The COVID-19 pandemic that erupted in 2020 forced businesses across the world to adopt virtual meetings. With many people working from home, software platforms like Zoom and Teams became ubiquitous, but their widespread use also revealed many weaknesses and limitations. While technologies for virtual meetings have existed for decades, these technologies have advanced significantly in recent years, and today range from audioconference facilities to telepresence rooms with high-resolution video and sophisticated virtual presence features. The available alternatives differ significantly in costs, complexity and capabilities, and choosing the most effective technology for each meeting setting is not always easy. This is important, since after the pandemic, virtual meetings will move from being a necessity brought on by the pandemic to being a widely accepted alternative to traditional face-to-face meetings. Consequently, the questions of when and how to meet virtually will become even more significant. In this article, we describe a decision-making framework for choosing when and how to meet virtually, based on matching the appropriate communication capabilities with various meeting objectives and taking into account meeting size and duration. The framework is based on extensive empirical research conducted in partnership with several major U.S. and European companies.

Eneco Group, the second largest utility company in the Netherlands, launched a smart thermostat, Toon, that served as a platform for energy management services. Toon quickly became the gold standard for smart homes in the Netherlands. In January 2017, top management needed to discuss the strategic priorities to keep Toon's lead and hold off the competition.

Eneco Group, the second largest utility company in the Netherlands, launched a smart thermostat, Toon, that served as a platform for energy management services. Toon quickly became the gold standard for smart homes in the Netherlands. In January 2017, top management needed to discuss the strategic priorities to keep Toon’s lead and hold off the competition.

In October 2015, three senior managers at BNP Paribas Fortis, the leader in retail banking in Belgium and a subsidiary of the BNP Paribas Group, were discussing how to take the bank’s latest service, “James,” to the next level and grow its customer base fivefold by the end of 2016. Launched in 2009, James was a unique investment portfolio advice service that substituted web conferencing technology for face-to-face interaction between advisors and affluent banking customers. An important feature of the James banking experience was that each customer mainly interacted with the same advisor, and was able to do so from virtually any location, outside regular office hours. The use of technology to build strong customer relationships from a distance proved beneficial for both the customers and the bank. Now the BNP Paribas Fortis managers had to decide how to expand James’ customer base, outpace the competition, and organize for growth. How could they grow the country’s current base of nearly 20,000 James customers to 100,000 in just one year?

In October 2015, three senior managers at BNP Paribas Fortis, the leader in retail banking in Belgium and a subsidiary of the BNP Paribas Group, were discussing how to take the bank's latest service, "James," to the next level and grow its customer base fivefold by the end of 2016. Launched in 2009, James was a unique investment portfolio advice service that substituted web conferencing technology for face-to-face interaction between advisors and affluent banking customers. An important feature of the James banking experience was that each customer mainly interacted with the same advisor, and was able to do so from virtually any location, outside regular office hours. The use of technology to build strong customer relationships from a distance proved beneficial for both the customers and the bank. Now the BNP Paribas Fortis managers had to decide how to expand James' customer base, outpace the competition, and organize for growth. How could they grow the country's current base of nearly 20,000 James customers to 100,000 in just one year?

DSM, a global life sciences, business-to-business company, is in the midst of a massive multi-year corporate rebranding exercise to incorporate the concept of creating sustainable shared value. With few precedents in this industry, the company must develop its own processes and implementation. Students are challenged to define the next steps in the rebranding, including the promotion of DSM’s sustainability positioning as its key differentiator.

DSM, a global life sciences, business-to-business company, is in the midst of a massive multi-year corporate rebranding exercise to incorporate the concept of creating sustainable shared value. With few precedents in this industry, the company must develop its own processes and implementation. Students are challenged to define the next steps in the rebranding, including the promotion of DSM's sustainability positioning as its key differentiator.

This article, based on work with dozens of Business-to-Business firms, extracts general principles of brand architecture design based on specific examples, and then tests these principles by applying them more broadly to a wide sample of brand architectures. B2B brand architecture is a function of two key dimensions: the organizational structure, in particular, the extent to which a firm is centralized or decentralized (in terms of its product range, sales, and marketing); and the extent to which the firm's market offerings are standardized versus customized. This framework and the axiom of risk alleviation through the sales process together capture the principal elements of B2B brand architecture design.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Most of the economy is made up of firms that were created well before the advent of e-business. Yet most e-business research has focused on "pure-play" companies that were created specifically to take advantage of the Web. The authors created an e-business planning process that can be used both to examine an established company's existing operations and to identify promising new business opportunities. The planning process has four steps. The first is to identify potential e-business initiatives according to whether they create business value or reduce costs. The second step is to analyze the functional scope of each project using an architecture of e-business processes. The third step, analyzing the sustainability of each initiative's benefits, is particularly important in the e-business context because Internet interactions are susceptible to being copied by competitors. Finally, prioritizing among e-business projects depends on how they fit with other information technology elements. The authors explore ways in which e-business can create opportunities for completely new products and markets, including adding information features, selling information as a product, and finding new markets. The authors detail how their e-business planning process was used at a mature global company. A company task force considered two major projects. The e-business planning process sharpened the definition of the projects, outlined the technical requirements and other resource needs, and confirmed the sustainability of both projects.