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Yang Jianguo was recently promoted from country manager for China to global head of product development at a staid French perfume maker. He was chosen for his technical smarts and his knowledge of emerging markets - a critical avenue for growth, given that sales in the company's core markets have stalled. Eager to succeed in his new role in Paris, Jianguo has lots of fresh ideas, but they seem to be falling on deaf ears. Members of the executive team, for their part, find Jianguo to be largely indifferent to their input. Can Jianguo adjust to this new culture? And can he succeed without sacrificing his identity? Three experts comment on this fictional case study in R0901A and R0901Z. Katherine Tsang, the CEO of Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai, explains the cultural differences between China and France and recommends that Jianguo push his thinking beyond the Chinese market. She also suggests that the company give all its executive team members multicultural training so they have the tools to understand one another and work together effectively. Mansour Javidan, the dean of research and a professor at Thunderbird School of Global Management, acknowledges that Jianguo's transition would be easier if he had the full support of the CEO, Alain Deronde. But since that isn't forthcoming, he advises Jianguo to work with Alain to develop targets for growth in emerging and traditional markets and a plan for building an infrastructure to achieve those goals. James Champy, the chairman of consulting for Perot Systems, is surprised that a family business would choose an "outsider" for this important post, but he recognizes it as a wise strategic move. He says that Jianguo needs a coach and should focus on learning the home market first, before trying to make inroads further afield.

In the face of the recent institutional breakdown of trust in business, managers are losing legitimacy. To regain public trust, management needs to become a true profession in much the way medicine and law have, argue Khurana and Nohria of Harvard Business School. True professions have codes, and the meaning and consequences of those codes are taught as part of the formal education required of their members. Through these codes, professional institutions forge an implicit social contract with society: Trust us to control and exercise jurisdiction over an important occupational category, and, in return, we will ensure that the members of our profession are worthy of your trust - that they will not only be competent to perform the tasks entrusted to them, but that they will also conduct themselves with high standards and great integrity. The authors believe that enforcing educational standards and a code of ethics is unlikely to choke entrepreneurial creativity. Indeed, if the field of medicine is any indication, a code may even stimulate creativity. The main challenge in writing a code lies in reaching a broad consensus on the aims and social purpose of management. There are two deeply divided schools of thought. One school argues that management's aim should simply be to maximize shareholder wealth; the other argues that management's purpose is to balance the claims of all the firm's stakeholders. Any code will have to steer a middle course in order to accommodate both the value-creating impetus of the shareholder value concept and the accountability inherent in the stakeholder approach.

Motivating employees begins with recognizing that to do their best work, people must be in an environment that meets their basic emotional drives to acquire, bond, comprehend, and defend. So say Nohria and Groysberg, of Harvard Business School, and Lee, of the Center for Research on Corporate Performance. Using the results of surveys they conducted with employees at a wide range of Fortune 500 and other companies, they developed a model for how to increase workplace motivation dramatically. The authors identify the organizational levers that companies and frontline managers have at their disposal as they try to meet workers' deep needs. Reward systems that truly value good performance fulfill the drive to acquire. The drive to bond is best met by a culture that promotes collaboration and openness. Jobs that are designed to be meaningful and challenging meet the need to comprehend. Processes for performance management and resource allocation that are fair, trustworthy, and transparent address the drive to defend. Equipped with real-world company examples, the authors articulate how to apply these levers in productive ways. That application should not be selective, they argue, because a holistic approach gets you more than a piecemeal one. By using all four levers simultaneously, and thereby tackling all four drives, organizations can improve motivation levels by leaps and bounds. For example, a company that falls in the 50th percentile on employee motivation improves only to the 56th by boosting performance on one drive, but way up to the 88th percentile by doing better on all four drives. That's a powerful gain in competitive advantage that any business would relish.

Jim Rogers, CEO of the energy company Cinergy, has led the company from the brink of bankruptcy to one of the premier energy companies through selecting a focused strategy, aligning the organization to support it, and mobilizing all the employees to implementation. The case also discusses the strategies used by Rogers to communicate the strategy, which included innovative image maps.

In 1995, Institutional Investor magazine began selling a complete ranking of the best equity research analysts. This report allowed research firms to assess the relative quality of each analyst across the industry, and this enabled firms to know nearly as much about the quality of analysts at other firms as they knew about the quality of their own analysts. Ponders the impact that increased transparency of performance will have on the labor market for equity research analysts, and asks how the directors of three different research firms ought to respond given each firm's competitive situation.

Michael Fernandes, the Director of Custom Manufacturing Operations at the pharmaceutical company Nicholas Piramal India Limited (NPIL), schedules a meeting with three of his reports, whose interpersonal conflicts with one another are causing his business development function to falter. He struggles to know how to handle these conflicts and bring the three into a productive working collaboration. Fernandes is in charge of incorporating NPIL's new acquisitions in Canada and the United Kingdom to market NPIL globally. His three direct reports are each involved in different aspects of NPIL--the Canadian operations, the British operations, and the global business development, and the case explores the team dynamics among them. Unless Fernandes can resolve the conflicts, the integration of the acquisitions is in jeopardy.

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Bob Rubin was a businessman given the task of setting up and running the National Economic Council for the Clinton Administration. Unfamiliar with management in a political climate, Rubin worked hard to design, staff, and position the Council to make better economic and policy decisions. Traces the career of Robert E. Rubin from his practice in law to his work at Goldman Sachs and studies how his work experiences prepared him to establish the National Economic Council.

J.R.D Tata, Chairman of the Indian conglomerate Tata & Sons, played a significant role in building India's economic infrastructure. Under his guidance, Tata & Sons built locomotives, steel refineries, airlines, chemical plants, and technology-based enterprises. Inheriting his title as Chairman in 1938, at the outbreak of World War II, Tata was able to navigate his family-owned companies through the tumultuous political climate of India. He worked with British colonial officers, and later closely with several Indian leaders under both pro- and anti-business government regimes. Applying his family's values to the workplace, Tata & Sons helped revolutionize business practices in India. From instituting the eight-hour work day and paid leave to providing a retirement gratuity, Tata's policies created a standard to which other companies--and eventually Indian government regulators--measured themselves. Blending humane business practices with political savvy and a pioneering spirit, J.R.D Tata is remembered as one of India's most important and influential business leaders. Tata is an example of a 20th century business leader who applied contextual intelligence to a variety of businesses, dramatically changing the landscape of India's infrastructure.

Events in the history of Cheung Kong's growth reveal how Li Ka-Shing applied his skills as a "first-class noticer" to complex political and socioeconomic environments. While Li's determination to succeed is legendary, so are his skills in reading and responding to the policies and norms of the People's Republic of China, British colonial Hong Kong, and the post-World War II international system. Since Li became the taipan of Hutchison Whampoa in the late 1970s, he has adjusted his ownership shares in a vast portfolio of businesses-including ports, energy, real estate, retail, telecommunications, and new media. Illustrates how Li applied his business acumen and his ability as a first-class noticer to decisions about raising or lowering his stake in these businesses, and whether to acquire new ones. After starting Cheung Kong Inc. in 1950, at age 21, Li built upon his knowledge and contacts in the plastics industry to become Hong Kong's King of Plastic Flowers. In the 1960s, amid political turmoil and labor unrest on both the mainland and in colonial Hong Kong, Li purchased rights to properties on Hong Kong island that were selling at distressed rates. Li's successes in industry and real estate continued, and he cultivated contacts and built a strong reputation that set the stage for his purchase of the hong Hutchinson Whampoa, thereby becoming the first Chinese taipan. As taipan, Li reorganized and reallocated his various financial holdings in the 1980s and 1990s as conditions were in flux due to the Westernization of China after Deng Xiaoping succeeded Mao Zedong, and amid concerns about the transfer of Hong Kong from Britain back to China in 1997.

General Electric thrived in every decade of the 20th century. Since its founding in 1892, GE has placed a high value on picking and training the best people. Staff members worked with other scientists in the company's research lab to design and manufacture new and better products to satisfy the growing American consumer demand for lighting, appliances, and consumer electronics in the 1910s to 1920s as well as in the 1950s and 1960s. GE's top executives have shown a clear understanding of the leadership and managerial styles that were appropriate for the years in which they worked. In the first decade of the 20th century, Charles Coffin demonstrated that he was an adept negotiator who amassed great wealth for GE in building generators and power equipment for local utilities in which GE also had a financial stake through bond issues. In the final decades of the 20th century, Jack Welch emphasized that GE should support only the most profitable businesses in the company's portfolio, a logic that led Welch and GE to phase out GE's consumer electronics division while bolstering the financial position of GE capital. Profiles all of GE's top executives.

This month, all of Harvard Business Review's Forethought contributions address avian influenza, its potential to become a pandemic, and the red flags this possibility raises for businesses. Jeffrey Staples warns that the H5N1 strain of the avian flu represents a new class of global threat and urges companies to plan accordingly. Scott F. Dowell and Joseph S. Bresee show how mutations of the virus could boost its ability to spread from person to person. If a human pandemic does strike, Nitin Nohria explains, the most adaptive organizations have the best chance of surviving. Warren G. Bennis says that such times call for a leader who can articulate the common threat and inspire people to overcome it together. Baruch Fischhoff, too, emphasizes the importance of risk communication, warning that managers who dismiss it may endanger the people they're responsible for and force stakeholders to look elsewhere for information. Fischhoff also demonstrates, in another article, how managers can map out their companies' vulnerabilities. Larry Brilliant tells us what people worldwide can expect from their governments. Peter Susser views the threat of a pandemic from a legal perspective, examining several HR-related issues businesses could face. Sherry Cooper points out the social and economic lessons we should have learned from Toronto's 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome. William MacGowan explains how Sun Microsystems is building a continuity plan to keep its global workforce healthy in the event of a pandemic. Wendy Dobson and Brian R. Golden caution that if a pandemic begins in China, as many scientists expect, the global impact will be immediate because China is so integral to the world economy. HBR also provides pandemic planning guidelines adapted from a checklist compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as a list of recommended avian flu resources.

Does management talent transfer from one company to another? The market certainly seems to think so. Stock prices spike when companies announce new CEOs from a talent generator like General Electric. But how do these executives perform over the long term? The authors studied the careers of 20 former GE executives who went on to lead other major organizations, with strikingly uneven results. Even the best management talent, the authors found, is transferable only if it maps to the challenges of the new environment. More specifically, the authors identified five types of skills that may or may not transfer to a new job: general management human capital, or the skills to gather, cultivate, and deploy financial, technical, and human resources; strategic human capital, or individuals' expertise in cost cutting, growth, or cyclical markets; industry human capital, meaning the technical and regulatory knowledge unique to an industry; relationship human capital, or the extent to which a manager's effectiveness can be attributed to his or her experience working with colleagues or as part of a team; and company-specific human capital, or the knowledge about routines and procedures, corporate culture and informal structures, and systems and processes that are unique to a company. The GE executives' performance as CEOs depended on whether their new organizations were able to leverage each type of skill. The authors' findings challenge the conventional wisdom on human capital, which holds that there are two types of skill: general management, which is readily transferable, and company specific, which is not. In fact, they argue, other types of management capabilities can contribute significantly to performance, and company-specific skills can be an asset in a new job.

In late June 2005, UBS Group CEO Peter Wuffli--anointed "Master of Zurich" by the financial press--was returning to Zurich from the firm's latest three-day Senior Leadership Conference (SLC). Tapping 600 top managers, this SLC featured an outdoor event at a former military site in the Swiss mountains. Under the banner of "Understanding, Commitment, and Trust," teams of 100 executives engaged in a simulation of six worlds--metaphors for the various regions and parts of UBS business. Initial skepticism about the exercise was replaced with enthusiasm for the "mind-boggling" camaraderie that it created. Held above Montreux, Switzerland, home of the International Jazz Festival, the program opened with a taped interview of jazz great Wynton Marsalis asking the audience to equate the dynamics of jazz with the collaboration required to maintain a complex professional services firm. Marsalis contrasted Duke Ellington, who composed for the specific talents of his band members, with John Coltrane, a master of improvisation. "Coltrane played the themes," Wuffli mused. "That's what we do. We've got the vision. We've got all of our different musicians and we're playing to these themes in an integrated way. It does make beautiful music."

Charles "Ed" Haldeman Jr. is promoted CEO of Putnam Investments after the firm was badly damaged by a series of improper trading practices. He is charged with the task of managing the crisis, repairing the company culture, and putting the firm back into a pattern of growth. Haldeman realizes that nothing less than a radical change in the culture of Putnam Investments would be enough to win back the trust of clients and employees who felt betrayed by the firm's apparent misconduct. He must confront some tough decisions about recently uncovered questions concerning the handling of certain accounting transactions three years earlier and about the continued lagging performance of Voyager, the firm's flagship equity fund.

We highlight 20 ideas just bubbling up to the surface in 2006. Howard Gardner contends that the ability to synthesize information will be the most valued trait for leaders. Dan Williams explores how body area networks can lower health care costs and improve safety. William McDonough describes China as a seedbed for environmental innovation. Nitin Nohria and Thomas A. Stewart say the next frontier for business will be managing incalculable uncertainty. Jeff Cares outlines the challenge confronting business as networks face off against networks. Claire Craig reports how scientists are going beyond the lab and using the world outside as their petri dish. Ted Halstead recommends that every newborn in America receive $6,000 as a down payment on a productive life. Georg von Krogh warns that customer-collaborators are starting to demand a stake in IP. Ged Davis envisions an OPEC-like organization to benefit consumers instead of producers. Nancy M. Dixon describes a model for peer-to-peer leadership development. Harris Allen and Sean Sullivan contend that investment in employees' health can pay for itself. David Weinberger says that stores should imitate Web design. Gerd Gigerenzer shows how a leader's personal rules of thumb influence employees. Zachary Karabell discusses the growing gap between nations' and companies' economic performance. Paul Hemp tells why avatars make good customers. Philip Parker explains why creating private labels for your retail customers is smart strategy. Judith Samuelson and Claire Preisser describe how companies are combating short-term thinking. George Stalk Jr. explains why many firms aren't benefiting from China sourcing. Michael S. Gazzaniga punctures inflated expectations about what neuroscience can do for business. E.L. Kersten says employees shouldn't expect their jobs to provide meaning. HBR also offers a list of important business books due out in 2006.

A $385 million loss for the final months of fiscal year 1994 signaled Continental might go bankrupt. Could new CEO Gordon Bethune turn Continental around? Continental was in dire straits because the deregulation of the commercial airline industry in 1978 ushered in a new era focused on mergers and acquisitions and bitter employee-management relations. Venerable airline brands with a commitment to quality, like Continental, were prime takeover targets. After Texas Air Chairman Frank Lorenzo (HBS 1963) secured Continental in his hostile takeover bid, tensions escalated between Lorenzo and the old guard--especially when Lorenzo declared Continental bankrupt in the fall of 1983 and then fired and replaced half his staff with cheaper nonunion labor. In October 1994, five months after Continental exited its second bankruptcy, Bethune was elevated to CEO and created a Go Forward Plan to return Continental to profitability. Two years after unveiling the Go Forward Plan, Continental was at the top of the industry in a number of important performance metrics.

General Electric thrived in every decade of the 20th century. Since its founding in 1892, GE has placed a high value on picking and training the best people. Staff members worked with other scientists in the company's research lab to design and manufacture new and better products to satisfy the growing American consumer demand for lighting, appliances, and consumer electronics in the 1910s to 1920s as well as in the 1950s and 1960s. GE's top executives have shown a clear understanding of the leadership and managerial styles that were appropriate for the years in which they worked. In the first decade of the 20th century, Charles Coffin demonstrated that he was an adept negotiator who amassed great wealth for GE in building generators and power equipment for local utilities in which GE also had a financial stake through bond issues. In the final decades of the 20th century, Jack Welch emphasized that GE should support only the most profitable businesses in the company's portfolio, a logic that led Welch and GE to phase out GE's consumer electronics division while bolstering the financial position of GE capital. Profiles all of GE's top executives.

Focuses on the leadership lessons drawn from the events precipitating the Animator's Strike of 1941, depicting the growing pains of a company that was as much formed and changed by American culture as American culture was formed and changed by it. The tale of Walt Disney's roller-coaster journey from small-town paperboy to underage ambulance-driving serviceman to amateur animator and thrice-failed businessman to iconic leader is told against the backdrop of swift and seeping change in the beginning of the 20th century. An ambitious creative genius, he masterfully pursued emerging technological advantage and uniquely grasped and personified American social mores, but was reckless and naive about strategic business issues, especially concerning intellectual property and human resources management. A rewritten version of an earlier case.

Demand for low-cost housing after World War II far exceeded supply. Was this a profitable new market? New York developer William Levitt had to decide. During World War II, Levitt was eager to build basic housing for the working class--otherwise, Levitt & Sons would have been idle due to the federal government ban on all nonessential construction, like the luxury homes that Levitt & Sons typically built on Long Island, New York. Under a contract with the U.S. Navy, Levitt & Sons erected 2,000 homes in a year's time, an effort that gave Levitt & Sons the opportunity to perfect rapid home construction techniques. Levitt had to decide if he would apply those techniques to meet the post-war housing demand. Levitt & Sons had the manufacturing know-how. Would sizable profits follow? Levitt needed to understand the implications of the home improvement loans and mortgages the government guaranteed to returning servicemen as part of their veterans benefits. Levitt had the opportunity to parlay his own World War II experience as a Navy Seabee to market these homes by appealing to the sentiments of veterans like himself who were eager to return home and settle down after the fighting stopped. Levitt's decision would have profound social, economic, and political impact on the lives of returning veterans, their spouses, and their children--the Baby Boomers.