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The Biaxin case deals with competition in the mature market for antibiotics designed for use in the treatment of bacterial respiratory infections. The case tells the story of how Pfizer's Zithromax stole the share dominance of an established brand, Abbott's Biaxin. The case deals with the importance in pharma markets of consumer (patient) and channel (physician and insurance payer) insight as well as pharmacological efficacy data.

A major barrier for growth of large multi-business-unit firms is the inability to resource the critical initiatives to win-both in terms of dollars and people. The underpinning of the challenge involves the conflict between resourcing current cash-generating legacy businesses vs. new initiatives which may not, in the short term, produce positive financial results. Most companies do not have a formal portfolio process to deal with this fundamental issue. The Healthcare Solutions business unit of Danaka is a fictional business based on real business experiences. The principle challenge is the need for this business to free up $300 million of current, budgeted R&D projects to fund new, unfunded initiatives to meet its five-year growth objectives. Tools and processes are introduced via interactive spreadsheets that show how to make the tough portfolio decisions on a project-by-project basis.

California telecommunications company Wireworld is considering an acquisition of Nusantara Communications, a subsidiary of Indonesian conglomerate Bakrie & Brothers. Nusantara had invested $50 million in developing the advanced rural telephone system, which had the potential to provide much-needed telecommunications services to the mostly rural Indonesian population. If if were exported, the worldwide market for this product in the next five years was projected to be in the billions. Should Wireworld acquire this small company halfway around the world? Was it prepared to enter the Indonesian marketplace and beyond?

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. An industry platform involves not only one company's technology or service but also an ecosystem of complements to it that are usually produced by a variety of businesses. As a result, becoming a platform leader requires different business and technology strategies than those needed to launch a successful stand-alone product. Companies should decide early on whether they want to pursue a platform or a product strategy. The authors describe two fundamental approaches to building platform leadership, which they call "coring" and "tipping." "Coring" is using a set of techniques to create a platform by making a technology "core" to a particular technological system and market. When pursuing a coring strategy, would-be platform leaders should think about issues such as how to make it easy for third parties to provide add-ons to the technology and how to encourage third-party companies to create complementary innovations. Examples of successful coring include Google Inc. in Internet search and Qualcomm Inc. in wireless technology. However, the authors note, Qualcomm faces opposition from some companies in its business ecosystem. The authors cite EMC Corp.'s WideSky initiative in the early 2000s as an attempt at coring that did not succeed. EMC's competitors were not eager to adopt WideSky as a platform and instead supported an open-standards one managed through an industry group. "Tipping" is the set of activities that helps a company "tip" a market toward its platform rather than some other potential one. Examples of tipping include Linux's growth in the market for Web server operating systems; the Linux case study, the authors point out, demonstrates the power of a coalition of service providers and users to tip a market by supporting a particular platform. Another tipping strategy is for a company to bundle features from an adjacent market into its existing platform; the authors call this "tipping across markets."

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Just a few decades ago, organizations could stay the course with one strategy for a period of years. The idea that a new vision would be needed, perhaps with some frequency, would have been treated with mild amusement, if not outright derision. But competitive realities have forced executives to rethink what their companies are doing, and how they are doing it, over time. Automakers see profitability and market share evaporating. Media companies face the hostile world of disruptive technology. Financial institutions discover that a one-country focus is a path to extinction. In such conditions, bold visions are called for -- and will be called for again, probably sooner than any executive would like. The problem is the gap between inspiration and implementation. CEOs often get off to a rousing start, energizing top managers by presenting a bold new vision at a lavish off-site meeting. The excitement, however, often dies down within a few months, and the vision blurs into an indistinct image. Eventually, it fades from sight completely, and the organization returns to its previous ways. To find out why this gap between inspiration and implementation is so common, the authors conducted research on about 40 global companies. In this article, they explain several common reasons for the derailment of bold visions such as failure to focus, failure to engage the workforce and neglecting the skills and talents of the organization. They go on to offer a five-stage framework that executives can use to ensure that their visions become more than just pipe dreams. Examples of companies that have successfully followed this path -- including Deutsche Bank, the BBC, Nissan, Mattel and Starbucks -- are drawn on both to illustrate the challenges and to provide guidance to those who want to turn bold visions into reality.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. As the war for talent intensifies, there is growing evidence that a company's corporate social responsibility activities comprise a legitimate and compelling way to attract and retain good employees. To burnish their social responsibility credentials and thereby attract and retain talent, CEOs of companies such as Home Depot, Delta Air Lines and SAP recently pledged to deploy millions of employee volunteers on various community projects. Indeed, many companies big and small, including Cisco Systems, General Electric and IBM, view employee engagement in CSR as a "strategic imperative." But few organizations have figured out how to use CSR properly as part of their employee engagement efforts. They fall short of communicating their CSR intentions and initiatives to their employees and tend to keep CSR decisions in the hands of senior managers. At the same time, they fail to understand which CSR initiatives work best to excite which groups of employees. All in all, they fail to capture CSR's considerable potential to help them fight the war for talent. When used properly, CSR can strengthen employees' engagement by creating the feeling that they are part of a larger corporate mission and that the company shares their values, and by helping them enhance their own social connections. This article draws on recent studies to confirm that CSR can yield substantial returns for both employees and the company. The research demonstrates that CSR initiatives can fulfill employees' needs and motivate them to identify strongly with their employers, as is very much the case at The Timberland Co. Using frequent verbatims from study participants, the article portrays the challenges that companies face in making the most of their CSR strategies internally. The authors then recommend five practical steps that can help business leaders increase CSR's effectiveness as a lever for talent management, acquisition, and retention.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

The western world bought the wrong thinking system from Aristotle, says the author, and this ranks as one of the worst investment decisions we ever made. The thinking system we invested in was Aristotle's 'analytics', which monopolizes what most people characterize as 'thinking.' As a result, our thinking processes remain dominated by the culture of the sciences, and traditional approaches to strategy sit squarely at the table of logic and Science. But Aristotle actually conceived of two thinking systems, not one: he also conceived an entirely different thinking pathway that combined invention, judgment and decision wrapped up in a social process of debate. He called this process 'rhetoric', which the author calls 'design thinking' -- the Second Road to truth. The critical difference between the two roads is best understood by the different domains they address: analytics is the road by which we diagnose what already exists; rhetoric is the road by which we design alternative futures.

Despite the differences between their fields, ecologists have produced many insights that are potentially useful to strategic management. The authors show that Ecology and Strategy have much to learn from one another, and that an exchange between the fields can lead to the development of a richer and more compelling understanding of organizational strategy. They identify and describe three particular areas for cross-pollination between the disciplines: demography and competition; positional advantages; and inertia and change.

In a highly-connected world, signals from the periphery of our environment are initially difficult to capture, but they can be vital early warning signs of both threats and opportunities. Unfortunately, most of us are 'passive scanners' of our environment, say the authors: we wait for information to reach us, and deal with it as it arrives. The danger in this practice is that it is all-too easy to miss unexpected and unfamiliar weak signals on the periphery - that blurry zone at the edge of our vision, where not many people or firms focus their attention. The authors provide four guidelines for addressing the periphery of your organization.

Can we change our brains to sharpen perception and memory, increase speed of thought, and heal learning problems? According to the author, we can, and he describes how in this excerpt from his book The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (Viking Penguin, 2007). The author shows how leading-edge scientists are challenging the view that we are stuck with the brain we have at birth. For instance, the 'Merzenich brain', featured in the article, is structured by its constant collaboration with the world. The evidence Doidge assembles provides hope for life-long learning that defies aging: "Everything that you can see happen in a young brain can happen in an older brain."

Business strategists tend to be well-versed in the identification and analysis of constraints, says the author, but what of possibilities? If the ability to see new possibilities is fundamental to creating innovative designs - whether of products, cities or business strategies - what do we know about state-of-the-art possibility thinking? Not much, she says. Business strategy has historically been a largely analytic endeavor, with relatively little attention paid to the creative aspects of strategy formulation. She describes eight ways to illuminate new possibilities taken from Engineering success stories. Engineers have long viewed design as a core activity, says the author, and managers would be wise to turn to them for creative inspiration.

In an age where the digital machine can outperform the human mind at any task that can be represented as an algorithm, Integrative Thinking is the best revenge. The author argues that this particular kind of thinking still matters to success in business, and that figuring out how to do more of it requires a new conceptualization of thinking in terms of its integrative functions - the functions that produce successful integration across knowledge and interactional domains and confer agency upon decision makers. He describes three types of integrative thinking and why they stand out for the value they create: substantive integration; interactional integration and agency (the integration of seeing, feeling, thinking and action.)

Radical innovation requires both evidence and intuition: evidence to become informed, and intuition to inspire us in imagining and creating new and better possibilities. Research can be an immensely positive force in the innovation journey, says the author (from leading design firm IDEO), but to derive value from it, we must be willing to complement, challenge, and evolve many of the approaches and practices that traditionally prevail. She shows that design research demands commitment from innovators to reach new levels of understanding about what matters to the people they want to connect with. Three types of design research are defined - generative, evaluative and predictive - as well as how they can lead to business innovation.

Design thinking, while much less understood than scientific thinking, has characteristics of great value to teams dealing with complex, ill-formed problems. There are two main types of design thinkers, says the author: 'finders' and 'makers'. Finders exercise their creativity through discovery and are driven to find explanations for phenomena not well understood. In professional life, they usually become scientists or scholars and are responsible for much of our progress in understanding ourselves and our surroundings. Makers are equally creative, but they demonstrate their creativity through invention. Makers are driven to synthesize what they know in new constructions, arrangements, patterns, compositions and concepts that bring tangible, fresh expressions of what can be. The author describes ten characteristics of design thinking and shows how together, the characteristics of design and science thinking form a set of complementary thought processes that add considerable strength to an organization.

The author describes the 'three gears of design' as practiced by the DesignWorks Lab, an initiative of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. She explains how the three gears -- user understanding, concept visualization and strategic business design - can lead to broader integration of the needs of all stakeholders into the final solution, as well as greater clarity and alignment regarding an organization's vision.