry was going to be a great, pure, global luxury brand, it needed to have one design director--a "brand czar"--and it needed to capitalize on its historical core: the trench coat. The company decided to innovate at the core to attract the luxury customers of the future: millennials.

A potent mix of modern technology and new government policy is about to transform disclosure--and with it the workings of many parts of the economy, say Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago and Will Tucker of ideas42. Increasingly, government-owned data and private-company disclosures will be made available in machine-readable formats, spurring growth of new services the authors call "choice engines"--technologies that interpret this data. Choice engines have already made significant inroads in revolutionizing markets. Consider the travel industry and websites such as Expedia and Travelocity that allow customers to bypass travel agents and search for and purchase flights and hotels. And travel sites are just the beginning. Not sure whether you should buy a laptop now or wait until prices drop? Go to Decide.com. Worried that an unwanted subscription will automatically renew? Sign up for BillGuard, a service that monitors your bank and credit card statements and sends you alerts about recurring charges. Want to lower your household energy consumption? Check out your usage patterns through the industry-led Green Button initiative. Have a family member allergic to gluten? Get a choice engine to use your shopping history to analyze food purchases and highlight items to avoid. If this sounds too good--or scary--to be true, look at the history of GPS, the now-ubiquitous global positioning system. When the U.S. government ordered the military to stop scrambling select data from Department of Defense satellites, in 2000, making the data freely available to the public, entrepreneurs quickly took over. GPS innovation has been a disaster for companies that sell maps on paper, but for consumers and the economy as a whole, it's been a boon. According to recent estimates, GPS added $90 billion in value to the U.S. economy just in 2011. The rise of choice engines, say the authors, will have an even greater, more transformative effect on the economy and on consumers' lives.

In three major waves of change over the past 30 years, employers and workers have converged on new arrangements for getting knowledge work done. First, home computers and e-mail spawned an army of freelancers, offering both workers and employers new flexibility. Next, mobile technology and global teamwork gave the same kind of work-anywhere, work-anytime flexibility to full-time employees, without asking them to forsake career progress and development within their companies. Now, in a third wave, new ways of providing community and shared space are curing a side effect of virtualization--worker isolation--and driving increased collaboration. The authors write that to make the most of this third wave of change, employers should rethink the compact they forge with workers. Five fundamental aspects of knowledge work require fresh thinking: the value of the relationship with a larger enterprise; the settings in which work is done; the organization of workflows and how individual contributors add value; the technologies used to support higher achievement; and the degree to which employment arrangements are tailored to individuals. The three waves of transformation surge forward at differing velocities across sectors and geographies and mix together in societies. Understanding how your business participates in each wave will help you make wise decisions about technology, work models, talent sources, and people practices.

Top talent is an invaluable asset: In highly specialized or creative work, for instance, "A" players are likely to be six times as productive as "B" players. So when your company has a crucial strategic project, why not multiply all that firepower and have a team of your best performers tackle it? Yet many companies hesitate to do this, believing that all-star teams don't work: Big egos will get in the way. The stars won't be able to work with one another. They'll drive the team leader crazy. Mankins, Bird, and Root of Bain & Company believe it's time to set aside that thinking. They have seen all-star teams do extraordinary work. But there is a right way and a wrong way to organize them. Before you can even begin to assemble such a team, you need to have the right talent management practices, so you hire and develop the best people and know what they're capable of. You have to give the team appropriate incentives and leaders and support staffers who are stars in their own right. And projects that are ill-defined or small scale are not for all-star teams. Use them only for critical missions, and make sure their objectives are clear. Even with the right setup, things can still go wrong. The wise executive will take steps to manage egos, prune non-team-players, and prevent average coworkers from feeling completely undervalued. She will also invest a lot of time in choosing the right team leader and will ask members for lots of feedback to monitor how that leader is doing.

For years, people have bemoaned executives' zealous focus on short-term results, which often leads CEOs to make moves that undermine their firms' long-term prospects and, some say, act irresponsibly. But all the talk won't change anything if the business world doesn't adopt a new way of measuring performance. Three professors from France's Insead believe they have the answer: an innovative scorecard that evaluates CEOs on the basis of the results they delivered over their entire tenures in office. It incorporates three metrics: industry-adjusted shareholder returns, country-adjusted shareholder returns, and increase in market capitalization over that time frame. Using this scorecard, the authors have studied and objectively ranked the performance of thousands of CEOs of major corporations around the world. In this issue, we reveal who made it into the top 100. This is the second installment of the ranking, which we published for the first time three years ago. Since then, the authors have expanded the group of CEOs studied, making it even more global. And, recognizing the growing sentiment that great financial performance is no longer enough, they also looked at social and environmental ratings to see which of the top CEOs also did well on those metrics. Accompanying this year's list is an interview with Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, whose well-known focus on the long term has served his company extremely well--earning him the #2 spot in the ranking.

Some people are practically phobic about going to the bargaining table. If their minimum needs are met, they'll sign on the dotted line just to end the stress of dealing with people who have different agendas and styles. But that can be an expensive aversion, the authors write. When you're facing an important negotiation, rigorous preparation--running the numbers, scouting the marketplace, developing a Plan B--is essential. But it's only half the story. The truth is that your passions matter in real-life deal making and dispute resolution. You need to understand, channel, and learn from your emotions in order to adapt to the situation at hand and engage others successfully. The authors studied 20 seasoned negotiators to explore their thoughts and feelings about the process. They invited their participants to find and combine pictures that metaphorically depicted those feelings, and to describe in in-depth interviews the collages they'd created. Three reasons for the stressfulness of the negotiation experience emerged: lack of control, unpredictability, and the absence of feedback. This article includes a six-step warm-up exercise to help you prepare emotionally to negotiate effectively.

As managers seek to exploit the tremendous amounts of data now available from internal and external sources, they're likely to use the approach they use with all their IT projects--that is, they'll focus on building and deploying technology on time, to plan, and within budget. That works for projects designed to improve business processes and increase efficiency, but when it comes to extracting valuable insights from data and using information to make better decisions, managers need a different approach and mind-set. A big data or analytics project is likely to be smaller and shorter than a conventional IT initiative, such as installing an ERP system. It's also more like scientific research. Commissioned to address a problem or opportunity, such a project frames questions, develops hypotheses, and then experiments to gain knowledge and understanding. The authors have identified five guidelines for taking this voyage of discovery: 1) Place users--the people who will create meaning from the information--at the heart of the initiative; 2) Unlock value from IT by asking second-order questions and giving teams the freedom to reframe business problems; 3) Equip teams with cognitive and behavioral scientists, who understand how people perceive problems and analyze data; 4) Focus on learning by facilitating information sharing, examining assumptions, and striving to understand cause and effect; and 5) Worry more about solving business problems than about deploying technology.

We've all heard of (or experienced) the "boss from hell." But that's just one form that incivility in the workplace can take. Rudeness on the job is surprisingly common, and it's on the rise. Whether it involves overt bullying or subtle acts of thoughtlessness, incivility takes a toll. It erodes productivity, chips away at morale, leads employees to quit, and damages customer relationships. Dealing with its aftermath can soak up weeks of managerial attention and time. Over the past 14 years the authors have conducted interviews with and collected data from more than 14,000 people throughout the United States and Canada in order to track the prevalence, types, causes, costs, and cures of incivility at work. They suggest several steps leaders can take to counter rudeness. Managers should start with themselves--monitoring their own behavior, asking for feedback on it, and making sure that their actions are a model for others. When it comes to managing the organization, leaders should hire with civility in mind, teach it on the job, create group norms, reward good behavior, and penalize bad behavior. Lest consistent civility seem an extravagance, the authors caution that just one habitually offensive employee critically positioned in an organization can cost millions in lost employees, lost customers, and lost productivity.

Corruption is the greatest impediment to conducting business in Russia, according to leaders recently surveyed by the World Economic Forum. Indeed, it's a problem in many emerging markets, and businesses have a role to play in combating it, according to Healy and Ramanna. The authors focus on RosPil--an anticorruption entity in Russia set up by Alexey Navalny, a crusader against public and private malfeasance in that country. As of December 2011, RosPil claimed to have prevented the granting of dubious contracts worth US$1.3 billion. The organization holds corrupt politicians' and bureaucrats' feet to the fire largely through internet-based crowdsourcing, whereby often-anonymous people identify requests for government-issued tenders that are designed to generate kickbacks. Should entities like RosPil be supported, and should companies fashion their own responses to corruption? On the one hand, there are obvious public-relations and political risks; on the other hand, corruption can erode a firm's competitiveness, the trust of customers and employees, and even the very legitimacy of capitalism. The authors argue that heads of many multinational companies are well positioned to combat corruption in emerging markets. Those leaders have the power to enforce policies in their organizations and networks, and they enjoy the ability to organize others in the industry against this pernicious threat.

The more uncertain your environment, the greater the opportunity--if you have the leadership skills to capitalize on it. Research at the Wharton School and at the authors' consulting firm, involving more than 20,000 executives to date, has identified six skills that, when mastered and used in concert, allow leaders to think strategically and navigate the unknown effectively. They are the abilities to anticipate, challenge, interpret, decide, align, and learn. This article describes the six skills in detail and includes a self-assessment that will enable you to identify the ones that most need your attention. The authors have found that strength in one skill cannot easily compensate for a deficit in another. An adaptive strategic leader has learned to apply all six at once.

A Taiwanese manufacturer of hybrid-car parts faces risks to its proprietary technology in its partnership with a Chinese automaker. Case Study authored by Willy C. Shih and Jyun-Cheng Wang, featuring commentaries by experts Eric Giler and Mats H. Olsson.

David McCullough, historian and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Truman and John Adams, on what the history of leadership means for managers today.

A Taiwanese manufacturer of hybrid-car parts faces risks to its proprietary technology in its partnership with a Chinese automaker. Case Study authored by Willy C. Shih and Jyun-Cheng Wang, featuring commentaries by experts Eric Giler and Mats H. Olsson.