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Employees have an enormous amount of business information at their fingertips--more specifically, at their desktops. The floodgates are open; profitable possibilities abound. But having to handle all that information has pushed downsized staffs to the brink of an acute attention deficit disorder. To achieve corporate goals, business leaders need their employees' full attention--and that attention is in short supply. In this article, the authors analyze the components of attention management through three lenses--economic, psychobiological, and technological--and offer guidelines for keeping employees focused on crucial corporate tasks. Their lessons are drawn from the best practices employed by today's stickiest Web sites and by traditional attention industries such as advertising, film, and television. The authors say executives must manage attention knowing that it's a zero-sum game (there's only so much to go around). Managers should also consider capitalizing on the basic survival and competitive instincts we all have that help determine how much attention we pay to certain things. For instance, the threat of corporate demise--and the consequent loss of jobs and livelihoods--undoubtedly focuses workers' attention on the need to change. Likewise, internal competition among business units may give employees added incentive to pay attention to a profit or sales goal.

We all know that leaders need vision and energy, but after an exhaustive review of the most influential theories on leadership--as well as workshops with thousands of leaders and aspiring leaders--the authors learned that great leaders also share four unexpected qualities: 1) They selectively reveal their weaknesses; 2) They rely heavily on intuition to gauge the appropriate timing and course of their actions; 3) They manage employees with "tough empathy"; and 4) They capitalize on their differences. All four qualities are necessary for inspirational leadership, but they cannot be used mechanically; they must be mixed and matched to meet the demands of particular situations. Most important, however, is that the qualities encourage authenticity among leaders. To be a true leader, the authors advise, "Be yourself--more--with skill."

Piaggio, manufacturer of the Vespa motor scooter, faces the decision of whether to outsource production of a new engine. The decision in the A case is couched in uncertainty over the achievable sales volume for the engine, particularly as new and less expensive competitor products are gaining popularity. The case provides an overview of the competitive style of each of the major manufacturers and allows a discussion of core capabilities of these competitors. The B case describes what happens in the market and to Piaggio after the company has built the engine.

Piaggio, manufacturer of the Vespa motor scooter, must decide whether to outsource production of a new engine. The decision is surrounded by uncertainty about the achievable sales volume for the engine, particularly as competitors' new and less expensive products are gaining popularity. The A case (UV1607) provides an overview of the competitive style of each of the major manufacturers and affords a discussion of their core capabilities. The B case describes what happens in the market and to Piaggio after the company has built the engine.

Explores the functioning of a German supervisory board in the context of a takeover bid made by a British company.

Dawn Riley is the CEO/Captain of America True, the first coed syndicate to race for the America's Cup. Over three years, based on her vision for America True, she built the syndicate from scratch, bringing on investors and sponsors, designing and building a boat, and hiring a sailing crew to race it. In June 1999, Riley must decide how to handle the San Francisco office now that America True's base of operations is moving to Auckland, New Zealand, where racing will begin in four months. She is facing pressure to phase out the office to cut down on costs, but Riley believes that the people in San Francisco and the work they are doing are key to her vision for America True. She must weigh the tension between immediate pressures to win and the longer-term sustainability of her vision.

Supplements the (A) case.

Dawn Riley and America True are based in Auckland, New Zealand, where racing will begin in six weeks. The senior management team will be meeting in August 1999 to decide whether or not to make changes to Tag, the practice boat that they are using as a testing platform. Riley has striven to create a consensus-based approach to decision-making, and see herself as a "participant" in these meetings. She wonders if things have gotten "too democratic," and if she should step in and lead this meeting. Would changing her behavior now about such a seminal matter compromise her effort to create a collaborative decision making approach? This case provides information on sailing and design programs, and explores in depth Riley's role as a "producing manager."

In the early 1990s, IBM was a has-been. Fujitsu, Digital Equipment, and Compaq were hammering down its hardware margins. EDS and Andersen Consulting were stealing the hearts of CIOs. Intel and Microsoft were running away with PC profits. Today, Big Blue is back on top, a leader in e-business services. This is the story of how the company, which had lagged behind every computer trend since the mainframe, caught the Internet wave. Much of the credit for the turnaround goes to a small band of activists who built a bonfire under IBM's rather broad behind. Together, building simultaneously from the top and the bottom of the organization through an ever-widening grassroots coalition of technicians and executives, they put IBM on the Web and morphed it into an e-business powerhouse. People who want to foment similarly successful insurrections can learn a lot from their example.

It's been four years since Dave Souza, Joe Castle, and Ryan Bahar started Socaba.com--an e-business that sells office supplies and services. Six months ago, acting on the advice of their VC, the young founders hired three seasoned managers to help bring the business to the next level. The new executives appeared to complete the Socaba management team. But even as early as the welcome lunch for the three, a rift between the insiders and outsiders developed. Just minutes after the party, the founders were seen drifting into Dave's office to assess the three newcomers. Such exclusionary meetings have continued on both sides, further aggravating the situation. To complicate matters, one of the company's main competitors wants to partner with Socaba, and there's controversy about whether to enter into the deal. Socaba.com is at a crossroads--the company is in position to grow, but internal conflicts could hold it back. In R00408 and R00414, commentaand Stever Robbins offer advice on this fictional case study.tors Tom Scott, Ted Murguia, Christine Comaford,

It's been four years since Dave Souza, Joe Castle, and Ryan Bahar started Socaba.com--an e-business that sells office supplies and services. Six months ago, acting on the advice of their VC, the young founders hired three seasoned managers to help bring the business to the next level. The new executives appeared to complete the Socaba management team. But even as early as the welcome lunch for the three, a rift between the insiders and outsiders developed. Just minutes after the party, the founders were seen drifting into Dave's office to assess the three newcomers. Such exclusionary meetings have continued on both sides, further aggravating the situation. To complicate matters, one of the company's main competitors wants to partner with Socaba, and there's controversy about whether to enter into the deal. Socaba.com is at a crossroads--the company is in position to grow, but internal conflicts could hold it back. In R00408 and R00414, commentators Tom Scott, Ted Murguia, Christine Comaford, and Stever Robbins offer advice on this fictional case study.

It's been four years since Dave Souza, Joe Castle, and Ryan Bahar started Socaba.com--an e-business that sells office supplies and services. Six months ago, acting on the advice of their VC, the young founders hired three seasoned managers to help bring the business to the next level. The new executives appeared to complete the Socaba management team. But even as early as the welcome lunch for the three, a rift between the insiders and outsiders developed. Just minutes after the party, the founders were seen drifting into Dave's office to assess the three newcomers. Such exclusionary meetings have continued on both sides, further aggravating the situation. To complicate matters, one of the company's main competitors wants to partner with Socaba, and there's controversy about whether to enter into the deal. Socaba.com is at a crossroads--the company is in position to grow, but internal conflicts could hold it back. In R00408 and R00414, commentators Tom Scott, Ted Murguia, Christine Comaford, and Stever Robbins offer advice on this fictional case study.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Executives are often baffled when they can't implement perfectly sound strategies. The root causes, according to a Harvard Business School professor and a senior organizational fellow at McKinsey & Co., are six deep-seated barriers to strategy implementation and organizational learning. The first barrier is a top-down or laissez-faire senior management style. Without transforming that barrier into a capability, none of the other barriers can be turned into capabilities either. The five others are: unclear strategy and conflicting priorities; an ineffective senior team; poor vertical communication; poor coordination across functions, businesses, or borders; and inadequate down-the-line leadership skills and development. According to the authors, the first three barriers together undermine an organization's quality of direction; a lack of vertical communication interacts with the other barriers to block quality of learning; and the last two barriers cause poor quality of implementation. The authors' own process, Organizational Fitness Profiling, has helped managers overcome the root causes of blocked strategy implementation and has led to individual and organizational learning. Not all organizations are up to the challenge, however.

Today's fast-paced economy demands that businesses change or die. But few companies manage corporate transformations as well as they would like. The brutal fact is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail. In this article, authors Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria describe two archetypes--or theories--of corporate transformation that may help executives crack the code of change. Theory E is change based on economic value: shareholder value is the only legitimate measure of success, and change often involves heavy use of economic incentives, layoffs, downsizing, and restructuring. Theory O is change based on organizational capability: the goal is to build and strengthen corporate culture. Most companies focus purely on one theory or the other, or haphazardly use a mix of both, the authors say. Combining E and O is directionally correct, they contend, but it requires a careful, conscious integration plan. Beer and Nohria present the examples of two companies, Scott Paper and Champion International, that used a purely E or purely O strategy to create change--and met with limited levels of success. They contrast those corporate transformations with that of UK-based retailer ASDA, which has successfully embraced the paradox between the opposing theories of change and integrated E and O. The lesson from ASDA? To thrive and adapt in the new economy, companies must make sure the E and O theories of business change are in sync at their own organizations.

A disturbing trend is going on in corporate America--CEO churning. Top executives are rapidly coming and going, keeping their jobs for increasingly shorter periods of time. The reason? Most boards are so unclear about the definition of leadership, they are picking the wrong people. CEO churning needn't be, say leadership experts Warren Bennis and James O'Toole. Boards can reverse the trend by following several guidelines. First, boards must come to a shared, accurate definition of leadership. Simply put, leaders must be able to move human hearts--to challenge people and make them want to scale steep peaks. Second, boards should strengthen the CEO selection process by resolving strategic and political conflicts amongst themselves. An agreed-upon strategic direction will make choosing the CEO with the right vision for the company that much easier and can clarify the job for the new CEO. Third, the board needs to measure every CEO candidate's soft qualities. Economic measures are important, but integrity, the ability to provide meaning, and the talent for creating other leaders are critical. Fourth, boards should beware of candidates who act like CEOs. Charisma and glossy pitches can be enticing, but they're rarely the stuff of true leadership. Fifth, boards should accept that real leaders will more than likely overturn the status quo. Sixth, boards need to know that insider heirs usually aren't apparent, and finally, boards should always avoid making a hasty decision. Hiring the right CEO is a slow process at best. Ultimately, the surest way for boards to pick the right CEO is to cultivate and nurture talent in the making.

New ideas are the precious currency of the new economy, but generating them doesn't have to be a mysterious process. The image of the lone genius inventing from scratch is a romantic fiction. Businesses that constantly innovate have systematized the production and testing of new ideas, and the system can be replicated by practically any organization. The best innovators use old ideas as the raw materials for new ideas, a strategy the authors call knowledge brokering. The system for sustaining innovation is the knowledge brokering cycle, and the authors discuss its four parts. The first is capturing good ideas from a wide variety of sources. The second is keeping those ideas alive by playing with them, discussing them, and using them. Imagining new uses for old ideas is the third part--some knowledge brokers encourage cross-pollination by creating physical layouts that allow, or even force, people to interact with one another. The fourth is turning promising concepts into real services, products, processes, or business models. Companies can use all or part of the cycle. Large companies in particular desperately need to move ideas from one place to another. Some will want to build full-fledged consulting groups dedicated to internal knowledge brokering. Others can hire people who have faced problems similar to the companies' current problems. The most important lesson is that business leaders must change how they think about innovation, and they must change how their company cultures reflect that thinking.

Everyone knows that the way things are formally organized in most companies (their processes) is not the same as the way things are actually done (their practices). The difference between the two creates tension that can be very difficult for managers to handle. Lean too much toward practice and new ideas may bubble up and evaporate for lack of a structure to harness them. Lean too much toward process and you may get no new ideas at all. The goal, then, is to tap into the creativity at work in every layer of an organization with a combination of process and practice. Take, for example, the community of people who fix Xerox machines. Large machines, it turns out, are not as predictable as Xerox's documentation would suggest. So when following the service manual is not enough, the reps come together--over breakfast, at breaks, at the end of the day--and talk about their own best practices. So far so good. But Xerox goes a step further. It has set up a process similar to an academic peer-review system to gather, vet, and share those best practices across the company. The reps get much-welcome recognition for their creativity, and local best practices are deployed companywide. Dot-com companies are a hotbed of innovative practices. But as they mature, they, like Xerox, may find that they need seasoned managers who can harness those practices through the judicious application of constructive processes.

Supplements the (A) case.

Jeanne Lewis, after six years with Staples, Inc., is promoted to senior vice president of marketing. She is to work for fifteen months alongside her predecessor, a legacy in the organization, "learning the ropes" before he moves on. This case is set nine months after she begins working with the marketing department. At this time, Staples has just emerged from a period of prolonged litigation because of an FTC antitrust suit challenging Staples' attempted merger with Office Depot. Post-merger, Lewis must determine how the marketing department can most effectively and efficiently help the company maintain its competitive edge in an increasingly competitive and complex market. Looks at the challenges a middle manager faces "taking charge" and managing change in a revitalization situation in which a more evolutionary approach is appropriate.

Robert Moses was Park Commissioner in New York City for nearly 50 years. In this position, he had more influence on the face of urban New York than anyone before or after.