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There may be no better training ground for being a good leader than the armed forces. This Ivey professor served in the Canadian Navy and the lessons he learned more than 20 years ago have guided his own life and his approach to teaching leadership. Readers will learn what those valuable lessons are in this article.

BP's horrible missteps after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded were almost predictable, given the culture of deceit and arrogance that executive actions had encouraged. While the accident could have been prevented, BP might have avoided its intense and deserved public flogging if only it had respected the best practices for managing a crisis and for managing. Readers of this article will learn what BP could and should have done differently.

In many organizations, employees know more about their work than their managers. This reality should force organizations that still cling to the old, top-down style of managing to recognize that many employees today are very capable of managing themselves. This author explains the Why and How of a new style of managing for today.

The smart, aware executive today is doing something different. He or she is asking questions. Almost like leading itself, asking has different techniques and styles. Readers will learn which ones are right and the best fit for them in this article.

Hunkering down may be the preferred strategy in tough economic times. But as these authors suggest, companies that recognize the opportunities and modify their business model, can actually grow. Managers will learn some key tactics that will make their companies stand up and out during tough times.

A manager who regularly steps in to solve a problem for an employee may think that he or she is helping. In fact, this well-intentioned manager is actually limiting - and hurting - the employee. The effective manager enables employees to utilize the full depth and range of their intellect and capabilities. In this article, readers will learn how managers can do that.

An interview with Tom Peters.

A successful Canadian road construction and maintenance company is contemplating U.S. market entry via a subsidiary in Texas. The case deals with market entry considerations: speed of entry, the need to invest in learning about a market, and the importance of staying focused on what was a reasonable, original strategy.

Coping with the complexity of today's business environment is not about predicting the future or reducing risk. It's about building the capacity, in yourself, your people, and the organization to adapt continuously and learn speedily, in order to maximize the chances of seizing fleeting opportunities. These authors' excellent suggestions will help today's leaders cope with complexity.

It may make sense to offer 12 varieties of lattes, at least to the company that markets the offering. In most cases though, too many choices create complexity and frustrate the customer. Moreover, there are times when the offering flummoxes the company's staff. Slimming and streamlining the offering is the way to go, says this author, who suggests 3 practical steps an organization can apply to simplify things.

No industry is as visible and active in the climate change debate as the energy industry. Almost every day, managers are addressing the short-term and long-term implications of their policies for dealing with this issue. The authors of this article studied 50 firms in the oil and gas industry and found that companies that address the short-term and long-term threats and opportunities of climate change can gain a significant competitive advantage.

Call it unconventional or unorthodox, but Creative Execution which can be all of these things is designed to differentiate the company sharply and take it to previously unattainable heights. Leaders will understand why and how after they've read this article.

HBR's annual ideas collection, compiled in cooperation with the World Economic Forum, offers 10 fresh solutions with the potential for a huge positive impact on business and the world. Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer reveal what their research shows is the true key to employee motivation-and it's not what most managers focus on providing. Ronald Dixon proposes that the real performance breakthrough in health care will come when the medical community adopts the everyday communications technologies patients already use. Lawrence M. Candell asks why the U.S. has a Lincoln Laboratory to put public-spirited experts across the table from profit-motivated defense contractors, but no such entity to do the same in the financial sector. Eric Bonabeau, Alpheus Bingham, and Aaron Schacht urge players in the pharmaceutical industry to treat drugs as information assets; big pharma could orchestrate drug-development networks to promote innovation. Jack D. Hidary describes a market solution to achieve what no government handout can in the greening of existing buildings. Robert E. Litan and Lesa Mitchell advocate that universities' technology transfer offices loosen their monopolistic grip on their scientists' taxpayer-funded discoveries. Bill Jensen and Josh Klein urge frustrated professionals to "hack work" by adopting the mind-set and tool kit of the hacker to achieve the positive outcomes their employers want but make difficult to achieve. Sendhil Mullainathan notes that we have the tools to spot bubbles about to burst, but individual firms have little incentive to sound the alarm. Why not appoint a "bubbles committee"? Paul Romer proposes that "charter cities" be established to show the citizens of failed and languishing states the merits of market economies and to provide an option for change. Carne Ross questions why only nation-states are allowed to shape international affairs and reveals the need for independent diplomacy.

Modern capitalism can be broken down into two major eras. The first, managerial capitalism, began in 1932 and was defined by the then radical notion that firms ought to have professional management. The second, shareholder value capitalism, began in 1976. Its governing premise is that the purpose of every corporation should be to maximize shareholders' wealth. If firms pursue this goal, the thinking goes, both shareholders and society will benefit. Though that is the theory, in reality shareholders have not been better off since they became the center of the business universe. From 1933 to the end of 1976, when they were allegedly playing second fiddle to professional managers, shareholders of the S&P 500 earned compound annual real returns of 7.6%. From 1977 to the end of 2008, S&P 500 shareholders did considerably worse - earning real returns of 5.9% a year. Putting shareholders first forces managers into playing a game in which they focus on managing shareholder expectations rather than on managing the business. The main principle behind shareholder value capitalism is inherently flawed, and it's time we abandoned it and made a shift to a new era: customer-driven capitalism. Companies that make customers their top priority, as P&G and J&J do, generate returns that are just as high as, if not higher than, those of shareholder-focused companies, and can sustain them for longer. If companies put the customer first, they will make better decisions, because they can focus on improving operations and products and services, rather than on spinning lines to shareholders.

Historically the U.S. economy has been about ideas, experiment, and exploration. U.S. dynamism-the country's ability and proclivity to innovate-depends on multiplicity: variety among new ideas, a pluralism of beliefs among financiers, and diversity among consumers. Dynamism has been in decline over the past decade. Venture capitalists bemoan a dearth of innovative ideas, and investors bewail a precipitous drop in their returns. Total venture investment is running at less than $20 billion per year. The current financial system chokes off funds for innovation. As an antidote, this article proposes the establishment of a new government-sponsored enterprise - the First National Bank of Innovation. It would be structured as a network of "merchant" banks that invest in and lend to innovative projects, and it would have some features of the Farm Credit System in the United States. A dedicated funding arm would raise money in the capital markets at attractive rates. Banks would pass these funds on to entrepreneurs at rates commensurate with the risks of their projects. The banks in the network would be dedicated to "relationship-based" investing and lending. Thanks to comprehensive risk-based disclosure, strict oversight and transparency would emerge.

Research in Cognitive Psychology and the newer field of NeuroEconomics consistently demonstrates that people violate the strictures of rationality on a regular basis. This literature has generated a lengthy list of irrational behaviors to which many of us are subject on any given day, whether we like to admit it or not. These well-documented violations of rationality have, in turn, spawned a list of biases that can be used to define 'rational thinking'. That is, we can assess degrees of rational thinking in terms of the number and severity of cognitive biases that an individual displays. The authors describe some of the most common biases that challenge rational thinking, in the hopes that a better understanding of them will foster more bias-free decision making. Topics covered include 'serial associative cognition', 'my-side processing' and 'mindware gaps'.

Research by esteemed academics has uncovered a wide variety of biases that plague decision makers on a regular basis. Thanks to them, we know that predictable errors lead people to commit sub-optimal acts on a regular basis, ranging from undersaving for retirement to engaging in needless conflict and accepting the wrong jobs. Unfortunately, we have yet to uncover systematic strategies to help people overcome these biases and behave more optimally. The authors get started on this path, focusing on strategies that can lead to better decisions, which involve leveraging the human tendency to default to 'Type 1' -- or automatic -- mental processing.

The author and design practitioner describes how to go about creating new businesses or reinventing existing ones. He argues that the best way to manage the inherent uncertainty of innovation is to look beyond the existing data to find out where value truly resides for your business. One of the most effective methods for doing that, he says, is to create an 'opportunity map' -- a visual representation of the business landscape that guides future strategy by synthesizing met and unmet consumer needs, emerging discontinuities such as cultural and technology trends, both direct and indirect competitive activity, and internal and external competitive competencies. This approach, he says, can help leaders navigate complexity and chart a path to future growth.

Some of the toughest decisions in life are so-called 'should vs. want' decisions: you know that you should be exercising at the gym, but you would rather go to the movies with friends. It is not that people don't know what they should be doing, they simply behave in a seemingly irrational manner when faced with tempting consumption opportunities. The authors introduce the Theory of Decision Points, which suggests that external interventions can help individuals curb excessive consumption by providing them with an opportunity to pause and think about consumption. They show that in the case of individuals who are seeking to control consumption, decision points can snap them out of an automatic mode to a more deliberative decision-making mode.

Whether your aim is to lose weight, save for retirement or quit smoking, most of us have a clear idea of the long-term goals that we would like to achieve for ourselves. Unfortunately, most of us also fail to implement the requisite course of action to produce these outcomes. Why don't we simply make the decisions necessary to make our goals a reality? The authors argue that Behavioral Economics can provide solutions to problems that predictably arise from individual behavior. Not only does it acknowledge that human behavior is often far from optimal, but it also identifies a variety of decision errors and biases that contribute to departures from optimality. The authors show that many of the same decision errors that produce self-destructive behavior in the first place can actually be used to people's individual and collective benefit.