When researchers tracked the performance of 444 celebrated U.S. CEOs, they discovered that companies run by MBAs underperformed the rest. The reason? The MBAs were more likely to engage in risky strategies. And while those strategies led to temporary gains, which increased the CEOs' compensation, they hurt the companies in the long run.

Family business socio-emotional preferences are often Janus-faced. Some strive to create a strong business they can pass on to offspring by building innovation-promoting resources such as human, relational, and financial capital. Other family firms cater to family desires for unqualified nepotism, altruism towards undeserving kin, and appropriation of firm assets to fulfill parochial desires that erode these resources. This article explores how such preferences, together with their impact on resources and the innovation demands of their markets, shape the approach to innovation.

After reading some confusing management texts for an Executive MBA course he is taking, a manager falls asleep. He dreams that he is standing before a beautiful classical-style building, within which a man sits on some stones, chatting with three younger men. The manager is drawn to the seated figure and, to his delight, realizes that it is Socrates. He approaches him with a longstanding preoccupation and a discussion ensues regarding what 'leadership' really is.

Organization design is becoming more and more a cornerstone of competitive advantage in today's increasingly complex companies. The authors' research on firms that have achieved significant advantage suggests that many did so by creating powerful synergies among their capabilities, among market opportunities, and between the two. But the way they recognized and realized these synergies was through their multidimensional organizational designs. Such designs not only reify and empower the dimensions within or across which synergies can occur (function, product, market segment, customer, etc.), they also define and manage the collaborative interfaces needed to discover, exploit, and renew those synergies.

Business fads can change companies, for better or worse. They can introduce useful ideas, but often fail to deliver on promises. So how can managers tell a fad from a tool that might endure? For one thing, beware of suspiciously simple techniques. If they seem too easy, they probably are.

Although popular brands and unique capabilities help sustain a company's competitive advantage, they cannot be built by imitation. Managers have been able to develop sustainable capabilities not by emulating others, but by using their organizational designs and processes to identify, build on, and leverage their "asymmetries"--their evolving unique experiences, contacts, or assets. Such asymmetries may occur even in the simplest organizations. Unfortunately, they frequently are concealed, of little apparent use, and unconnected to value creation. Thus, they require new strategy making and organizational approaches for their discovery, development, and application. Based on lessons from a two-year study of a diverse sample of companies, this article shows how managers can grow capabilities that sustain competitive advantage by constantly identifying and growing asymmetries, embedding and empowering them within an organizational design, and shaping market focus to exploit them.

To develop and sustain competitive advantage, companies must begin thinking about strategy in a more integrated way. First, strategies must be comprehensive: they need to have clear direction and a coherent product-market focus, and they must be supported by incisive operating capabilities and resources and robust organization cultures. Second, strategies must align these dimensions and their subcomponents and ensure that each is well adapted to the competitive environment. Third, all of the elements of strategy need to be orchestrated around a powerful core theme. This article shows how managers can develop each of these aspects of strategic integration.

One company can copy another's strategy, reverse engineer its technology, or benchmark its systems. But it cannot duplicate the way strategy, systems, technology, and processes are configured into a synergetic whole. Competitive advantage results from a powerful unifying focus that pulls together the company's core mission and the systems and structures that support the core. Marshall Industries provides an excellent case study of how a company achieved a compelling configuration that goes beyond strategy. Three prototypes of effective configurations are suggested: the pioneer, the salesman, and the craftsman (specific firms illustrate these prototypes). Ideally, a configuration demonstrates consistent emphases: across mission, means, and market; in support systems that direct attitudes and attention; in the prioritization of resources; and in the directing of effort, motivation, and influence. But configuration can be excessive; symptoms of this include too much attention to a single narrow goal and failure to reexamine assumptions and methods. A good configuration permits periodic reassessment and provides the means for renewal and revision. A suggested "configuration audit" is offered as a guide to managers.