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The M-form, in which a corporate parent manages relatively freestanding business units, was the most successful organizational design of the twentieth century. However, contemporary economic conditions call for designs that allow firms to exploit synergies across their business units, and on this dimension the M-form is notoriously weak. This article reports on empirical research that highlights the fundamental tension between clear lines of authority and the exploitation of synergies that firms face as they move away from the M-form and implement shared service centers, corporate account management, and matrix organizations. However, a limited but substantial number of firms have evolved organizational designs that signal a new way of resolving this tension. These firms are organized around multiple dimensions (e.g., region, product, and account) and are able to simultaneously hold different managers accountable for performance on these dimensions. The multidimensional organization is best understood as the next step in the evolution from a resource-centric physical production model to a customer-centric knowledge-exploitation model. It is a way of organizing that is particularly well adapted to stimulating the teamwork that is necessary to create economic value in complex markets on the basis of distributed knowledge and intangible resources.

Every generation of managers experiments with new organizational forms-new business models and the organizational structures and management processes required to support them. Much of the current experimentation with business and organizational models is occurring in knowledge-intensive industries such as biotechnology, computers, telecommunications, and medical and scientific equipment. The principal business model emerging in these and similar industries can be called market exploration. Market exploration is a firm's pursuit of opportunities created by intersecting technologies and markets. The market exploration process is complex, involving technology development, product development, and commercialization in collaboration with customers and other firms, as well as involving the orderly development of markets that have large but unknown potential. Firms that want to be effective at market exploration must organize specifically for innovation-they must be able to build and manage an I-form organization. This article shows how many firms are moving towards and improving the I-form organization and discusses its purpose, key features, and benefits.

The empirical evidence is that only a tiny fraction of organizations live to age 40. Why this should be is a puzzle, since when firms are doing well they have all the resources (financial, physical, and intellectual) to continue to be successful. Yet the evidence is that most organizations fail. Drawing on recent advances in evolutionary theory, this article illustrates how multi-level selection processes help organizations adapt in the face of technological and market changes. This process, along with the concepts of organizational ambidexterity and dynamic capabilities, may help organizations survive over long time periods. One deliberate and repeatable version of this process enabled IBM to generate more than $15 billion in growth between 2000 and 2005.

A new branch of corporate sustainability, Bottom-of-the-Pyramid (BOP), seeks out new market opportunities with low-income consumers in the developing world that simultaneously contribute to the sustainable development of these regions. While many companies consider the addition of BOP strategies to their sustainability portfolio, many also hesitate because of the uncertainties that surround this new sustainability practice. This article investigates strategies adopted by the corporate sustainability function in Novozymes, a multinational company with a solid track record in corporate sustainability, to implement a BOP project within key areas of the company's operational core. There are four internal organizational barriers that interlock one another and that have so far prevented the implementation of this project in key areas of operations. The article examines the challenges for sustainability managers who seek to overcome interlocking cognitive, processual, and structural barriers to the implementation of this new branch of sustainability practices.

In July, 2009, Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, received an e-mail. The two co-founders and joint co-CEOs and their colleagues at Orange Kimono Software were struggling with their pay system. Orange Kimono, based in the north of England, was a software company with approximately 150 employees that made products sold to businesses. This case contains the text of the e-mail which details the old and new sales compensation systems and the resulting effects on sales, representative behavior, and customer experience.

Three pressing challenges (equity split, extent of commitment to social responsibility, and product discoloration) confront VeeV, the world's first alcoholic beverage infused with acai berries. Brothers Courtney and Carter Reum founded VeeV in 2007 and the firm has experienced rapid growth since then. The case documents the backgrounds of the young founders, details the launch and early phase of the company, and presents three challenges the founders must address: how to split the equity of the new company, how far to go in their efforts to be a "green" and socially responsible brand; and an unexpected potential product quality issue.

In the four years since Principal Ray Myrtle took over Highland Elementary School, the school moved from the brink of state takeover to performance levels in the top ten percent of all schools in Maryland. The case describes the concrete steps Myrtle and the teaching staff took to affect the dramatic change in student learning.

RiskMetrics Group, a risk and governance consultancy, had a great deal of influence on U.S. companies. This case examines the history and growth of the company, the governance services it offers, the extent of its impact on shareholders, the controversy surrounding its conflicts of interest, and the impact it has had on directors.

Middleby Corporation was a designer and manufacturer of commercial food processing and food service equipment for fast food as well as high-end restaurants. During the latter half of the 1990s, Middleby became increasingly unfocused as its number of product lines increased dramatically. Margins and sales slipped. At the same time, some of the company's high-profile product development initiatives ended in failure. Although Middleby's top management recognized some of these apparent warning signs, rather than take action, they seemed eager to blame the disappointing results solely on the company's overseas operations. This inaction caused Middleby's financial performance to deteriorate further, resulting in violations of its loan covenants. To finally correct the situation, Selim Bassoul was moved from his role as general manager of Middleby's Southbend plant up to chief operating officer for the entire corporation. Bassoul had taken the underperforming Southbend plant and turned it into a star performer, correcting and improving customer service, operations, and finances and establishing a clear strategic direction. Bassoul had to craft a turnaround plan for the entire company in the areas of strategy, operations, and finance. He cut the number of products substantially, fired some key customers after a customer profitability analysis, and focused product development on innovative products that saved Middleby's customers time and money. Following these changes and others, the company returned to profitability and Bassoul was named CEO. Bassoul then decided to present a major acquisition opportunity to the board of directors.

The author, who imagines brave new worlds for a living, sees technology not as an Orwellian threat but as an empowering vehicle for individual expression.

The current economic crisis is not just another rough spell. Today's mix of urgency, high stakes, and uncertainty will continue even after the recession ends. The immediate crisis - which we will get through with policy makers' expert technical adjustments - sets the stage for a sustained, or even permanent, crisis, a relentless series of challenges no one has encountered before. Instead of hunkering down and relying on their familiar expertise to deal with the sustained crisis, people in positions of authority - whether they are CEO s or managers heading up a company initiative - must practice what the authors call adaptive leadership. They must, of course, tackle the underlying causes of the crisis, but they must also simultaneously make the changes that will allow their organizations to thrive in turbulent environments. Adaptive leadership is an improvisational and experimental art, requiring some new practices. Like Julie Gilbert, who overcame internal resistance to reorient Best Buy toward female purchasers, adaptive leaders get things done to meet today's challenges and then modify those things to thrive in tomorrow's world. They also embrace disequilibrium, using turbulence as an opportunity to build crucial new capacities, as Paul Levy did to rescue Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center from a profound financial crisis. Finally, adaptive leaders, such as Egon Zehnder, the founder of an executive search firm, draw out the leadership skills that reside deep in the organization, recognizing the interdependence of all employees and mobilizing everyone to generate solutions.

Standard economic theory assumes that human beings are capable of making rational decisions and that markets and institutions, in the aggregate, are healthily self-regulating. But the global economic crisis, argues Ariely, has shattered these two articles of faith and forced us to confront our false assumptions about the way markets, companies, and people work. So where do corporate managers - who are schooled in rational assumptions but run messy, often unpredictable businesses - go from here? In this lively article, the author, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University, shows how the emerging discipline of behavioral economics can help businesses better defend against foolishness and waste. Smart organizations will develop a behavioral economics capability by hiring qualified experimenters and conducting small trials that build on one another, revealing a radically different view of how people make decisions. Revenge and cheating are only two of the irrational behaviors that companies will find underlying their employees' and customers' actions. Once an understanding of irrationality is embedded in the fabric of an organization, a behavioral economics approach can be applied to virtually every area of the business, from governance and employee relations to marketing and customer service.

When did we start measuring the success of a company only according to the increase in its share price? Stanford professor Pfeffer argues that it's time for CEOs to once again balance shareholders' interests with those of the other stakeholders: employees, suppliers, and customers.

Decades of short-term management have inflated the importance of CEOs and reduced employees to fungible commodities. Middle managers, who see the connections between operations and strategy, can be instrumental in rebuilding a sense of community in businesses.

The case entitled 'How to Implement Blue Ocean Strategy' challenges participants to apply key concepts of blue ocean strategy implementation to overcome key organizational and management hurdles while leading a strategic shift. The case lays out how Braynesbridge Industries (BI), a fictional conglomerate involved in the steel industry, recently launched a new strategy to break out of the red ocean of bloody competition in the industry. The new strategy, however, represented a significant departure from the status quo, which led to steep cognitive, resource, motivational, and political hurdles in the organization. Hence, to implement the new strategy, BI executives had to overcome these four key hurdles. Despite this challenge, the case reveals that BI's management team successfully implemented the strategy fast and at low cost using tipping point leadership and fair process. BI's Board of Directors, very impressed with the new strategy and its successful implementation, is curious to learn the principles of tipping point leadership and fair process and how these apply to organizations.

Executives in the financial services industry, which faces intense scrutiny, should learn from the experiences of the oil, gas, and mining industry.

This case profiles President Barack Hussein Obama's rise to the presidency as an "improbable candidate." The case illustrates the ways in which he overcame criticism from those who questioned his credibility and his values and skepticism from those who were unsure of whether America was ready to elect its first African American President. It also explores how President Obama was able to gain support from the American people despite lagging behind Senator Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic frontrunner, throughout much of the pre-primary period.

The purpose of this technical note is to introduce a creativity exercise based on photo stimuli to business-school faculty and to discuss how it can be used effectively in the MBA and executive education classrooms. Variants of this exercise are in use at design and innovation firms. It works well for a 90-minute class session. The goal is to get participants to engage in the processes of observation and idea generation by using a set of photographs (taken from a random family album) as the subject of observation, and to gain an understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of this type of observational research.

In late May 2009, Albert Bohemier, CEO of Survival Systems Limited (SSL), located in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, paced the deck of the training pool at Survival Training Simulation Theatre wondering how best to transition the company to new leadership. During the past five years, attempts at succession planning had been unsuccessful. As the leader of the company for over 25 years, Bohemier was ready to retire, but there were many aspects of succession planning to consider. Bohemier's personal criteria for incoming leadership were threefold: it had to be good for SSL's existing clients, a positive move for the company as a whole and good for the current team.