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If you're unhappy at work, and changing roles or companies may be unrealistic given the tough economy, what can you do? A growing body of research suggests that a process called job crafting can be a powerful tool for reenergizing and reimagining your life at work. It involves redefining your current job description to better incorporate your motives, strengths, and passions. The exercise prompts you to visualize your job graphically, map its elements, and reorganize them to shape the job to better suit you. In this way, you can put your own personal touches on the way you see and do your job; and you'll gain a greater sense of control at work-all of which is especially critical at a time when you're probably working longer and harder and will be retiring later. Perhaps job crafting's best feature is that it's driven by you, not your supervisor. Research with a range of organizations indicates that employees who engage in job crafting often end up more engaged and satisfied with their work lives, achieve higher levels of performance in their organizations, and report greater personal resilience. And organizations have a lot to gain by enabling job crafting: The exercise lets managers turn the reins over to employees, empowering them to become "job entrepreneurs." And when pay resources are constrained or promotions impossible, job crafting may give companies a different way to motivate and retain their most talented employees.

Joe Girardi had wanted to play for the Chicago Cubs since he was a boy. He achieved that ambition, went on to coach for the Yankees, and is now the New York team's manager. He reflects in this interview on the value of numbers, how to keep players focused, and the challenges that come with being the most successful sports franchise in American history.

Successful enterprises create and adhere to distinct business ideologies-such as the Toyota Way and the Xerox Way-over time. These doctrines contain specific ideas about how to compete, performance measures, organization structures, and whom to reward. Every employee knows: That's the way we do things here. The problem is that those success factors turn into entrenched orthodoxies over time, and no one challenges them. That's why during a corporate transformation, the forgetting curve is sometimes more important than the learning curve.

To change CEOs' behavior, we need to change the numbers we measure and emphasize.

Supplement to 910C01

Kent Thiry, CEO of dialysis provider DaVita, is considering how to integrate employees from recently acquired Gambro Healthcare without damaging DaVita's robust, unconventional internal culture. When Thiry joined DaVita in 1999, breaking an important promise to his family in order to do so, he was determined to create a differentiated company with a community-like culture. Over six years, he had engineered an impressive financial turnaround and successfully developed the strong culture he had envisioned. In late 2004, DaVita acquired arch-rival Gambro Healthcare, whose 12,000 employees would nearly double DaVita in size once the integration is completed in fall 2005. Confident that the deal makes business sense but worried about potential adverse impacts of the integration-especially in light of rumors that Gambro employees are suspicious of Thiry's authenticity and critical of DaVita's arguably eccentric culture-Thiry is considering whether to impose DaVita's culture on the new arrivals, or just allow Gambro to operate independently for a period of time.

A middle manager at a large company is unable to get her engineering customers and corporate bosses to see eye to eye on a public relations decision, and now her corporate boss seems to have totally misinterpreted her intentions. Suitable for MBA or executive education classes, this field case is a composite of actual experiences and fabricated elements. The case addresses a scarcity of material on the unique dilemmas faced by middle managers.

One of the key elements of Fiat's recent resurgence is the superiority of its clean, fuel-efficient engine technologies that were mostly developed during the 1990s by Centro Ricerche Fiat (CRF), the Fiat Group company in charge of R&D and technology development. In the early 1990s, when the Italian carmaker was going through troubling times (along with many other players in the automotive industry), CEO Gian Carlo Michellone radically turned around CRF's organization and innovation strategy, adopting and mastering a strategic approach to innovation that resembles what would become known as the open innovation paradigm. This revolution allowed the Fiat Group to keep its "innovation engine" running, despite the heavy downturn of the industry. The CRF case demonstrates how open innovation can protect the firm's innovation capability from the risk of severe resource rationalizations during periods of crisis while proffering a starting point to replicate innovation capability once the downturn is over. The efforts to streamline the adoption of open innovation need to be targeted at several aspects of a firm's organization, i.e., the structures, organizational roles, the planning and control and performance management systems, corporate values, and individual competencies and attitudes. The role played by the senior executive leadership in promoting the successful implementation of open innovation is critical, especially during tough economic times.

According to studies done by Dana Carney of Columbia Business School, powerful people are better liars. The stress of lying produces involuntary physiological reactions-such as half shrugs, rapid speech, and cognitive impairment-but liars who have power are much better at masking or suppressing those telltale signs than liars without power. Physiologically, high-power liars closely resemble truth tellers. Bottom line: Powerful people are more comfortable lying, and it is harder to tell that they're being dishonest.

Do the managers who are in the highest tiers of leadership at your company also feel the greatest sense of responsibility? Moreover, do they actually have authority to get things done? If you map out the authority of all your managers against their titles and their sense of responsibility, the results may surprise you-and reveal hidden pockets and dangerous vacuums of power.

The business world's preoccupation with predictability and quantitative analysis has not gotten us very far, the author argues. For instance, none of the economic forecasting organizations predicted that the economy would shrink in 2008, let alone that it would crater as disastrously as it did. Our complex world is like a spirited race horse, he says. The harder we tug on the reins to control it, the more it resists to prove a point: it is not a machine that responds the way a user manual suggests it will; rather, our world is an intensely complicated, ambiguous system of systems that defies comprehensive quantification. Such an environment demands a lesser-known form of analysis -- one that pays attention to qualities (i.e. important aspects of a problem that cannot be measured) rather than just quantities. The author argues that if we are to face today's complex challenges, we must build up 'qualitative intelligence'.

The complex problems we face go by many names, including 'social messes', 'wicked problems' and 'big hairy problems'. As the definitions of 'ends' (where to go) and 'means' (how to get there) become more ambiguous and the number of variables increases, the difficulty of solving such problems intensifies dramatically-a difference not just in scale of problem, but in kind. The author argues that such enigmatic problems comprise features identical to those routinely found in the arts-including uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity, uniqueness and interdependence between ends and means. As a result, she says, complex problems can be treated as opportunities for artistry -- but only if we enter the world of qualitative thought and experience, where judgment and imagination take their place alongside quantitative analysis and deductive reasoning.

Slowly but surely, modern managers are realizing that the complex situations they face cannot be approached in a routine manner. Indeed, the quest for creative solutions has become pervasive. But for creativity to truly add value to an organization, managers must first understand its core principles. In this article the authors define those principles, which include personal creativity, process creativity and collective creativity. They also highlight the critical role that imagination, inspiration and intuition still have to play in modern business.

A new source of inspiration for creative leadership and development comes from the world of the Arts. While the Arts have inspired people for centuries, greater attention is now being paid to learning from artists themselves. In their work with artists and business people the authors have uncovered two key approaches for applying artistic methods in business: the development of artful capabilities and competencies and the ability to conceptualize and prototype. In this article they examine how theatre directors use these skills and present a possible new model for creative leadership.

Today more than ever, business growth requires new ways of looking at the world. Unfortunately, most people don't know how to go about looking at their landscape in new ways. Too often, they continue to look at the world in the same way they always have, only to be surprised and disappointed when they don't discover anything new. In this article the authors present seven 'ways of looking' at the world around you that will enhance your ability to see possibilities that do not yet exist.

It takes a stubborn person to remain an artist in a society that values conformity, and the authors argue that it will take the same courage and tenacity in organizations to create a culture where adults can reconnect with their innate artistic capacities. In their research, they have peeled back the outer layers of creative methods to reveal the underpinnings of the 'artistic mindset'. In doing so, they have identified a capacity that they call Aesthetic Intelligence (AI), which is comprised of three elements: presence, authenticity and synthesis. When integrated into the fabric of organizational life, AI can inform strategy and process and holds the potential to energize leadership and performance.

The design and production of new products and services is an endeavor that calls for the skills and experience of interdisciplinary teams to get the job done. Yet, as a half-century of research makes abundantly clear, teamwork is difficult. The competing viewpoints that promote creative ideas and sound decision-making can also lead to conflicts that waste precious time and erode relationships. The authors present five key challenges faced by new product development teams and describe how these very challenges can lead to positive outcomes such as project management skills, broad perspectives, expanded networks and boundary-spanning skills.

While play is a familiar concept, as a topic of serious inquiry it is among the least-studied and least-understood organizational behaviors -- despite the fact that the Social Sciences have long associated play with creative functioning. The authors define play as a way of organizing behavior that consists of five elements: threshold experience; boundaries in time and space; uncertainty, freedom and constraint; flexibility between ends and means; and positive affect. While the cost of play can be inefficiency, errors or dead ends, the authors argue that the cost of not playing may actually be even more severe to organizations whose survival and prosperity depend upon creative ability.

Design thinking has received a great deal of attention as increasing numbers of organizations succeed in solving complex problems by creative means. In doing so, many of these firms have focused on implementing specific 'design methods' - from observational research to iterative prototyping to storytelling-alongside more mainstream approaches. But as any professional designer will attest, design thinking entails much more than applying such methods: to create value, methods must be applied together with design sensibilities. The author explains what design sensibilities are and describes innovations from Altoids to Virgin America that embody the optimal balancing of design methods with design sensibilities.

Differences in behavior and associated gender stereotypes derive from the different norms and expectations associated with the social roles that men and women typically hold. The stereotypes are all-too familiar: men are better at math, women at communicating; men make better military officers, women better caregivers. As a result, occupations, jobs and tasks become gender-typed as 'male' or 'female' according to the gender of the typical incumbent. The authors report their findings, which suggest that the additional scrutiny of being a solo member of one's gender -- whether self-imposed or imposed by others -- can be either beneficial or detrimental to performance, depending on the typicality of the task relative to one's gender.