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We like to think enlightened managers understand employee motivation. But research conducted by Stanford's Chip Heath suggests that managers are not as good at judging what drives their employees as they might think. The key to improving your ability to understand motivation is to appreciate that employees are driven by the same things you are.

Executive consultant Marshall Goldsmith tells his CEO clients that he's not the real coach; the people around them are. To change your behavior, he says, quit whining about the past and start asking your colleagues how you can do better. You're not done until they think you are.

Women tend to be less enthusiastic than men about hierarchies, says Kim Campbell, Canada's first female prime minister and minister of national defense, and that can be good for business. When women join leadership teams, hierarchies become less rigid and can lose their power to protect bad leaders.

Not long ago, it seemed far-fetched to think that feature films could be made on computers. Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull discusses how his company turned improbability into reality with the blockbusters Toy Story, A Bug's Life, and Monsters, Inc.

When it comes to management styles, newer isn't always better, or so chef Anthony Bourdain tells us in his best-seller Kitchen Confidential and in this conversation with HBR associate editor Gardiner Morse. But his old-fashioned approach--complete with a rigid hierarchy and a sacrosanct code of conduct--produces a counterintuitive result. Bourdain's kitchen at brasserie Les Halles in New York is a politically incorrect, frenzied workplace that demands and cultivates hard work, high performance, and unqualified loyalty. Bourdain runs his kitchen according to the old-school ethic developed by legendary chef Auguste Escoffier. Escoffier developed the "brigade system" after serving in the army during the Franco-Prussian War and ran his kitchens with a command structure much like the army's. According to Bourdain, the military model works because when people are laboring under extreme conditions, they come to feel that they are members of an elite. Bourdain's kitchen is a little society that depends on the kind of loyalty and mutual dependence needed in any crisis situation. And Bourdain "returns loyalty with absolute loyalty." Equally so, he lays down the law about lines that cannot be crossed. His kitchen allows people many personal freedoms but within a rigid framework. Workers must be punctual, take care of their work areas, and focus on making a great product every time. Protected by their highly structured work relationships, people become free to say what they think. Ego simply disappears because it's unnecessary and unwelcome, and resentments aren't allowed to simmer. Most of all, Bourdain says, the mix of informality and order serves to build great teams.

Too many companies have run into trouble because their boards won't stand up to management. Good governance requires a balance of power between the board and the CEO and a healthy tension between them, says former Medtronic CEO William George.

What do your customers really think? Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman discusses his novel market-research method for revealing consumers' unconscious thoughts about everything from fabric sprays to the Internet.

NASA chief Daniel Goldin made enemies during his controversial tenure, but even critics agree that his aggressive, no-nonsense tactics transformed the moribund agency into a lean and innovative operation. He talks candidly about what he learned and what he would have done differently.

U.S. businesses face many dangers in the global marketplace these days, from threats of political violence to shifting investment risks in emerging markets. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the former chair of the National Commission on Terrorism, discusses ways to mitigate these threats.

In this conversation, McKinsey's T. Michael Nevens takes the wraps off the "productivity paradox" and explains why competition and innovation, not IT, are the real drivers of productivity.