個案總覽

The managers most responsible for a company's success or failure happen to be the ones with whom the CEO spends the least amount of time: frontline managers, such as shop-floor supervisors, heads of R&D or sales teams, and managers in restaurant chains or call centers. That's a mistake, says Hassan, the CEO who led dramatic turnarounds at Schering-Plough and Pharmacia and who is now a senior adviser at Warburg Pincus. In this article, Hassan makes the case that systematic interactions with individual and small groups of frontline managers are important to executing a company's strategy and represent an all-important feedback loop that allows the CEO to stay abreast of the latest developments in the business. He provides guidelines for how CEOs and other senior managers should structure interactions with this vital, and often overlooked, cadre of managers.

In the 2000s, the African economy finally began to stir. Africa is today the world's third fastest-growing region, and its collective GDP is roughly equal to Brazil's and Russia's. Africans spend nearly $900 billion on goods and services-far more than Indians do. Pent-up consumer demand on the continent is enormous, and so are the opportunities: Consider that telecom companies have added 316 million subscribers-more than the U.S. population-in Africa since 2000. Yet because of political instability and poverty, many companies have reservations about Africa. To help managers assess whether growth will continue there-and if so, where-McKinsey conducted an economic analysis of the continent and studied its consumer markets. The conclusion: Companies can no longer ignore Africa. But they need to manage risks, develop innovative strategies to deal with gaps in infrastructure and training, and recognize that it isn't one market. There are four main types of economies: diversified, oil exporting, transition, and pretransition. Each presents a different set of opportunities and challenges, and executives must develop their strategies accordingly.

A veteran top executive at two giant mutual fund companies, the author has also been an attorney, a government official, a law school professor, and a business school professor-sometimes simultaneously. Over the years, he has devised a number of principles and practices to maximize his personal productivity without sacrificing his health or family life. In this article he presents six of them. Know your comparative advantage. Focus not on what you do best but on what your organization most needs from you-and don't spend too much time on operational details. It's not the time you spend but the results you produce. Most executives put a huge amount of time into their jobs, assuming that more hours equal more value added. That's too simplistic. Think first, read or write second. Figure out your argument in advance; then jot down your four or five key points and write the concluding paragraph. Prepare your plan, but be ready to change it. Arrive early for a speaking engagement in order to grasp the mood of your audience and tailor your speech accordingly. Let others own their space. Instead of assigning detailed tasks, present general priorities and let your reports decide how to implement them.

In 1999, Mei Zhang quit her lucrative consulting job to launch WildChina, a small travel company in her native China. Nearly four years later, the SARS outbreak hit Asia, battering a travel industry still recovering from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Faced with this crisis, Zhang opted for drastic measures: WildChina ceased operations, she and the COO suspended their incomes, and all other employees went on vacation at 25% pay. These were prudent moves, but Zhang was still unprepared for the challenges of restarting her company once business picked up again. Employees she had trusted were not committed to the company, and WildChina needed to rebuild its client base. But Zhang revived the company, which is now a leader in its field. Looking back, Zhang sees that her first big move turned her into an entrepreneur, but it was the SARS experience, and the lessons she learned from it, that taught her how to be a CEO.

Tom Green, an aggressive young sales executive at self-service kiosk company D7 Displays, has been promoted to senior marketing specialist by Shannon McDonald, his division VP. Shannon had warned Tom that she was taking a chance with him and that he'd have to learn fast and work well with his new boss, Frank Davis, who wouldn't have chosen Tom for the position. On the job, Tom finds himself at odds with Frank and challenges him openly at a well-attended meeting. Frank begins to formally document deficiencies in Tom's performance, and McDonald falls in line with Frank. With his back against the wall, Tom must carefully consider his next move. Harvard Business School professor W. Earl Sasser presents the fictional case. Jeffrey Pfeffer, of Stanford University, and Paul Falcone, of Time Warner Cable, offer their expert commentary.

Mikhail Baryshnikov on reinvention, effective mentorship, and teamwork.

Tom Green, an aggressive young sales executive at self-service kiosk company D7 Displays, has been promoted to senior marketing specialist by Shannon McDonald, his division VP. Shannon had warned Tom that she was taking a chance with him and that he'd have to learn fast and work well with his new boss, Frank Davis, who wouldn't have chosen Tom for the position. On the job, Tom finds himself at odds with Frank and challenges him openly at a well-attended meeting. Frank begins to formally document deficiencies in Tom's performance, and McDonald falls in line with Frank. With his back against the wall, Tom must carefully consider his next move. Harvard Business School professor W. Earl Sasser presents the fictional case. Jeffrey Pfeffer, of Stanford University, and Paul Falcone, of Time Warner Cable, offer their expert commentary.

Tom Green, an aggressive young sales executive at self-service kiosk company D7 Displays, has been promoted to senior marketing specialist by Shannon McDonald, his division VP. Shannon had warned Tom that she was taking a chance with him and that he'd have to learn fast and work well with his new boss, Frank Davis, who wouldn't have chosen Tom for the position. On the job, Tom finds himself at odds with Frank and challenges him openly at a well-attended meeting. Frank begins to formally document deficiencies in Tom's performance, and McDonald falls in line with Frank. With his back against the wall, Tom must carefully consider his next move. Harvard Business School professor W. Earl Sasser presents the fictional case. Jeffrey Pfeffer, of Stanford University, and Paul Falcone, of Time Warner Cable, offer their expert commentary.

Real-time adaptation is crucial in today's unpredictable world. A plethora of revision triggers force organizations to adapt to a fluid reality. This article suggests that leaders need to develop the capacity for real-time adaptation since it is impossible to anticipate and plan for every eventuality. Super-flexibility is one way to achieve real-time adaptation. The term is an umbrella concept that encompasses agility and versatility, as well as resilience and robustness. In a practical sense, it is a dialectical capacity of withstanding turbulence, like a camel surviving in desert conditions, while transforming, like a chameleon changing its color. Based on the second edition of the book Super-Flexibility for Knowledge Enterprises (Springer, 2010) and distilling the authors' experience in Silicon Valley, this article describes the conceptual foundations of super-flexibility, and presents five action principles for becoming super-flexible.

An overlooked but important benefit of CSR is to insure a firm against a decline in reputation in the face of adverse events. Through a case study and a multi-year analysis of stock price responses for S&P 500 companies following product recalls, we find that firms that have high CSR ratings fare better than those that do not. Furthermore, a firm that is exceptional in both doing good and avoiding harm suffers virtually no reputational damage following negative media publicity. Using the results of this study, we offer a guide to managers for determining the appropriate amount and mix of CSR activities.

In recent years, the idea of conscious capitalism has emerged as an important alternative approach to the problems confronting American capitalism. Embraced by a number of corporations and prominent business leaders, it represents a new strategy for reconciling business, social, and environmental objectives. While this movement is an inspiring one and worthy of admiration, we believe the assumptions that underlie it suffer from a number of important limitations that make it unlikely for the movement to achieve the ambitious promises of its proponents. In fact, it is often difficult to do well by doing good, and few firms have been able to sustain superior social performance over the long run. Moreover, reconciling the interests of all the firm's stakeholders is often hard to achieve in practice. Most important, the adherents of conscious capitalism overlook the critical role that governments must play in reconciling corporate interests with broader public objectives.

Even slow-growing markets can be highly dynamic, if there is rapid turnover of the customer base. Examples include smoking cessation aids, video games, diapers, bridal magazines, and real estate agencies. Potential new entrants can assess the opportunities by calculating what the authors call the net turnover rate, or NTR-the ratio of new consumers to total consumers in a given year. They can then use several suggested strategies to break into these high-turnover markets and, once there, maintain their position.

Managers typically look for ways to reduce wait time to increase customer satisfaction. New research suggests there's a better approach: showing customers a representation of the effort, whether literal or not, being expended on their behalf while they wait. (The prototypical example is the travel website Kayak, which shows customers each airline it searches.) Studies show that customers prefer waiting when the work being done is transparent-even when the waits are longer or the results are no better than those obtained with shorter waits.

Although there's ample research to guide marketers in naming new products, little of it has addressed follow-on offerings, even though these make up the bulk of new products in many industries. Companies have two basic strategies to choose from. They can stick with a name, often adding a sequential indicator (PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3), or they can come up with an entirely new name (Nintendo's Wii). Three questions managers should consider when deciding whether brand-name continuation or brand-name change is the best way to go for their next-generation product.

How do effective managers get employees to act promptly? New research suggests that it's by making their requests at least twice. Though you may think redundancy is unnecessary and even a waste of time, a new study indicates that it helps your message cut through today's information overload.

The financial meltdown made clear that the executives of many major financial institutions were operating with inadequate or distorted information about the values and risks of their firms' assets. It's fair to say that business scholars bear some responsibility for that. Most of them are neither studying nor teaching emerging best practices in asset valuation and risk management. They need to begin exploring the interior of leading-edge companies to provide detailed, qualitative case studies.

As we continue to redefine capitalism, let's not discount the role of aspiration and the desire for luxuries in fueling productivity.

Choosing which innovative ideas to pursue is often an exercise in guesswork. But by using existing management tools in a new way, you can effectively gauge your innovation's potential along two crucial dimensions: Can it withstand market pressures from competitors? And can it deliver more economic value to customers than alternatives?

Excel model to complement a three-party negotiation exercise.

Excel model to complement a three-party negotiation exercise.