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Roger Martin interviews best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell about his latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown and Company, 2008) and finds that success is much more complex than we might think. Gladwell explains that, if we want to understand why some people thrive and others don't, we should spend the bulk of our time looking around the individual - at such things as their family, their birthplace, even their birth date. Along the way he touches on 'disadvantages that turn into advantages'; the powerful learning strategy of compensating for one's weaknesses; and why only 30 per cent of any outcome can be correlated with general intelligence.

For competitive advantage in the 21st century, firms must be able to access and balance both the science of business and the art of business. Knowledge advances along four categories: from mystery to heuristic to algorithm to code, described here. Today's businesses can create value in two fundamental ways: first, by operating a business within a single knowledge category; i.e. either by running a heuristic, an algorithm, or code; and second, by instigating a progression along the sequence of knowledge from mystery to heuristic, heuristic to algorithm or algorithm to code. Doing both concurrently is critical to a modern organization's success.

Canada's Outstanding CEO of the Year for 2007, Gord Nixon of RBC Financial Group, talks to Roger Martin about some of his biggest challenges and opportunities as chief executive of Canada's largest bank. The interview touches on the effects of global financial turmoil on the bank and the opportunities such turmoil presents; his predictions for global banking in the near term; and why Newsweek named RBC the top large company in the world at effectively managing environmental risks.

Integrative thinkers like Jack Welch, A.G. Lafley and Michael Dell share some common traits, which is good news for those who aspire to attain their level of decision-making prowess. Thes traits they share relate to three elements of their personal knowledge systems: their stance, tools and experiences. The author explains each of these in depth as well describing the decision-making process that integrative thinkers use.

In search of lessons to apply in our own careers, we often try to emulate what effective leaders do. Roger Martin says this focus is misplaced, because moves that work in one context may make little sense in another. A more productive, though more difficult, approach is to look at how such leaders think. After extensive interviews with more than 50 of them, the author discovered that most are integrative thinkers--that is, they can hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once and then come up with a new idea that contains elements of each but is superior to both. Martin argues that this process of consideration and synthesis (rather than superior strategy or faultless execution) is the hallmark of exceptional businesses and the people who run them. To support his point, he examines how integrative thinkers approach the four stages of decision making to craft superior solutions. First, when determining which features of a problem are salient, they go beyond those that are obviously relevant. Second, they consider multidirectional and nonlinear relationships, not just linear ones. Third, they see the whole problem and how the parts fit together. Fourth, they creatively resolve the tensions between opposing ideas and generate new alternatives. According to the author, integrative thinking is an ability everyone can hone. He points to several examples of business leaders who have done so, such as Bob Young, co-founder and former CEO of Red Hat, the dominant distributor of Linux open-source software. Young recognized from the beginning that he didn't have to choose between the two prevailing software business models. Inspired by both, he forged an innovative third way, creating a service offering for corporate customers that placed Red Hat on a path to tremendous success.

Canadian firms are profoundly influenced by the Canadian capital markets' narrow definition of what constitutes 'risky behavior,' and the unfortunate result, says the author, is a dearth of globally-competitive Canadian companies. It is exceedingly unhelpful to Canadian firms for the capital markets to fixate on the risks of globalizing while largely ignoring the risks of staying at home, he says. In doing so, they avoid the consequences of failed efforts to globalize, while at the same time eliminating much of the upside that they could also enjoy through the successful globalization of Canadian firms. In discouraging such globalization, the capital markets are inadvertently threatening Canada's long-term prosperity in an increasingly-interconnected world.

Yesterday's approaches to problem solving just won't cut it in today's complex environment, say the authors. The high-value decision maker of the future will be characterized by a capacity for Integrative Thinking. They show that Integrative Thinking stands not as an enemy to traditional business disciplines, on whose shoulders it can be seen to squarely rest, but rather as a constructive challenge to produce more adaptive-reasoning patterns, more valuable instruments of prediction, and a more inclusive approach to inter-disciplinary dialogue. The new model for business education they argue for acknowledges the vital role of integration in modern business, stressing the virtues of 'nimble mindedness', 'big mindedness' and 'tough mindedness' over the seductive trap of narrow perfectionism.

ViaGen has invested heavily to develop cloning technology for the livestock industry. Cloning has the potential to significantly improve the genetics of livestock, leading to higher quality meat, healthier animals, and more efficient production. Since 2003, the firm has been waiting for the FDA to declare that meat and milk from cloned animals are no different from non-clones. During that period the company has worked to educate regulators, consumers, and members of the livestock chain about cloning. In late 2006, the FDA announcement appears imminent. ViaGen CEO Mark Walton needs to develop different business plans to commercialize cloning technology in pigs, cattle, and horses, all of which have a different industry structure. At the same time, he must consider what to do if the announcement is delayed yet again.

Board directors suffer from conflicts of interest just as managers do and, so, can't be trusted to act in shareholders' interests. The solution is to make directorship a high-profile public service.

The paradigmatic shift taking place in economic value creation requires organizations to move away from an obsession with reliability and towards a more welcoming environment for validity. A reliable process is one that produces a consistent and predictable result, over and over. To enhance the reliability of any process, one has to reduce the number of variables considered and use quantitative, bias-free measurement. On the other hand, to increase the validity of any process, one must consider a much wider array of relevant variables and use intuition and gut instinct. Ultimately, reliability and validity anchor down opposite ends of a spectrum: more reliability requires fewer variables and therefore less validity, and vice versa. How does this trade-off relate to design, and why should it matter to today's business leaders? Because design possesses an inherent bias toward validity: great designers seek deep understanding of the user and the context, which entails the consideration of many variables; they don't limit their considerations to aspects that can be thoroughly quantified; they worry less about whether they can replicate a particular process, and more about producing a valid solution to the problem before them. The author presents five strategies for being effective in a reliability-obsessed organization.

Employees are the backbone of every organization, and as you might expect, research shows that happy employees are more motivated, productive and committed. While considerable research has explored the link between an organization's long-term success and motivated employees, much less has been said about what actually makes employees happy. The author sets out to do this, arguing that three key drivers affect employee happiness: i) being a valued member of a community, ii) that is valued by you, iii) and that others outside the community value. Business leaders who want to benefit from the productive power of happy employees must think systematically these three drivers of happiness. Only once all three are functioning smoothly will they have harnessed the full power of happiness.

The List is HBR's annual attempt to capture ideas in the state of becoming--when they're teetering between what one person suspects and what everyone accepts. Roderick M. Kramer says it isn't bad when leaders flip-flop. Julia Kirby describes new efforts to redefine the problem of organizational performance. Joseph L. Bower praises the "Velcro organization," where managerial responsibilities can be rearranged. Jeffrey F. Rayport argues that companies must refocus innovation on the "demand side." Eric Bonabeau describes a future in which computer-generated sound can be used to transmit vast amounts of data. Roger L. Martin says highly reliable corporate systems such as CRM tend to have little validity. Kirthi Kalyanam and Monte Zweben report that marketers are learning to contact customers at just the right moment. Robert C. Merton explains how equity swaps could help developing countries avoid some of the risk of boom and bust. Thomas A. Stewart says companies need champions of the status quo. Mohanbir Sawhney suggests marketing strategies for the blogosphere. Denise Caruso shows how to deal with risks that lack owners. Thomas H. Davenport says personal information management--how well we use our PDAs and PCs--is the next productivity frontier. Leigh Buchanan explores workplace taboos. Henry W. Chesbrough argues that the time is ripe for services science to become an academic field. Kenneth Lieberthal says China may change everyone's approach to intellectual property. Jochen Wirtz and Loizos Heracleous describe customer service apps for biometrics. Mary Catherine Bateson envisions a midlife sabbatical for workers. Jeffrey Rosen explains why one privacy policy won't fit everyone. Tihamer von Ghyczy and Janis Antonovics say firms should embrace parasites. And Jeffrey Pfeffer warns business-book buyers to beware. Additionally, HBR offers a list of intriguing business titles due out in 2005.

As the modern economy has evolved, business has increasingly used management science and information technology in an attempt to generate reliability - predictable outcomes on a consistent basis. The author argues that despite these efforts, there is little evidence that the ability of organizations to accurately understand the world and predict the future has increased one iota. Massive spending on these systems has not prevented corporations from being ambushed by new competitors and changing markets, and the author argues that the reason for this is a natural tension between the pursuits of reliability and validity. Reliability seeks to produce consistent, predictable outcomes by utilizing a system that is restricted to the use of objective data - for instance, predicting a customer's future purchases by using data collected in their Customer Information File (CIF) in a CRM system. Considering judgmental factors such as the mood of the customer or their attitude towards new products would be seen as an abomination in a reliable system. Validity, on the other hand, seeks to produce outcomes that meet the desired objective, even if the system employed can't produce a consistent, predictable outcome. The author describes three key implications of the obsession with reliability for management and says that to succeed in the next 20 years, firms will have to figure out how to become a more welcoming place for validity-oriented systems and for people who are more comfortable handling 'fuzzy' data and using their judgment.

The rise of 'shareholder value maximization' as the primary mission of corporations has created a context that exacerbates extreme reactions to monetary compensation. As a result, argues the author, depending heavily on monetary incentives to motivate people is nothing short of dangerous, especially for a firm whose mission is truly to maximize shareholder value. When it comes to incentives, balancing them and dulling their 'sharp edges' with a supportive firm context is far preferable - for employees, the firm and for society - to unleashing them on their own.

For much of the 20th century, labor and capital fought bitterly for control of the industrialized economy. The titans of industry ultimately won a resounding victory over the unions, but the story doesn't end there. In today's economy, value is largely the product of knowledge and information. Companies cannot generate profits without the ideas, skills, and leadership capabilities of knowledge workers. It's these factors--not technologies, not factories, and certainly not capital--that give the most successful companies their unique advantages. As knowledge workers come to realize this, and see that the demand for their talent outstrips the supply, they are steadily wresting more and more of the profits from shareholders. This time the battle is between the sources of capital and the producers of value, and how it will end is far from clear. With this new battle, we're also witnessing a fundamental change in the political alignment of capital. The Left is now siding with "the common shareholder" against the well-compensated top tier of the labor pool. Shareholders seeing an unprecedented proportion of the return on their investments siphoned off to employees may well ask, Is there no end to it? The growing tensions between shareholders and managers cannot be ignored, and capitalism is at a crossroads--again.

It sounds simple: Compensate managers with stock or options, and they'll do what's best for shareholders. But it doesn't always work that way; more than a few executives have cashed in while shareholder value burned up. To fix that problem, Roger Martin contends, boards need to abolish stock-based compensation and replace it with bonuses based on real earnings growth.

Executives who want to make their organizations better corporate citizens face many obstacles: If they undertake costly initiatives that their rivals don't embrace, they risk eroding their company's competitive position. If they invite government oversight, they may be hampered by costly regulations. And if they adopt wage scales and working conditions that prevail in the wealthiest democracies, they may drive jobs to countries with less stringent standards. Such dilemmas call for clear, hard thinking. To aid in that undertaking, Roger Martin introduces the virtue matrix--a tool to help executives analyze corporate responsibility by viewing it as a product or service. The author uses real-life examples to explore the forms and degrees of corporate virtue. Martin uses the virtue matrix to examine why the public clamor for more responsible corporate conduct never seems to abate. Another issue the author confronts is anxiety over globalization. Finally, Martin applies the virtue matrix to two crucial questions: What are the barriers to increasing the supply of corporate virtue? And what can companies do to remove those barriers?

Big companies in crisis get there by doing the things that once made them big. The experience of troubled companies is a syndrome with four stages. First the founders articulate their vision. Then the company develops steering mechanisms to operationalize the vision and guide the company through change. Unfortunately, these steering mechanisms tend to become rigid over time, with much stronger ties to the founding vision than to the changing economic environment. So in the third stage, feedback deteriorates. And the useful signals that do get through run into organizational defensive routines--the fourth stage--that prevent information from being put to proper use. The key to getting out of this syndrome is to abandon blame and focus instead on what the company did right to get into the crisis it now faces. To answer that question, managers must examine the differences between the strategy the company espouses and the strategy it enacts.