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Employers can choose from lots of tools when they want to encourage employees to work together toward a new corporate goal. One of the rarest managerial skills is the ability to understand which tools will work in a given situation and which will misfire. Cooperation tools fall into four major categories: power, management, leadership, and culture. Choosing the right tool, say the authors, requires assessing the organization along two critical dimensions: the extent to which people agree on what they want and the extent to which they agree on cause and effect, or how to get what they want. The authors plot on a matrix where various organizations fall along these two dimensions. Employees represented in the lower-left quadrant of the model, for example, disagree strongly both about what they want and on what actions will produce which results. Those in the upper-right quadrant agree on both dimensions. Different quadrants call for different tools. When employees share little consensus on either dimension, for instance, the only methods that will elicit cooperation are "power tools" such as fiat, force, and threats. Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito wielded such devices effectively. So did Jamie Dimon, current CEO of JPMorgan Chase, during the bank's integration with Bank One. For employees who agree on what they want but not on how to get it--think of Microsoft in 1995--leadership tools, such as vision statements, are more appropriate. Some leaders are blessed with an instinct for choosing the right tools--Continental Airlines' Gordon Bethune, General Electric's Jack Welch, and IBM's Lou Gerstner are all examples. Others can use this framework to help select the most appropriate tools for their circumstances.

Summarizes a model that helps managers determine what sorts of initiatives an organization is capable and incapable of managing successfully. The factors that affect what an organizational unit can and cannot accomplish can be grouped as resources, processes, and the priorities embedded in the business model. Demonstrates what kinds of changes are required in an organization and team structure for each different type of innovation.

Hewlett-Packard decided that, to grow more rapidly, it needed to design a revolutionary disk drive product that would create an entirely new market or application for magnetic recording technology. The company followed most of the "rules" good managers follow in such situations: heavyweight project team, lots of senior management support, etc. But it still failed.

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Spreadsheet supplement for case 606-088.

Ted Levitt used to tell his Harvard Business School students, "People don't want a quarter-inch drill--they want a quarter-inch hole." But 35 years later, marketers are still thinking in terms of products and ever-finer demographic segments. The structure of a market, as seen from customers' point of view, is very simple. When people need to get a job done, they hire a product or service to do it for them. The marketer's task is to understand what jobs periodically arise in customers' lives for which they might hire products the company could make. One job, the "I-need-to-send-this-from-here-to-there-with-perfect-certainty-as-fast-as-possible" job, has existed practically forever. Federal Express designed a service to do precisely that--and do it wonderfully again and again. The FedEx brand began popping into people's minds whenever they needed to get that job done. Most of today's great brands--Crest, Starbucks, Kleenex, eBay, and Kodak, to name a few--started out as just this kind of purpose brand. When a purpose brand is extended to products that target different jobs, it becomes an endorser brand. But, over time, the power of an endorser brand will surely erode unless the company creates a new purpose brand for each new job, even as it leverages the endorser brand as an overall marker of quality. Different jobs demand different purpose brands. New growth markets are created when an innovative company designs a product and then positions its brand on a job for which no optimal product yet exists. In fact, companies that historically have segmented and measured markets by product categories generally find that when they instead segment by job, their market is much larger (and their current share much smaller) than they had thought. This is great news for smart companies hungry for growth.

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CEO Peter Walsh faces a classic innovator's dilemma. His company, Crescordia, produces high-quality metal plates, pins, and screws that orthopedic surgeons use to repair broken bones. In fact, because of the company's long-standing commitment to quality, some orthopedic surgeons use nothing but Crescordia hardware. And now these customers have begun to clamor for the next-generation technology: resorbable hardware. Resorbables offer clear advantages over the traditional hardware. Like dissolving sutures, resorbable plates and screws are made of biodegradable polymers. They hold up long enough to support a healing bone, then gradually and harmlessly disintegrate in the patient's body. The new products, however, are not yet reliable; they fail about 8% of the time. That's why Crescordia has delayed launching a line using the new technology. But time is running out. A few competitors have begun to sell resorbables, despite their imperfections, and these companies are picking up market share. Should Crescordia join the fray and risk tarnishing its brand? Or should the company sit tight until it can offer a perfect product? Commenting on this fictional case study in R0506A and R0506Z are Robert A. Lutz, vice-chairman of product development at General Motors; Clayton M. Christensen, the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; Jason Wittes, a senior equity analyst covering medical supplies and devices at Leerink Swann; and Nick Galakatos, a general partner of MPM Capital.

CEO Peter Walsh faces a classic innovator's dilemma. His company, Crescordia, produces high-quality metal plates, pins, and screws that orthopedic surgeons use to repair broken bones. In fact, because of the company's long-standing commitment to quality, some orthopedic surgeons use nothing but Crescordia hardware. And now these customers have begun to clamor for the next-generation technology: resorbable hardware. Resorbables offer clear advantages over the traditional hardware. Like dissolving sutures, resorbable plates and screws are made of biodegradable polymers. They hold up long enough to support a healing bone, then gradually and harmlessly disintegrate in the patient's body. The new products, however, are not yet reliable; they fail about 8% of the time. That's why Crescordia has delayed launching a line using the new technology. But time is running out. A few competitors have begun to sell resorbables, despite their imperfections, and these companies are picking up market share. Should Crescordia join the fray and risk tarnishing its brand? Or should the company sit tight until it can offer a perfect product? Commenting on this fictional case study in R0506A and R0506Z are Robert A. Lutz, vice-chairman of product development at General Motors; Clayton M. Christensen, the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; Jason Wittes, a senior equity analyst covering medical supplies and devices at Leerink Swann; and Nick Galakatos, a general partner of MPM Capital.

The theories of market segmentation and brand building in Chapter 3, What Products Will Customers Want to Buy? in The Innovator's Solution by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor suggest that when companies segment markets and build brands in ways that match how the customer sees the market--customers hire products to get jobs done--their success rate in innovation increases. Gallardo's is a privately held firm whose products--salsas, sauces, and seasonings for Latin American dishes--were sold primarily in the southwestern United States. When the company had saturated that geographical market, its CEO decided to invade Mexico. Describes how Gallardo's marketers learned what jobs Mexican housewives hired these products to do. Shows how the company used these market insights to segment the market along different lines than its competitors. Gallardo's products and advertisements ended up spurring significant growth in the market, but most of the growth was captured by its primary competitor. What went wrong? Were Gallardo's branding and segmentation strategies consistent with the jobs-to-be-done model? Does the company have the chance to relaunch its products more successfully?

HBR's editors searched for the best new ideas related to the practice of management and came up with a collection that is as diverse as it is provocative. The 2004 HBR List includes emergent concepts from biology, network science, management theory, and more. A few highlights: Richard Florida wonders why U.S. society doesn't seem to be thinking about the flow of people as the key to America's advantage in the "creative age." Diane L. Coutu describes how the revolution in neurosciences will have a major impact on business. Clayton M. Christensen explains the law of conservation of attractive profits: When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products usually emerges at an adjacent stage. Daniel H. Pink explains why the master of fine arts is the new MBA. Herminia Ibarra describes how companies can get the most out of managers returning from leadership-development programs. Iqbal Quadir suggests a radical fix for the third world's trade problems: Get the World Bank to lend to rich countries so that there are resources for retraining workers in dying industries.

Theory often gets a bum rap among managers because it's associated with the word "theoretical," which connotes "impractical." But it shouldn't. Because experience is solely about the past, solid theories are the only way managers can plan future actions with any degree of confidence. The key word here is "solid." Gravity is a solid theory. As such, it lets us predict that if we step off a cliff we will fall, without actually having to do so. But business literature is replete with theories that don't seem to work in practice or actually contradict each other. How can a manager tell a good business theory from a bad one? The first step is to understand how good theories are built. They develop in stages: gathering data, organizing it into categories, highlighting significant differences, then making generalizations explaining what causes what, under which circumstances. For instance, professor Ananth Raman and his colleagues collected data showing that bar code-scanning systems generated notoriously inaccurate inventory records. These observations led them to classify the types of errors the scanning systems produced and the types of shops in which those errors most often occurred. Recently, some of Raman's doctoral students worked as clerks to see exactly what kinds of behavior cause the errors. From this foundation, a solid theory predicting under which circumstances bar code systems work and don't work is beginning to emerge. Once we forgo one-size-fits-all explanations and insist that a theory describes the circumstances under which it does and doesn't work, we can bring predictable success to the world of management.

SMaL Camera Technologies CEO Maurizio Arienzo was trying to decide what market opportunities SMaL should target. The company had developed a revolutionary imaging technology that powered small digital still and video cameras. Its first-generation product--a kit to power a credit-card-size consumer camera--was a success. Now, Arienzo had to decide whether to focus on beating back emerging competitors in the consumer space, stepping up efforts to crack the security and surveillance market, trying to reach the automotive market, developing a cellular phone camera offering, or making a "left turn." The decision would determine whether SMaL ever hit it big.

To distribute products to very small retailers in a very fragmented retail environment, the local subsidiary of a large consumer products company created an innovative distribution mechanism. The subsidiary's Small Local Stores division employed middlemen who distributed vans full of consumer products throughout the Philippines. The channel was growing rapidly, but it was the company's least profitable. Now the subsidiary had to decide what to do. Should it try to squeeze more margins out of the channel, even if that would lower the middlemen's incentives? Should it scrap the channel altogether? Or should it try to build an internal capability to reach the smallest stores, even if it involved significant capital expenditures? Regional management was due to arrive and the company had to come up with a plan.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Many companies proudly think of themselves as innovative. The great majority of them, however, are adept at producing only sustaining innovations--products or services that meet the demands of existing customers in established markets. Few companies have introduced genuinely disruptive innovations, the kind that result in the creation of entirely new markets and business models. And, yet, the motivation to pursue such innovations should be urgent. In almost any industry, the most dramatic stories of growth and success were launched from a platform of disruptive innovation. Clayton M. Christensen of Harvard Business School, Mark W. Johnson of Innosight in Woburn, Massachusetts, and Darrell K. Rigby of Bain & Co. are close observers of innovation successes and failures at large and small companies. Drawing on a decade's worth of research, they offer two sets of litmus tests that senior managers can use to shape business plans to improve their chances of success. Following a detailed exploration of the litmus tests, they try out their ideas in a hypothetical example that asks whether Xerox could disrupt Hewlett-Packard's ink-jet printer business. They conclude by outlining the process any company needs to institute if it wants to create an engine capable of building new disruptive businesses over and over again. If senior managers pursue the path outlined here--and if the growth businesses they start or acquire are truly disruptive in character--it will be less difficult and risky than many have supposed to create wave after wave of new corporate growth.

Amalgamates several cases concerning strategic decision making at Intel Corp. Discusses the company's decisions surrounding its entry and exit from several lines of businesses, most involving varieties of semiconductors that cost billions of dollars to develop and produce and profoundly influence the company and the marketplace.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The quest for competitive advantage often inspires executives to imitate the strategies of the most successful companies. Interestingly, however, precisely opposite factors are considered sources of competitive advantage at different points in time. Henry Ford's emphasis on focus has been touted as the key to success right alongside General Motors' product-line breadth. IBM's vertical integration was considered an unassailable source of competitive advantage a generation ago; today, everyone admires the outsourcing flexibility inherent in the nonintegrated business models of Cisco Systems and Dell Computer. If history is any guide, the practices and business models that constitute advantages for today's most successful companies confer those advantages only because of particular factors at work under particular conditions at a particular time. Harvard Business School's Clayton Christensen, a leading thinker on disruptive technologies, alerts managers to the imperative of understanding the context that supports a particular competitive advantage. He explains why, for example, pharmaceutical companies' current focus on ever larger mergers is moving them in exactly the wrong direction at exactly the wrong time. He blames their strategists (and investment bankers) for not thinking deeply about cause and effect with respect to competitive advantage. He also notes that the very existence of competitive advantage sets in motion creative innovations that, as competitors strive to level the playing field, cause the advantage to dissipate. That does not mean the search for competitive advantage is futile. Rather, it suggests that successful strategists need to cultivate a deep understanding of the processes of competition and progress and of the factors that undergird each advantage. Only then will they be able to see when old advantages are poised to disappear and how new advantages can be built in their stead.

CEO Michael Collins must decide if and how a process he developed to further innovation in the kids' industry could port over to other industries. The process was based on Collins' experiences as an inventor and as a venture capitalist, and it allowed his company to be an intermediary between inventors and innovation-seeking companies. The process seemed to be working quite well in the kids' industry and Collins had to decide what would "travel" to a different vertical.

What was it Wayne Gretzky said about why he was so good at hockey? He just skated to where the puck was going next. Executives and investors wish they could do so, too--to sense where profits are going next. Following a six-year study of profitability patterns, the authors have developed a model for doing just that. In the early stages of a product's evolution, companies compete on the basis of performance. And because they can't make substantial improvements in product performance unless the entire value chain is housed under one organizational roof, it works best if companies are vertically integrated. But as the underlying technology improves to meet the needs of most customers, companies begin to compete on the basis of convenience, customization, price, and flexibility. At that point, vertical integration is no longer an advantage--in fact, it quickly becomes a disadvantage. Different links in the industry value chain become modular, and the chain subsequently fragments. In either stage, most profitability goes to the companies that own the interdependent links in the value chain--the places where everyone's still vying to satisfy their customers with ever-better product functionality. Initially, that's the makers of the proprietary products aimed at the end-use consumers. But as those products become standardized, profitability shifts to the makers of components, and as components themselves become standardized, it can shift further back in the value chain. That's predictable, but it causes a problem for incumbents. As their products become commodities and profits decline, pressure from investors to maintain ROA causes them to spin off asset-intensive units that design and manufacture components--the very places where profits are heading.

After its spin-off from one of the world's largest ultrasound makers, Sonosite attempts to popularize a new kind of handheld ultrasound units. Sonosite needs to decide if it should focus on new markets that will value the portability and ease of use of its products, or if it should evolve its offerings so that they appeal to radiologists and cardiologists, the largest purchasers of ultrasound systems.