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What makes for a good strategy in highly uncertain business environments? How do executives choose a clear strategic direction when no amount of sophisticated analysis will allow them to predict the future? The authors, consultants at McKinsey & Co., outline a new approach for dealing with the high levels of uncertainty that regularly confront managers today. This article explains how to make crucial distinctions among the levels of uncertainty managers face, and then how to choose a strategic posture appropriate for that level. This strategy framework helps managers to tailor a portfolio of actions--comprising big bets, options, and no-regrets moves--to the uncertainty at hand. An important and timely addition to the strategy arsenal, this article offers a discipline for thinking rigorously and systematically about uncertainty.

Companies all across the economic spectrum are making use of teams, but many senior executives and CEOs have become frustrated in their efforts to create teams at the top. Too often, they see few gains in performance from their efforts to be more teamlike. And they recognize that the rest of the organization knows that the senior group doesn't really work together as a team. Nevertheless, a team effort at the top can be essential to capturing the highest performance results possible--when the conditions are right. Good leadership requires differentiating between team and non-team opportunities, and then acting accordingly. Jon R. Katzenbach, a partner at McKinsey & Co. in New York City and the author of Teams at the Top: Unleashing the Potential of Both Teams and Individual Leaders (Harvard Business School Press, in 1997) explains why teams at the top are often ineffective--and when they can be essential to capturing the highest performance results for their organization.

This fictitious case study by Idalene F. Kesner, the Frank P. Popoff Professor at Indiana University, and Sally Fowler, assistant professor at Victoria University, explores the issues that arise when the wires get crossed between a team of consultants and their key client. The client is the CEO of a newly-merged company; the consultants have been hired to help knit together the two former companies' policies and cultures. Unfortunately, the client's impression of the current status of the new company and the consultants' assessment of the situation facing them are vastly different. In 97605 and 97605Z, John Rau, Charles Fombrum, Robert H. Schaffer, and David H. Maister advise the consultants and the client about their options, offer their perspectives on what makes a good client/consultant relationship, and discuss the difficulties that face newly merged companies.

This fictitious case study by Idalene F. Kesner, the Frank P. Popoff Professor at Indiana University, and Sally Fowler, assistant professor at Victoria University, explores the issues that arise when the wires get crossed between a team of consultants and their key client. The client is the CEO of a newly-merged company; the consultants have been hired to help knit together the two former companies' policies and cultures. Unfortunately, the client's impression of the current status of the new company and the consultants' assessment of the situation facing them are vastly different. In 97605 and 97605Z, John Rau, Charles Fombrum, Robert H. Schaffer, and David H. Maister advise the consultants and the client about their options, offer their perspectives on what makes a good client/consultant relationship, and discuss the difficulties that face newly merged companies.

This fictitious case study by Idalene F. Kesner, the Frank P. Popoff Professor at Indiana University, and Sally Fowler, assistant professor at Victoria University, explores the issues that arise when the wires get crossed between a team of consultants and their key client. The client is the CEO of a newly-merged company; the consultants have been hired to help knit together the two former companies' policies and cultures. Unfortunately, the client's impression of the current status of the new company and the consultants' assessment of the situation facing them are vastly different. In 97605 and 97605Z, John Rau, Charles Fombrum, Robert H. Schaffer, and David H. Maister advise the consultants and the client about their options, offer their perspectives on what makes a good client/consultant relationship, and discuss the difficulties that face newly merged companies.

Almost all companies today compete to some degree on the basis of continuous innovation. And many turn to customers for information to guide that innovation. The problem is that customers' ability to guide new product and service development is limited by their experience and by their ability to imagine and describe possible innovations. How can companies identify needs that customers themselves may not recognize? A set of techniques Harvard Business School Professors Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey Rayport call empathic design can help resolve those dilemmas. Its basic principle is observation--watching customers use products or services. But the critical twist is that such observation is conducted in the customer's own environment--in the context of normal, everyday routines. In such a context, the company is privy to a host of information that is not accessible through other observation--oriented research methods such as focus groups or usability laboratories. This article explores a new way for companies to spark innovation--a new way for them to identify consumer needs, and thus design successful new products to meet those needs. The techniques of empathic design--effectively gathering, analyzing, and applying information gleaned from observation-are familiar to top engineering/design firms and a few forward-thinking manufacturers, but are not common practice.

Lean production, which has succeeded in both improving quality and lowering costs, has become the competitive standard for automakers worldwide. But a debate continues over how that system treats workers--a debate that concerns not only economics and engineering but also values and ideology. In this article, Michael Maccoby, a consultant based in Washington D.C. who specializes in organizational culture and leadership, reviews two books on General Motors' factories: Farewell to the Factory: Autoworkers in the Late Twentieth Century, by Ruth Milkman; and Just Another Car Factory? Lean Production and Its Discontents, By James Rinehart, Christopher Huxley, and David Robertson. Maccoby argues that companies can raise worker morale and productivity by showing workers true respect and by educating them in business perspective. General Motors may have failed to accomplish this at its Linden, New Jersey and Ingersoll, Ontario plants, but lean production has succeeded at Saturn and NUMMI. As more industries switch to lean production, workers will come under more pressure but companies will also have new opportunities to win their commitment to business goals. Car factories perform much better when workers understand the business and join in the effort to improve it.

One of the most challenging decisions a company can confront is whether to diversify. The rewards and risks are extraordinary. Success stories such as General Electric, Disney, and 3M abound, but so do stories of failure--consider Quaker Oats' entry into the fruit juice business with Snapple. There has been much talk about the importance of strategic focus for companies in recent years, so much so that diversification as a corporate strategy has gone out of vogue. In this article, London Business School Professor Costas Markides argues that companies may be overlooking significant growth opportunities by abandoning diversification moves. In order for diversification to work, though, he proposes that companies consider a number of essential questions before they leap into new business: What business am I in? Do I have all of the critical success factors? Can I break up my core competencies? The answers to these and other questions may make the difference between success and failure in the new business. Much has been written about "focusing on core competencies," while diversification has been largely ignored. And yet, diversification can be a powerful way to grow a business.

Companies achieve real agility only when every function and process--when every person--is able and eager to rise to every challenge. This type and degree of fundamental change, commonly called revitalization or transformation, is what many companies seek but rarely achieve because they have never before identified the factors that produce sustained transformational change. The authors identify three interventions that will restore companies to vital agility and then keep them in good health: incorporating employees fully into the principal business challenges facing the company; leading the organization in a different way in order to sharpen and maintain incorporation and constructive stress; and instilling mental disciplines that will make people behave differently and then help them sustain their new behavior. The authors discovered these basic sources of revitalization by tracking the change efforts of Sears, Roebuck and Co., Royal Dutch Shell, and the United States Army. This article is one of the first practical revitalization guides to appear anywhere, and it is based not on theory but on actual experience.

The continued success of technology-based companies depends on their proficiency in creating next-generation products and their derivatives. So getting such products out the door on schedule must be routine for such companies, right? Not quite. Behnam Tabrizi, a Consulting Professor of Engineering Management in the Department of Industrial Engineering & Engineering Management at Stanford University, and Rick Walleigh, a partner at Ernst & Young LLP, recently engaged in a detailed study--in which they had access to sensitive internal information and to candid interviews with people at every level--of 28 next-generation product-development projects in 14 leading high-tech companies. They found that most of the companies were unable to complete such projects on schedule. And the companies also had difficulty developing the derivative products needed to fill the gaps in the market that their next-generation products would create. The problem in every case, the authors discovered, was rooted in the product definition phase. And not coincidentally, the successful companies in the study had all learned how to handle the technical and marketplace uncertainties in their product definition processes. The authors have discerned from the actions of those companies a set of best practices that can measurably improve the definition phase of any company's product-development process.

In this HBR Classic, originally published in January-February 1989, Abraham Zaleznik, a psychoanalyst and the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School, observes that many senior executives are substituting the rituals of "psychopolitics"--the balancing of social expectations in the workplace--for the real work of thinking about and acting on ideas relating to products, markets, and customers. In his retrospective commentary, Zaleznik writes that senior executives seem to have established a healthier balance in the 1990s between their real work and psychopolitics. Executives are now leading their companies to deal with external, competitive conditions that require them to cut costs, create products, please customers, and develop markets. What worries Zaleznik today, however, is that under the guise of employee empowerment, senior executives are beginning again to indulge in ritualized actions. For instance, they establish task forces to seek answers to questions they themselves should be addressing. The real work of the executive, says Zaleznik, should always include the thinking that informs and directs action. Zaleznik consults to business and government, and his most recent book, Learning Leadership, was published in 1993. In addition to "Real Work," he has authored five previous HBR articles.

This microeconomics case examines the pricing issues related to the sale of inexpensive vaccines for use in developing countries. The case describe the historic success of the United Nations' so-called "tiered pricing" policy. This policy had allowed the World Health Organization to purchase large volumes of vaccines at the marginal price of vaccine production-often just a few cents per dose-while developed nations paid the full average cost-often many times more. Changing political circumstances and the cost structure of new vaccines threaten the decades-old arrangement, however. HKS Case Number 1450.0

This microeconomics case examines the pricing issues related to the sale of inexpensive vaccines for use in developing countries. The case describe the historic success of the United Nations' so-called "tiered pricing" policy. This policy had allowed the World Health Organization to purchase large volumes of vaccines at the marginal price of vaccine production-often just a few cents per dose-while developed nations paid the full average cost-often many times more. Changing political circumstances and the cost structure of new vaccines threaten the decades-old arrangement, however. HKS Case Number 1450.0

The Washington Post is now headed up by its fourth family member in three generations. The Graham family has somehow transcended the problems and pitfalls that overtake so many family-owned and operated businesses.

This exercise comprises seven problems that collectively allow students to work through each type of cash flow that is encountered in capital budgeting. The instructor can also address such issues as product cannibalization and real options.

Spreadsheet Supplement for case 298068

Describes the major elements of marketing strategy: the decisions to be made and the underlying analysis to support that decision making.

Starting in 1988, the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) began a controversial transformation in management and governance. For its first 112 years, the AMC's structure had resembled that of a country club--volunteer leaders directed the club's operations and its small, paid staff. However, with the club slowly sinking in debt and operations spinning increasingly out of control, a group of members persuaded the membership to take the governing, volunteer council out of the direct management of the organization, hire a new executive director as CEO, and institute a "corporate-style" board of directors charged with policy and oversight. During the next six years, the revamped AMC sprang back to life. The board and the executive director instituted new budgeting procedures, initiated marketing programs, and hired more professionally-trained staff that helped erase the debt, double the membership, and triple the endowment. However, challenges remained. At the end of 1996, the reorganized board experienced a generational transition in leadership as the terms of the last of the directors who had been present during earlier transition expired. This transition provided a good milestone from which to assess the board's role within the organization and its relationship with the expanded staff and membership.

Supplements the (A) case.