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Workplace incivility can be as costly as sexual harassment, reports HBR senior editor Gardiner Morse.

The unwillingness of autonomous teams to monitor members' work can depress performance, finds Washington University's Claus Langfred.

Risk aversion is undermining U.S. innovation, warns Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness.

When you name your brand, trust your gut.

They're in your organization--and they're easy to mistake for high potentials. But psychologists Robert Hare and Paul Babiak are readying a test to flush them out.

You can overdo feedback, HR professor Alain Gosselin's field research reveals.

Rutgers sociologist and disaster studies expert Lee Clarke discusses how organizations unwittingly make pie-in-the-sky plans--what he calls symbolic plans--that are often worse than useless. He advises companies to expose and reassess these unrealistic strategies.

University of Chicago's Roman Weil charges that many audit committee members are financially illiterate--and he has the test results to prove it.

E. Lawrence Kersten thinks corporate America could use a good dose of demotivation. Carrying products that promise to "unleash the power of mediocrity," Kersten's company, Despair Inc., has just the ticket.

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.

A homogeneous workforce can be a hindrance when it comes to innovation. In this interview, Chris Anderson--the chairman and host of the annual Technology, Entertainment, and Design brainfest--argues for more diversity in the workplace.

Airstream's ability to innovate and grow depends on balancing longtime owners' expectations with new buyers' desires. In this conversation, president and CEO Dicky Riegel speaks about making sure that the more the iconic, egg-shaped aluminum trailers change, the more they remain the same.

IBM director of web infrastructure software, Robert Sutor, is a key leader in the arcane world of web services. In this interview, he says it's just a matter of time before companies seamlessly connect their systems and software via the Internet through all-but-invisible applications. Web services will change the way we do business.

Iqbal Quadir, the founder of Bangladesh's GrameenPhone, discusses the failure of foreign aid to rescue moribund third-world economies and the need to empower local entrepreneurs. The most important feature of his company, he explains, isn't the phone system itself but the microloans that mobilize an army of individual entrepreneurs to meet an unsatisfied need profitably.

In his book and TV series Commanding Heights, Daniel Yergin traces the arc of globalization, illuminating the vitality of market capitalism and the unpredictability and fragility of markets. In this conversation, he considers where the growth will be in the next 20 years, what oil companies know about managing through uncertain times, and the unexpected course that globalization is currently taking.

In this HBR interview, business-etiquette consultant Barbara Pachter describes common executive gaffes, explains why managers still get etiquette wrong, and offers some rules of thumb about good business manners.

For the sixth year in a row, sporting-gear cooperative REI made Fortune's list of the 100 best companies for which to work. CEO Dennis Madsen shares his thoughts about the things the retailer seems to be doing right--among them, aligning corporate culture with employees' values and not getting too far ahead of customers.

When Bruce Chizen took over as president and CEO from Adobe's legendary founders in 2000, he knew he had to confront the skeptics who doubted he had the technological grounding to lead the company. In this interview, Chizen describes how he won converts by acknowledging his shortcomings and discusses the leadership lessons he learned along the way.

How does the structure of social networks affect the way fads catch on and companies solve problems? Columbia University network scientist Duncan Watts says that this young field is on the path to answers.

David Gergen, adviser to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton, knows a thing or two about how leaders get their messages across. In this edited e-mail interview with HBR's Gardiner Morse, Gergen discusses the power of persuasion and the theatrics of communicating well.