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Crowdsourcing can be defined as the application of social media to the process of open innovation. It leverages social media to enable brands, places, and entrepreneurs to engage and seek input from online communities who contribute powerful, creative ideas. Crowds should reflect a diversity of opinions, be independent, be geographically dispersed, and be able to aggregate private judgements into a collective decision. Culture can be an impediment to a firm’s adoption of crowdsourcing, if the firm is not open to receiving external input. Crowdsourcing also presents various risks, such as low participation due to a lack of awareness by an audience, controversy over intellectual property ownership, and confusion within a crowd about a task. Best practices in pursuing crowdsourcing include: 1) Ensure support: All ideas and contributions should be appreciated, and executive power for developing the contributions must exist. 2) Be clear with definitions: The company must understand how social media is being used internally. 3) Do demos and pilot: Try out different solutions and approaches and find what works best for an audience. 4) Think of what you want to ask: Explain the challenge in a way that resonates with the audience and elicits concrete contributions. 5) Give kudos: Reward the best contributors.

The Ivey Business Journal interviews Aldo Musacchio, associate professor at Harvard Business School and an expert on state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Defining state capitalism as the widespread influence of a government in an economy, Musacchio contends that the current debate on state capitalism and the efficiency or inefficiency of SOEs is outdated. Most observers compare today’s SOEs to Soviet-era SOEs, which often failed to comply with international financial standards or focus on profitability. The rise of SOEs dates to the 19th century, when governments tried to solve basic market failures and intervene to provide public services. The second stage of state capitalism, from the 1930s to the 1980s, was characterized by the state venturing into firms across many industries. The third stage saw SOEs being run more like private corporations, with governments as the majority owners. <br><br>While the Fortune Global 500 lacked an SOE in the top ten firms in 2005, it contains four in 2013. Two common forms of modern state capitalism are a) the government influencing investment decisions of private companies through majority ownership in publicly traded corporations and b) smaller government investments or loans. In recent years, large SOEs have gained more autonomy from governments, especially in financial terms. Chinese SOEs have been aggressively buying stakes in resource firms, and acquisitions that would have formerly been considered “imperialism” are now mainstream. In fact, flagship SOEs in large countries are moving towards a model in which management is quite sophisticated.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Steve Coll is interviewed on the topic of ExxonMobil, the American multinational oil and gas corporation that is often considered both a corporate bully and a paragon of prudent management practices. In describing his research on ExxonMobil, Coll details its extreme degree of discipline and tightness of information released on the energy industry. He describes the former CEO Lee Raymond as sophisticated, concrete, and reform-minded, albeit intimidating to colleagues and ardent in his philosophy of anti-government regulation and climate change skepticism. Raymond focused on metrics for measuring company health, forced employees to follow the same script on operating performance, improved safety records, and bolstered financial discipline. He also had a close relationship with Dick Cheney, the U.S. vice president under George W. Bush. Besides his complex views on ExxonMobil, Coll shares his thoughts on “resource nationalism,” particularly the fraught relationship between oil and nationalism. He attributes opposition to building oil pipelines to environmentalist forces, and finishes the interview with his outlook on the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Yves Doz is Professor of Strategic Management and the Timken Chaired Professor of Global Technology and Innovation at INSEAD, and Visiting Professor at the Helsinki School of Economics. He was Dean of Executive Education (1998-2002) and Associate Dean for Research and Development (1990-1995) at INSEAD. He has also taught at the Harvard Business School, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Seoul National University, and Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. <br><br>This interview touches on globalization, Chinese and Korean companies, the decline in U.S. business influence, and innovation.

An interview with Tom Peters.

From Built to Last to Good to Great and now to Why the Mighty Fall (HarperCollins), Jim Collins has established himself as the leading management thinker of our time. The former Stanford University Business School professor turned mega-selling author and avid rock climber is the driven researcher and thinker whom many leading companies look to for advice on how to grow, how to improve their performance and how to go from merely good to great. He spoke to Ivey Business Journal from his research laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.

Almost all discussions of corporate governance focus on boards of directors. But what about managers? Faults in the way a company is governed can be found in certain limits imposed on managers and in the relationship between managers and directors, a relationship that managers themselves can make more productive. One of the world's leading management thinkers offers some ideas for doing so.

In this interview, the author of Emotional Intelligence, one of the most influential books on organizational behaviour, discusses what he calls primal leadership, the emotional dimension of leadership. A leader's primal task is an emotional one, to articulate a message that resonates with their followers' emotional reality and so moves people in a positive direction.