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A high-ranking district administrator in India, upon taking office, is informed that his predecessor agreed to acquire a plot of land for a local jail. When he learns that the landowner is the wife of an influential local politician, he becomes suspicious and decides to inspect the property himself. Located in the middle of a forest, completely inaccessible to transport, and far from police headquarters, it becomes clear that the land acquisition is designed only to make someone rich at the district's expense. Meanwhile, the real needs of the district-to provide safe drinking water, prevent malaria, improve literacy, invest in employment programs, and wean local youth away from secessionist militancy-are slighted. The administrator decides to stall the acquisition, even while realizing that the effort may put his career, and his programs to help the district, at risk. The case recounts his escalating tactics, from bureaucratic trickery to deliberate deceit and destruction of a government document. It provides a vehicle for discussing the ethical duties of public officials confronted with systemic corruption-and possible strategies for dealing with it. HKS Case Number 1615.0

Sustainability has become a strategic imperative for all businesses in the 21st century. It has become a fundamental market force affecting long-term financial viability and success. Over the past two decades, Hewlett-Packard (HP) has moved along a continuum toward environmental sustainability. During the 1980s, HP was a leader in pollution prevention and control. During the 1990s, HP established a leading product stewardship function. Today, HP is taking big steps to move beyond baseline market expectations and integrate environmental sustainability into its fundamental business strategy. This article explores the processes currently underway at HP as well as the challenges ahead.

In the 1990s, Environmental Voluntary Agreements (VAs) involving regulatory agencies and industry have emerged as the promise of the future in environmental policy circles. The collaborative mechanisms of VAs can be conducive to the development of innovative solutions, which regulators or firms would have been unlikely to develop alone. From a business perspective, participation in VAs can reduce the burden of regulation, facilitate the communication of environmental improvements, and allow firms to be ahead of competition for environmental products. However, the benefits of participating in VAs can be outweighed by high transaction and administration costs if VAs are not properly designed. This article discusses when participation in a VA offers strategic opportunities and when joining a VA might turn into a costly enterprise.

Environmental Management Systems (EMSs) are relatively new and rather innovative management practices that provide firms with additional sources of information and leverage over their environmental and business processes and performance. This article reports the results of a survey of manufacturing plants that have adopted EMSs. It finds that EMSs are associated with factories that are larger, more committed to total quality management, and more innovative in general. EMSs are also a useful tool for managing community relationships and dealing with key stakeholder groups with respect to potentially controversial environmental issues. Furthermore, EMS plants appear to pose less environmental risk for communities and report that their adoption and use of an EMS is an important factor in achieving this result. In the end, EMSs are an effective tool for managing environmental costs and risks inside and outside the factory in ways that add to, rather than detract from, the bottom-line.

The toy industry faces relentless change and an unpredictable buying public, which creates immense challenges in anticipating best sellers and predicting volume. Like the high-technology industry, toys also suffer from many supply chain ailments, including short product life, rapid product turnover, and seasonal demand. Coupled with long supply lines and ongoing political and economic turmoil in Asia, toy makers face an unusually complex set of risks. Managers in many businesses can learn valuable lessons in managing uncertainty from toy makers. This article describes supply chain lessons focused on reducing risk by actively managing both demand and supply variability. These lessons include product variety strategies based on product extensions, rolling mix strategies, leveraged licensing agreements, coordinated outsourcing strategies, and hedging against political and currency risk by producing in many different countries.

This articles presents four standardization techniques--product, part, procurement, and process--that help mitigate the negative impact of product variety on a firm's operations. The ability of a firm to use these standardization approaches depends on the following: degree to which it can modularize its products and processes, what it is trying to achieve for its customers, and the costs associated with standardization. Presents a framework for thinking about these options and choosing among them.

In spite of making substantial investments in information technology planning systems, retailers are struggling with two execution problems--inventory record inaccuracy and misplaced stock keeping units (SKUs)--that are hurting their performance and ability to satisfy customers. At one leading retailer, 65% of inventory records were inaccurate (i.e., recorded inventory levels did not reflect actual inventory levels). Misplaced SKUs at another leading retailer prevented one in six customers who requested help from a sales associate from finding the products that were available in a store. These execution problems reduce profits by more than 10%. Moreover, performance along these two dimensions of execution varies substantially among stores within the same chain that use identical information technology. By examining the systematic differences that exist among stores, this article identifies the drivers of inventory record inaccuracy and misplaced SKUs and recommends steps retailers can take to improve operational execution in their chains.

Cisco's CFO Larry Carter explains how the company has made real-time accounting a reality. The key, he says, lies more in the process than the technology.

In the 1990s, companies improved their business performance by speeding up their operations. Now comes the second generation of speed--and this time, the focus is on accelerated strategy making.

The California electricity market is a mess, no doubt about it. But these five lessons may help executives shield their companies from the kind of power shortages that California businesses are suffering.

Lori Andrews, a professor of science, technology, and law, discusses the legal and ethical issues surrounding genomics. She explains what executives need to know about handling sensitive genetic information and technologies.

A study indicates that on-line shoppers would rather customize Web site information themselves than have personalization software do it for them. But the best customer-retention strategy may be a combination of both approaches.

There have been many changes in professional services since Egon Zehnder founded his executive search firm nearly four decades ago--not the least of which has been a shift in the way professionals pay themselves. When he started, compensation everywhere was strongly tied to seniority. Today, partners at most professional services firms are paid according to the size of their client billings and their ability to bring in new clients. But Egon Zehnder International, which now has 57 offices worldwide, has stuck with the old-fashioned way to pay. In addition to giving partners base salaries and equal shares in a percentage of the profit, the firm apportions another fraction of the profit based only on length of tenure as partner. Yet the firm attracts outstanding consultants, and its turnover rate is low. The reasons, the author says, are simple: the firm's approach to compensation forces it to hire team players--consultants who get more pleasure from the group's success than from their own advancement. And the seniority-based system requires the firm to find people who want to stay for the long haul. Call the system a relic, says Zehnder, but don't call it nonsense. It works. In this article, the author describes the extremely intensive interview process used to hire the right kind of people. By the time the interviews are over, he says, potential hires know that people in the firm's Boston office think and act the same way as people in its Brazil offices--and that they themselves must think and act that way if they are to succeed at the firm.

Many companies now run boot camps--comprehensive orientation programs designed to help new hires hit the ground running. They're intense and intimidating, and new employees emerge from them with strong bonds to other recruits and to the organization. But at Trilogy, organizational consultant Noel Tichy discovered one program that's a breed apart. In this article, Tichy gives us a detailed tour of Trilogy's boot camp, Trilogy University, to demonstrate why it's so different--and so effective. Like the best boot camps, it serves as an immersion in both the technical skills new recruits will need for their jobs and Trilogy's corporate culture, which emphasizes risk-taking, teamwork, humility, and a strong customer focus. But this is a new-employee orientation session that's so fundamental to the company as a whole that it's presided over by the CEO and top corporate executives for fully six months of the year. Why? In two three-month sessions, these top executives hone their own strategic thinking about the company as they decide what to teach the new recruits each session. They also find the company's next generation of new products as they judge the innovative ideas the recruits are tasked with developing--making the program Trilogy's main R&D engine. And they pull the company's rising technical stars into mentoring roles for the new recruits, helping to build the next generation of top leadership. After spending months on-site studying Trilogy University, Tichy came away highly impressed by the power of the virtuous teaching cycle the program has set in motion. Leaders of the organization are learning from recruits at the same time that the recruits are learning from the leaders. It's a model, he argues, that other companies would do well to emulate.

Most executives know the basics of negotiation; some are spectacularly adept. Yet even experienced negotiators routinely leave money on the table, end up in deadlock, damage relationships, or allow conflicts to spiral. They fall prey to common mistakes that keep them from solving the right negotiation problem. In any negotiation, each side ultimately chooses between two options: accepting a deal or taking its best no-deal option - that is, the course of action if a deal were not possible. As a negotiator, you seek to advance your interests by persuading the other side to say yes to a proposal that meets your interests better than your best no-deal option. Because the other side will say yes only to a proposal that meets its own interests better than its best no-deal option, you must understand and shape your counterpart's decision so that it chooses in its own interest what you want. Far from being exercises in manipulation, understanding your counterpart's interests and shaping the decision so that the other side agrees to a proposal for its own reasons are the keys to jointly creating and claiming sustainable value from a negotiation. In this article, James Sebenius compares good negotiating practice with bad, providing examples from the business world and insights from 50 years of research and analysis on negotiation. The author describes six common mistakes that result in merely effective negotiation: neglecting your counterpart's problem, letting price bulldoze other interests, letting positions drive out interests, searching too hard for common ground, neglecting no-deal alternatives, and failing to correct for skewed vision.

Diversity has become a top priority in corporate America. Despite corporations' best intentions, however, many have failed to achieve a racial mix at the top levels of management. Some have revolving doors for talented minorities, recruiting the best and brightest, only to see them leave, frustrated by their experiences. Others are able to retain high-potential professionals of color but find them mired in middle management. To understand the different career trajectories of whites and minorities, David Thomas studied the progression of racial minorities at three large U.S. corporations. Here, he explains the three career stages that all professionals advance through, and he discusses why promising white professionals tend to enter fast tracks early in their careers, whereas high-potential minorities typically take off after they have reached middle management. Thomas's research shows that minorities who advance the furthest share one characteristic: a strong network of mentors and corporate sponsors. He found that minorities who plateaued in middle management received mentoring that was basically instructional; it helped them to develop skills. By contrast, minorities who became executives enjoyed fuller developmental relationships with their mentors. Thomas explains the types of support mentors provide for their proteges and outlines the challenges of mentoring across racial lines.

Speeches and presentations offer an interesting catch-22: executives don't want to spend long hours creating them, and people don't want to sit for long hours listening to them. Ultimately, though, executives can't live without them. That's because a good speech or presentation has the power to inspire people to act on the speaker's behalf and create change. Author Nick Morgan, a longtime speechwriter and speaking coach, says what's most often lacking in today's speeches and presentations is what he calls the "kinesthetic connection." Many good speakers connect aurally with their audiences, telling dramatic stories and effectively pacing their speeches to hold people's attention. Others connect visually, with a vivid film clip or a killer slide. Some people do both, but not many also connect kinesthetically. Morgan says the kinesthetic speaker feeds an audience's primal hunger to experience a presentation on a physical, as well as an intellectual, level. Through awareness of their own physical presence--gestures, posture, movements--and through the effective use of the space in which they present, kinesthetic speakers can create potent nonverbal messages that reinforce their verbal ones. In this article, Morgan describes techniques for harnessing kinesthetic power and creating a sense of intimacy with an audience--a closeness that is more widely expected from speakers since the advent of television. For instance, kinesthetic speakers should make use of audience proxies--individuals in the crowd who serve as representatives for the others. Ultimately, the author says, a speech or presentation offers something of great value to business executives: it's the best vehicle for winning trust from large groups of people--be they employees, colleagues, or shareholders.

Business is shaped by ideas. But how do you separate enduring ideas from passing fancies? In this, the first edition of the annual HBR List, our editors spotlight five breakthrough ideas that are truly shaping the future of business. Even a great business model is not enough. The rise and fall of dot-coms left markets reeling and CEOs scratching their heads. The most important lesson of the debacle: squishy thinking about "business models" is no substitute for a distinctive strategy. Change is changing. In recent years, pundits have urged executives to incite revolutions within their companies. But a growing group of experts now suggests that the best companies actually evolve through incremental change--change that builds on rather than subverts their heritage. Ego makes the leader. By looking deeply into executives' psyches, we are beginning to unlock the enigma of leadership. While there will never be a single recipe for successful corporate stewardship, an understanding of the human ego can shed light on leadership's most fundamental components. Only connect. In business organizations, what's really important about people is not their individual skills but the relationships they form with one another. By investing in "social capital," companies can often push their performance to a whole new level. The biology century dawns. In the twentieth century, product innovations tended to spring from physics. But in the new century, biology may be the central source of innovation. From genomics to biomimicry, the study of life promises to change what companies sell and even how they operate.