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Challenging business threats and opportunities abound, yet few Renaissance men/women exist to help organizations move forward creatively in response to these challenges. Too much information exists today for a true rebirth to happen. However, self-perpetuating, quasi-renaissance managers might assimilate patterns of thinking and behavior into their professional/personal lives that ultimately make them more intersectional and innovative. Specifically, we point to five habits and three methods managers can implement to lower associative barriers and enhance intersectionality. We then introduce a culling process that helps managers find the few highly creative ideas from larger batches of mediocre ideas, thus enabling enhanced creativity.

During the next decade-plus, thousands of Baby Boomer entrepreneurs will retire, usually without formal succession plans. Next-generation relatives, former employees, or outsiders will assume leadership of these now-mature enterprises, hopefully bringing their own visions and initiatives and becoming, in every sense, re-entrepreneurs. Re-entrepreneurship describes a process through which a mature enterprise can be made new again. Re-entrepreneurial leaders will encounter challenges that differ radically from those confronted by traditional entrepreneurial leaders. Re-entrepreneurial initiatives necessarily should begin with new visions of what mature organizations might do to become new again; will succeed only if stakeholders commit to that vision; and should culminate with reimagined, restaged, and revitalized enterprises. To secure re-entrepreneurial outcomes, three framing principles are proposed. Each principle is rooted in the theory of Joseph Schumpeter, the godfather of entrepreneurism and creative destruction. Seven re-entrepreneurial rules follow. While grounded in entrepreneurial theory, each rule is based primarily on experiential lessons shared by re-entrepreneurial executives who have previously assumed leadership succession roles inside mature organizations--and subsequently reimagined, restaged, and revitalized, ultimately renewing their firms.

For many American firms engaging with Chinese business partners, patterns of negotiated promises made but not kept by their Chinese counterparts often prove rule rather than exception. While various issues play a role in this unfortunate condition, many contributing factors are not subject to control or correction by U.S. negotiators. But two singularly damaging factors can be controlled and corrected by U.S. managers. First is their tendency to negotiate from decidedly Western sociocultural perspectives. Second is that managers often negotiate in states of relative ignorance about certain key cultural values that heavily influence Chinese negotiating practices. Grounded in Bing Fa, this article describes approaches designed to enable managers to negotiate more effectively with Chinese partners. By turns, the approaches instruct U.S. managers regarding why and how they should (when negotiating with Chinese counterparts): embrace the unusual as normal; begin with hard ends in mind; anticipate/prepare for conflict; never resist resistances, [instead] always retreat gracefully; disclose with discretion; act like ladies and gentlemen; and never die with bullets in [their] guns. Adopt these tactics, and U.S. managers would lessen the impact of two factors that, when present, degrade their negotiating effectiveness.

What are the timeless truths of advertising? How can agency leaders manage their teams, creative talent, and clients? To answer these and other questions, the mythology of the "Golden Age of Advertising" is examined and analyzed herein. Specifically, using ad-man Don Draper-protagonist of the fictional but already culturally iconic television series Mad Men-as a mythic archetype, lessons are extracted for contemporary advertising practitioners. Ten timeless rules are proposed and explicated in the areas of managing intra-agency leadership processes, managing creative processes, and managing client relationships.

When the colors of all the U.S. armed services' uniforms are combined, the color purple appears; therefore, military insiders refer to inter-service operations as "purple" operations. Now a core concept, the "jointness" of U.S. military strategic response to a critical operational failure encapsulates principles and processes through which two or more armed services are best able to integrate strategies, strengths, and capabilities in ways that yield genuine synergies, despite the differences in mission and culture that naturally separate the services. The now ingrained ability of military services to "go purple" quickly has materially contributed to strategic and operational successes during the last 20 years. The internal circumstances as well as global environmental challenges faced by domestic firms, particularly at the marketing-manufacturing (M-M) interface, resonate with those faced by the U.S. military. Firms may benefit from evaluating the prospect of "going purple" at this crucial point of interface. This article integrates military-like jointness principles into an organizational framework that functions as a guide to pursuing cross-functional M-M integration more successfully. The framework also provides a methodology through which managers can determine whether and how much "purple" ought to be pursued.