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Roger Martin interviews best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell about his latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown and Company, 2008) and finds that success is much more complex than we might think. Gladwell explains that, if we want to understand why some people thrive and others don't, we should spend the bulk of our time looking around the individual - at such things as their family, their birthplace, even their birth date. Along the way he touches on 'disadvantages that turn into advantages'; the powerful learning strategy of compensating for one's weaknesses; and why only 30 per cent of any outcome can be correlated with general intelligence.

For years, Rotman School of Management Vice Dean Jim Fisher has been bringing Shakespeare's Henry V to business-school classrooms, and in this interview he explains why. He explains how, despite having the cards stacked squarely against him, Henry ends up with the outcome he wants. As he shows, this involves a recognition that with your authority, all you can do is get people to do the minimum necessary to keep their job: everything they give you over and above the minimum, they volunteer to do - every shred. Along the way he provides tips from bringing Henry's approach into the modern day workplace.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Two very different ways of thinking about investment and risk are in competition. One emphasizes the financial risk of investing; the other concerns the competitive risk of not investing. In normal times, the bearishness of the former tends to complement the bullishness of the latter. But during extremes in the business cycle, the author argues, the balance between the two can break down. Specifically, companies seem to overemphasize the financial risk of investing at the bottom of the business cycle, at the expense of the competitive risk of not investing. This is dangerous, in the author's view, because it can create a lasting competitive disadvantage. Using examples from the semiconductor, paper and diamond industries, the author argues that it doesn't make sense to stamp out either financial or competitive risk, even though financial risk could be eliminated by investing not at all and competitive risk could be eliminated by investing indiscriminately. Instead, managers need to strike a balance between the errors implicit in these two types of risk: the error of pursuing too many unprofitable investment opportunities as opposed to the error of passing up too many potentially profitable ones. The original version of this article was published in the Sloan Management Review in Winter 1993. In this updated version, the author expands his views in light of the 2008 economic downturn.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In their 1998 Sloan Management Review article "Preserving Employee Morale During Downsizing," the authors maintained that strong organizations need to develop resilience so they could take advantage of new opportunities that arise during periods of economic retrenchment. They detailed four stages of downsizing programs: deciding to downsize, planning the program, making the announcement and implementing the program. In this sequel, the authors argue that downsizing programs aren't just about "doing more with less."They also provide opportunities to build a sense of trust and empowerment between managers and employees, which can provide significant benefits going forward. In addition to examining the impacts downsizing has on surviving employees and how survivors can influence whether a program is successful, the article explores three new areas that the authors have come to recognize as important to the success of downsizing efforts: (1) how organizations must become more flexible, (2) how they must become more innovative and creative, and (3) how they must improve their communications with stakeholders who are increasingly skeptical of downsizing efforts.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In his 2004 MIT Sloan Management Review article "Principles of the Master Cyclist,"the author made the case for why companies need to learn how to integrate strategic business-cycle management into their tool kits. The article presented a set of principles that savvy managers can use in making tactical decisions (in areas such as inventory management, marketing and pricing) and strategic decisions (in areas such as capital expansion and mergers and acquisitions). At the time of publication, there was a growing perception that the business cycle had largely been "tamed" by the sophisticated application of discretionary fiscal and monetary policies. However, that myth has since been completely shattered--not just by the 2008-2009 recession but also by the U.S. Federal Reserve System's role in formulating the economic policies that helped trigger the crash. In this current article, the author discusses the heightened importance of economic and financial market literacy and how smart forecasting can help companies manage the business cycle more effectively than their competitors. The author highlights three major activities managers need to focus on: (1) developing and deploying forecasting capabilities to anticipate movements and key turning points in the business cycle, (2) applying well-timed business-cycle management strategies and tactics across the functional areas of the organization in a synergistic and integrative fashion, and (3) building an organization with a business cycle orientation, a facilitative structure and a supportive culture.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. As we sift though the debris of today's crisis, economists and policy makers alike are trying to assess why risk management systems and regulatory constraints didn't kick in before the global economy became engulfed in a tsunami of red ink. But economist Andrew W. Lo, the Harris & Harris Group Professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, director of the school's Laboratory of Financial Engineering and founder and chief scientific officer of AlphaSimplex Group LLC, an investment adviser in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is less surprised than most seasoned observers. Lo has studied the connections between financial decision making, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology for over a decade. Among his findings are that professional traders, far from being cool-headed and rational, can become transfixed by extreme price movements, their decision-making capabilities temporarily hijacked by emotions such as fear and anxiety. In Lo's view, "behavioral blind spots"(which he defines as evolutionarily hard-wired reactions to perceived risks and rewards) are particularly dangerous during periods of economic extreme: bubbles and crashes.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Clayton Christensen is best known for his ideas about how disruptive innovations can transform markets. In this wide-ranging interview, he discusses topics ranging from the downturn's effect on innovation to opportunities to improve the U.S. health care system. Christensen thinks the economic downturn will be good for innovation, because downturns force innovators to adapt their strategies to the market quickly and inexpensively. What's more, he notes that resource constraints stimulate breakthrough thinking. And, despite the recent problems in the financial markets, Christensen believes that, overall, innovation has been beneficial in financial services. He cites historical financial innovations, such as no-load mutual funds and index funds, as examples of the way disruptive innovations in financial services have benefited consumers. However, he also notes that there are markets in which regulation is necessary -and the securities industry is one. Christensen, who is the coauthor of a new book on health care, The Innovator's Prescription, also discussed how disruptive innovation might improve the U.S. health care system. He explains how disruptive innovation helps make goods and services inexpensive and accessible.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Executives tend to think of mass customization as a fascinating but impractical idea, implemented in only a small number of extreme cases, such as Dell Inc. in the PC market. But over the past decade, the authors have studied mass customization at different organizations, including a survey of more than 200 manufacturing plants in eight countries. From that investigation, they found that mass customization is applicable to most businesses, provided that it is appropriately understood and deployed. The key is to view it fundamentally as a process for aligning an organization with its customers' needs through the development of a set of three organizational capabilities. Those three fundamental capabilities are: (1) the ability to identify the product attributes along which customer needs diverge, (2) the ability to reuse or recombine existing organizational and value chain resources, and (3) the ability to help customers identify or build solutions to their own needs. Admittedly, the development of these capabilities requires organizational changes that are often difficult because of powerful inertial forces in a company, but many obstacles can be overcome by using a variety of tools and approaches, and even small improvements can reap substantial benefits. The trick is to remember that there is no one best way to mass customize: Managers need to tailor their approach in ways that make the most sense for their specific business.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Are corporate social responsibility programs beneficial to companies when they undertake overseas expansion? To address that question, the authors analyzed both financial and corporate social performance data for more than 800 U.S. public companies. In particular, the researchers set out to examine the relationship between corporate social responsibility and profitable international sales. The researchers found that those companies that had low or high levels of corporate social responsibility had significantly greater success internationally than those with moderate levels of corporate social responsibility. The authors suggest that companies with high levels of social performance may benefit internationally from their good reputation for corporate social responsibility, and companies with low levels may attain cost advantages from overseas expansion. However, companies in between may be "stuck in the middle"--and unable to obtain a competitive advantage internationally from their corporate social responsibility programs. Since retrenching from existing corporate social responsibility efforts can be viewed negatively by existing stakeholders, the authors recommend that companies that are "stuck in the middle" rethink their overseas corporate social responsibility programs--either to de-emphasize competitive advantage or to increase the programs' impact.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Managers will never be able to predict the future as clearly as The Amazing Kreskin. But by making a deliberate effort, they can develop the clairvoyance they -and those around them -already possess into a potent competitive weapon. Because their antennae are always aloft, executives naturally detect weak signals as they drift in and out of range from the outer edges of their marketplace. How they find, keep and make sense of those faint clues can make all the difference when it comes to getting an early start on confronting a threat or exploiting an opportunity. In this article, the authors draw from their research into companies that learn from the future. They outline the specific skills managers need to develop--and those they had better lose--to correct their fuzzy vision of what's ahead. First, the authors identify the different breeds of biases that most managers don't even realize they have, and provide them with the tools to rout out such distortions. Then they outline nine proven and practical strategies managers can use to find, understand and make use of the most meaningful distant data. Confronting reality isn't as straightforward as hushing hunches in favor of high-minded analysis; there has to be room for both. Finally, the authors encourage executives to consider new information within the context of as many wider views of the future marketplace as they can find -tapping the farsighted folks at their company and in their industry. By learning how to extract meaning, managers will grow to understand that the future is plainly ours to see, no matter what the song says. What takes work is piecing those glimpses into a plausible panorama so that managers can see where their company strategy fits -before anyone else does.

The case features a dispute between the US Forest Service and conservation groups over forest management practices on the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana. The conservation groups sued the Forest Service in US District Court and the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Court with the Forest Service eventually winning on the issues. However, in August 2008, Dave Bull, the Forest Service Supervisor, was frustrated with the recurrent conflicts that impeded the Forest Service's ability to pursue important forest management projects (e.g., fuel reduction projects to protect people's lives and properties). Dave's staff of 145 people spent 80% of its time on data collection and analysis, much of it preparing for anticipated lawsuits, and 20% on project implementation. Dave wanted to reverse those numbers, but after 50 years of conflict, he was not sure where to start. He felt he needed a strategy to improve collaboration, but that carried some risks. If he made things worse, he might get an early retirement. As the case closes, Dave is examining the Forest Service's approach to collaboration. The Forest Service encouraged collaborative strategies but it said, "The final decision still rests with the agency." Given this caveat, Dave was wondering how he could effectively encourage collaboration among the stakeholders. The case explores this issue and gives Dave some direction.

In this first in a series of articles created in partnership with Harvard Health Publications, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School discusses regret and its potential benefits. Regret needn't be a self-flagellating emotion, he says. In fact, when asked to rank negative emotions in terms of value, people placed regret at the top, crediting it with helping them make sense of life events and remedy what went wrong.

Eliot Robbens is the CEO of TrakVue, a spinout launched two years ago with highly ambitious financial projections. His vice president of sales has just quit after only six months, becoming the second sales VP that Eliot has lost. The company is a year behind in achieving its results, and Eliot has a board meeting coming up in just a few days. Where to turn? His old friend Amory declines to advise him and suggests executive coaching. An affable squash opponent counsels that he save himself by landing a couple of big accounts. His beloved wife offers a vaguely Zen exhortation. How can Eliot get genuine help? Three experts comment on this fictional case study in R0904B and R0904Z. Jaithirth Rao, an IT entrepreneur and the founder of MphasiS, has experienced Eliot's difficulty himself. He calls it "the myth of the self-reliant leader." Rao cautions that colleagues' own agendas may color their advice and that executive coaches may fail to perceive the ambiguities in a situation. A formal network of peers can be powerful, he says - as can a loyal and perceptive assistant. Susan J. Ashford, a dean and a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, suggests that the biggest challenge for Eliot is developing greater learning agility. He must admit his weaknesses, share his concerns with colleagues and the board, and create a company culture in which input is valued. Stephen J. Socolof, a founder and a managing partner of New Venture Partners, says that Eliot should acquire an active network of mentors and should regularly ask for help from the board, which will appreciate being kept in the loop.

In January 2008, CBS anchor Katie Couric asked then-candidate Barack Obama what single book, apart from the Bible, he would bring with him to the White House. He cited Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin's account of Abraham Lincoln's leadership during the Civil War. It was a signal that Obama intended to model his leadership during the current crisis on the style of his presidential predecessor from Illinois. By bringing heavyweight politicians who are themselves past and future presidential contenders into his cabinet, Obama has indeed reprised Lincoln's strategy of creating a team composed of his most able rivals. If the new U.S. president can learn from Lincoln so, too, can business executives now grappling with similar questions of how to lead in turbulent times. To draw out the lessons of Lincoln's administration, HBR senior editor Diane Coutu interviewed Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose other books include No Ordinary Time (about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and their era), The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. In their wide-ranging conversation, Goodwin discusses the advantages of forming an executive committee of strong-willed, forthright individuals who won't insulate a leader from uncomfortable but important dissent. She describes how Lincoln managed a group of people who were capable of taking over the top job - and sometimes plotting to do so. She sheds light on Lincoln's magic, which she says was not so much a matter of charisma as of emotional intelligence. And she takes the historian's long view on the current economic crisis and the opportunities for political and business leaders alike to take advantage of these extraordinary times.

Because no two recessions are exactly alike, marketers find themselves in poorly charted waters every time one occurs. But guidance is available, say Quelch and Jocz, who have studied marketing successes (by Smucker, Procter & Gamble, Anheuser-Busch, and others) as well as failures throughout past recessions and identified patterns in consumer and company behavior that strongly affect performance. Understanding consumers' changing psychology and habits, the authors argue, will enable firms to hone their strategies so they can both survive the current downturn and prosper afterward. Consumers in a recession can be divided into four groups: The slam-on-the-brakes segment, which feels the hardest hit, reduces all types of spending. Pained-but-patient consumers, who constitute the largest segment, also economize in each area, though less aggressively. Comfortably well-off individuals consume at near-prerecession levels but become a little more selective (and less conspicuous) about their purchases. Live-for-today consumers pretty much carry on as usual, responding to the recession mainly by extending their timetables for making major purchases. People may switch segments if their economic situations change for the worse. All groups prioritize consumption by sorting products and services into the following categories: essentials (central to survival or well-being), treats (justifiable), postponables (can be put off), and expendables (unnecessary or unjustifiable). As firms manage their marketing investments, they must simultaneously assess their brands' opportunities, allocate resources for the long term, and balance their budgets. Many make the mistake of cutting costs indiscriminately, which can jeopardize long-term performance. Instead, firms should streamline their product portfolios, improve the affordability of their offerings, and bolster customers' trust.

In tough times, many retailers focus on their most loyal customers. That seems sensible enough. But, paradoxically, your most loyal customers are not your best source of revenue growth in a recession. You're already collecting most of the money they're spending. If they suddenly spend 25% less, most of that will come out of what they spend in your stores. It's not likely that you'll pry away customers who are fiercely loyal to other retailers either. Your best opportunity lies with "switchers" - the people who spend money both in your shops and elsewhere. If you collect, say, only 20% of what they're spending today but can increase that to 30%, you'll still realize a net gain even if their total spending drops by 25%. Drawing on a study of more than 50 major U.S.-based retailers and over 20 years of global consulting experience, consultants Favaro, Romberger, and Meer set out five operating rules to help retail executives determine where to direct recession-squeezed resources for the biggest return. These rules basically boil down to: (1) Identify the people who are shopping both in your stores and in others'. (2) Figure out what they're buying elsewhere (or want and can't find at all) and adjust your offer so you can give it to them. (3) Analyze which of your costs contribute to producing the benefits the switchers want, then spend more on those activities and less on the ones that don't matter to them. (4) Organize your efforts efficiently by grouping your stores into clusters based on different populations of switchers. And, finally, (5) focus your customer research, merchandise-planning, performance management, and strategic-planning processes on the switchers. By following those rules, struggling retailers will discover that they have a larger universe of growth opportunities than they might think.

Multisided platforms can lower your transaction costs and increase customer reach. But powerful MSPs like Microsoft, Google, and Apple have also tended to extract most of the value from their platforms, mainly because companies that played with them didn't adequately understand their motives and operating strategies. As a result, firms can easily find themselves ceding control over customers to MSPs or being unwittingly turned into commodities. Hagiu and Yoffie, both professors at Harvard Business School, explore how MSPs can use their power to "hold up" companies that join them. The authors offer guidelines to help managers create an effective strategy for dealing with MSPs, identifying three basic issues that managers must address: (1) Whether to play with existing MSPs, build their own platform, or do both; (2) once they've concluded that at least one third-party MSP can benefit their business, deciding how many to join; and (3) figuring out how to play - that is, which features or services they should adopt and which they should reject in order to maintain their company's competitive advantage. Some companies that lack the power to influence an MSP's actions may have few options. But many firms - either on their own or in alliances - can make choices that will differentiate them from competitors and curb MSPs' power over their businesses.

Without question, internal collaboration can produce benefits for an organization. This doesn't mean, however, that the more your employees collaborate, the better off the company will be. It may, in fact, be worse off. The author, a professor at UC Berkeley and at Insead, offers a simple method for determining when collaborating on a project makes sense. He calls it calculating the collaboration premium - what's left after you subtract opportunity costs and collaboration costs from a project's expected financial return. The opportunity cost is what's lost by devoting resources to the collaboration project rather than to something else - particularly something that doesn't require collaboration. Collaboration costs arise from the challenges - conflict over goals and budgets, competing objectives, logistical roadblocks - involved in working across organizational boundaries. Sometimes those costs are so high that the project results in a collaboration penalty. The Norwegian company Det Norske Veritas (DNV) would have done well to apply Hansen's calculation before it launched a food-safety initiative combining the expertise, resources, and customer bases of two business units: standards certification and risk-management consulting. According to initial projections, from 2004 to 2008 the joint effort would quadruple the growth to be realized if the two units operated separately. Unfortunately, DNV hadn't formally evaluated food safety's potential relative to other promising sectors; the consulting unit might have more profitably pursued IT risk management on its own. Meanwhile, mistrust and quarreling between the two units scotched efforts to cross-sell, while conflicting goals and incentives pulled individual team members in opposing directions. Two years after launching the initiative, DNV abandoned it. The challenge is to cultivate not more collaboration but the right collaboration. Hansen's formula can get you started.

Understanding how competitors will respond to your actions should be a critical component of decision making. Few companies, however, incorporate such insights into their strategic decisions, in large part because most methods for obtaining them are complex and unreliable. The authors have drawn on their research and work with companies to develop an approach for predicting rivals' behavior that is both accurate and easy to apply. It involves considering just three questions: Will the competitor react at all? Few strategic planners consider the possibility that a rival may not respond to a company's competitive move. Yet 17% of the companies surveyed by the authors did not react to a rival's major initiative. Some competitors may not detect a company's move, while others may not feel threatened by it or may simply be unable to coordinate a timely response. What options will the competitor actively consider? Most companies seriously examine fewer than four response options, and it's likely that among them will be the most obvious, such as introducing a me-too product or matching a price change. To come up with a short list of options, companies will probably look at what they have done in similar situations. Which option will the competitor most likely choose? Your adversaries will choose the option that they consider to be most effective. It helps to know that in anticipating competitive behavior, most companies analyze only one round of moves and countermoves, and they evaluate their options using simple, short-term measures. The key is to get inside your rival's head and look at the situation from that perspective, not yours.

When a change initiative falters, the knee-jerk response can be to blame those who won't get on board. Jeffrey Ford, of the Ohio State University, and Laurie Ford, of Critical Path Consultants, examine why that type of reaction is not only pointless but potentially destructive. Drawing on their years of research and consulting work, the authors recommend seeing resistance for what it really is - feedback - and propose five ways for leaders to use that feedback to effect change more productively. Boost awareness. In the early stages, if the only way to keep the conversation about change alive is to entertain highly charged discussions, so be it. A complete lack of feedback can sound the death knell for change. Return to purpose. Employees need to know not only what will change but why the new reality will be better. Don't be shy about offering explanations as directly as possible. Change the change. People who resist change are often the ones most concerned about getting things right. Give them the chance to help you make a good change initiative better. Build participation and engagement. Heed feedback even when it doesn't seem likely to yield objective improvements. The ownership people feel when you adopt their best ideas will pay off in ways you often cannot foresee. Complete the past. A legacy of bad change can inhibit your change effort, even if you had nothing to do with the unfortunate history. Acknowledging - and, if possible, correcting - past change failures is often essential to future success.