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After a relatively quiet period following the end of the Cold War, geopolitics is back. With the United States displaying a reduced appetite for violent confrontation, there are now no world policemen, few effective "neighborhood watch" schemes, and a growing number of vigilante groups and countries eager to challenge the existing rules of the game. Companies cannot assume, in any region of the world, that the strategic status quo will be sustained by neat balances of power or unbreakable promises of foreign-policy assistance from superpower states. In this new reality, the most successful multinational companies will be those that make expertise in international affairs central to their operations, adopting what John Chipman, the chief executive of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, calls a corporate foreign policy. A corporate foreign policy has two components. "Geopolitical due diligence" involves the assessment of local, regional, and transnational risks facing a company. "Corporate diplomacy" aims to enhance a company's ability to operate internationally and to ensure its success in each particular country with which it is engaged. Chipman lays out the principles of geopolitical due diligence and corporate diplomacy and argues that their successful execution can be a new source of competitive advantage for multinational businesses in a time of increased geopolitical volatility.

What consumers truly value can be difficult to pin down and psychologically complicated. But universal building blocks of value do exist, creating opportunities for companies to improve their performance in existing markets or break into new markets. In the right combinations, the authors' analysis shows, those elements will pay off in stronger customer loyalty, greater consumer willingness to try a particular brand, and sustained revenue growth. Three decades of experience doing consumer research and observation for corporate clients led the authors-all with Bain & Company-to identify 30 "elements of value." Their model traces its conceptual roots to Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of needs" and extends his insights by focusing on people as consumers: describing their behavior around products and services. They arrange the elements in a pyramid according to four kinds of needs, with "functional" at the bottom, followed by "emotional," "life changing," and then "social impact" at the peak. The authors provide real-world examples to demonstrate how companies have used the elements to grow revenue, refine product design to better meet customers' needs, identify where customers perceive strengths and weaknesses, and cross-sell services.

Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? According to Christensen and his coauthors, product developers focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data. To create offerings that people truly want to buy, firms instead need to home in on the job the customer is trying to get done. Some jobs are little (pass the time); some are big (find a more fulfilling career). When we buy a product, we essentially "hire" it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, we hire it again. If it does a crummy job, we "fire" it and look for something else to solve the problem. Jobs are multifaceted. They're never simply about function; they have powerful social and emotional dimensions. And the circumstances in which customers try to do them are more critical than any buyer characteristics. Consider the experiences of condo developers targeting retirees who wanted to downsize their homes. Sales were weak until the developers realized their business was not construction but transitioning lives. Instead of adding more features to the condos, they created services assisting buyers with the move and with their decisions about what to keep and to discard. Sales took off. The key to successful innovation is identifying jobs that are poorly performed in customers' lives and then designing products, experiences, and processes around those jobs.

The most successful companies don't just have good products and strong distribution systems-they have a deep understanding of customers. That naturally requires lots of marketing data, but the authors say it also takes an "insights engine"-a set of structures, people, and processes that can translate data into actionable strategy. How do high-performing organizations achieve this kind of customer centricity? Extensive research by the lead author's firm indicates that seven operational characteristics are critical for a superior insights and analytics group: It must be adept at synthesizing data, independent from other functions, integrally involved in business planning, collaborative, willing to experiment with new technologies and programs, future oriented, and active in strategic decision making. In addition, the people who are part of the insights engine share three key traits: They have a whole-brain mindset (they think creatively as well as analytically), they focus on business growth, and they are effective at getting their messages across with engaging storytelling rather than dry recitations of data. The authors discuss each characteristic in turn, using the consumer goods giant Unilever as a case study. Unilever's Consumer Markets and Insights group, the epitome of a powerful insights engine, has helped the company generate impressive revenue and sales growth.

In legal disputes, contested insurance claims, and similarly adversarial negotiations, one party is likely to open with an inflated claim or a lowball offer. And if the other side's position is unreasonable, it may make little sense to be reasonable yourself. But if everyone routinely came to a dispute with a realistic starting position, the offers would be more or less aligned, and any negotiation that followed would most likely be relatively civil, speedy, and fair. How can a negotiator who wants to be fair from the start ensure that his or her counterpart will be reasonable as well? The authors propose the "final-offer arbitration" challenge, which leverages an approach first applied in labor negotiations in the 1960s. You can employ this tactic by opening with a demonstrably fair offer and then--if the other party is unreasonable--extending a challenge to take the competing offers to an arbitrator who must choose one or the other rather than a compromise between them (the usual outcome of conventional arbitration). The authors describe how AIG used the approach and how other companies can begin to adopt it.

High-end professional services firms, unlike product companies, traditionally experience only linear revenue growth. That's because selling more services means adding more professionals, which limits profit margins. However, savvy providers of consulting, legal, accounting, and other services are using technology to their benefit. They are automating certain routine aspects of their work to essentially "productize" those tasks. By combining those products with human attention to matters requiring more knowledge or judgment, they can give clients better service at a lower cost. This article provides a guide to product development for professional services firms. The author describes the three key stages of the process: (1) To "discover potential products," identify opportunities for automation by looking for patterns in your services and zeroing in on the tasks that are performed frequently and require little knowledge. (2) To "develop products," use algorithms and artificial intelligence to create "smart" tools to handle high-volume, low-sophistication tasks. (3) To "monetize your products," stop charging for time and materials, and shift first to transaction-based pricing and then to an outcome-based model. In conjunction with this process, it's important to create a cross-functional team that focuses on product development. And take the long view--you'll have to invest time and money before you reap the benefits of embedding products in services.

Executives with scandal-tainted companies on their resumes pay a penalty on the job market, even if they clearly had nothing to do with the trouble. Because the scandal effect is lasting, a company you left long ago could have an impact on your current and future job mobility, not to mention your compensation. Overall, executives who suffer from the effect are paid nearly 4% less than their peers. You can't control this risk, the authors write, but you can and should plan for it. They offer three steps to help you survive a corporate scandal. (1) Be forthright. Transparency and full disclosure are key to overcoming the stigma. Executive recruiters, who do due diligence on candidates, can help you create a full, clear, and succinct narrative for hiring managers. (2) "Borrow" reputation and legitimacy from others in your network, establishing innocence by association. Executive search firms can also act as references and sponsors. (3) Take a "rehab job," one at which you so clearly excel that it creates a persuasive story to compete with the scandal narrative.

The toughest calls managers have to make come in situations when they have worked hard to gather the facts and have done the best analysis they can, but they still don't know what to do. Then judgment--a fusion of thinking, feelings, experience, imagination, and character--becomes critical. The author offers five practical questions to improve your odds of making sound judgments: (1) What are the net, net consequences of all my options? (2) What are my core obligations? (3) What will work in the world as it is? (4) Who are we? (5) What can I live with? All five questions must be answered, according to the author: "Each question is an important voice in the centuries-long conversation about what counts as a sound decision regarding a hard problem with high stakes for other people." If you work through these questions, you'll know that you've approached the problem in the right way--not just as a good manager but as a thoughtful human being.

The NASCAR champion discusses the importance of teamwork at the racetrack, how technology has affected his sport, and what will determine when he retires.

Few business leaders will ever confront the challenge that Landsbankinn CEO Steinthór Pálsson faced in mid-2010, when he attempted to rebuild Iceland’s oldest full-service financial institution. After the nation’s banking industry collapsed two years prior, the government seized control of a greed-dominated sector. Excessive leverage and aggressive expansion, combined with inadequate risk management and, in some cases, criminal executive behaviour, brought the country near bankruptcy. Angry citizens protested against massive personal and corporate losses and change was demanded, especially at Landsbankinn. Over the past four years, Pálsson has systematically restructured Iceland’s oldest bank. In this interview, the change management expert discusses Landsbankinn’s restructuring strategy and why he took a significant pay cut to take on what appeared to be an impossible task. Pálsson opened up all senior management positions at the bank to internal and external competition and took out ads in major newspapers promising to restructure customer loans and improve governance. Despite bank employees facing threats and physical attacks, he preserved the bank’s brand. He emphasizes the importance of allowing debate among his senior team and says, “Good ideas are worth one point and a good plan is worth 10 points, but good execution is 100 points.”

Nick Leeson was known in financial circles as the original rogue trader for his misbehaviour on the trading floor in the early 1990s, and his story still stands out — not just because he was played by Ewan McGregor in the 1999 movie “Rogue Trader.” Leeson singlehandedly toppled a major financial institution. Indeed, today’s push for effective risk management of global trading practices can be traced back to his actions as a 25-year-old trader in 1995, when Britain’s oldest merchant bank at the time suffered a US$1.3 billion loss thanks to Leeson’s unauthorized speculative bets. The actions in question were not driven by greed. Rather, Leeson bankrupted the Queen’s personal bank, destroyed his career and reputation, and was sentenced to six and a half years in a Singaporean jail because he did not have what it took to admit failure. In this IBJ interview, Leeson talks to Ivey Business School Professor Gerard Seijts about lessons learned, the unique challenges managing trading risk today, and why he supports initiatives by Ivey’s Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership to help the world proactively develop business professionals with superior judgement driven by a proper balance of leadership character traits. As Leeson says, “People who freely admit that they are not sure about operational matters are not what we’re traditionally drawn to when we look for a leader, but it’s what we need.”

When it comes to attracting investments, Canada is a laggard despite being a trading nation with all the talent and tools required. The main reason is that few in Canada have tried to answer the why-invest-in-Canada question. With or without Canadians leading large corporations, investment decisions made in Detroit are not influenced by any special love for Canada; they’re based on business. In 2016, the argument for playing the incentive game is very strong, and Canada could end up being bypassed for new plant investments for an entire investment cycle. But Canada isn’t just losing the competition for new auto plants. While the Canadian economy still attracts a reasonable share of foreign direct investment, there has been a significant shift in the industrial composition of Canadian FDI inflows. Over the past 15 years, Canadian oil and gas FDI has grown four-fold, while there has only been modest growth in manufacturing investments. As a result of weak performance in new greenfield projects, staunch free-marketers now accept the need to play the incentive game. Ivey’s Lawrence Centre has developed three overarching recommendations to help Canada raise its investment-attraction game to the level of its best-practice competitors: 1. All governments involved should make a formal commitment to act in a coordinated fashion when engaged in investment attraction. 2. Government players should jointly develop an explicit business plan for investment attraction to guide all parties, with results judged by incremental tax revenue generated. 3. Canadian political leaders and senior government officials should become engaged in a sustained way in all stages of the investment attraction process.

This special issue draws on a range of intellectual roots-ranging from financial economics to organization theory, to design theory, and to human cognition. The goal of this special issue is to bring scholars from different disciplines together with practitioners who have had success applying the framework so as to help other managers lead their organizations to higher levels of performance.

"Organizational agility" is often treated as an immutable quality, implying that firms need to be in a constant state of transformation. However, this ignores that such transformations, while often essential, come at a cost. They are not always necessary, and may not even be possible. This article explores agility at a more fundamental level and relates it more specifically to dynamic capabilities. It demonstrates that it is first essential to understand deep uncertainty, which is ubiquitous in the innovation economy. Uncertainty is very different from risk, which can be managed using traditional tools and approaches. Strong dynamic capabilities are necessary for fostering the organizational agility necessary to address deep uncertainty, such as that generated by innovation and the associated dynamic competition. This article explores the mechanisms by which managers may calibrate the required level of organizational agility, deliver it cost effectively, and relate it to strategy.

This article develops a conceptual integration of the dynamic capabilities and ambidexterity perspectives in order to understand how firms adapt to discontinuous change. Based on three illustrative case studies, it demonstrates that it is not possible to identify a universal set of dynamic capabilities. Rather, the distinct set of capabilities required depends on which of three modes of adaptation (structural separation, behavioral integration, or sequential alternation) has been prioritized. This article contributes a contingency perspective to dynamic capability research and offers guidance to managers about the alternative approaches they could take when seeking to adapt to environmental discontinuities.

The dynamic capabilities framework identifies three components as critical for successful organizational adaptation: sensing, seizing and transforming. By contrasting two distinct business cases, a long-term biofuel investment by DuPont and Novartis's rapid deployment of digital technologies in marketing, this article assesses the managerial implications of each of these components. It develops an embryonic contingency model that illustrates why the relative importance of dynamic capabilities varies across firms. The article also highlights the critical role played by strategic leaders, who must selectively adapt and refine dynamic capabilities and also serve as a last line of defense in times of rapid change.

How can organizations put dynamic capabilities into practice? This article focuses on the power of organizational design, showing how managers can harness new organizational forms to build a capacity for sensing, shaping and seizing opportunities. Fast-moving environments favor open organization and self-organizing processes that quickly convert individual capabilities into actionable collective intellect. However, such self-organizing processes require managers to design and execute them. Using Valve Corporation as a case example, this article shows how new design principles-such as polyarchy, social proofs, and new forms of open organization-allow organizations to build dynamic capabilities for sustained innovation in dynamic environments.

The ability to sense valuable strategic options and then to organize effectively and efficiently to embrace them is at the core of a company's dynamic capabilities. This article identifies and discusses a specific type of sensing that we call "generative sensing." Companies and executives that display generative sensing capabilities proactively generate hypotheses about observed events and then test these hypotheses to generate new data in a recursive process. Borrowing from design cognition research, we discuss the two microfoundations of these capabilities- framing and abduction - and provide examples of how they are embedded in companies to enhance option generation.

This article presents a clinical study, based on a decade of ongoing research at Samsung Group, that describes how the Samsung Group and its mobile phone division competed successfully in smartphones. The ability to manage co-opetition-simultaneous forces of competition and cooperation within the business group-is a particular dimension of dynamic capability that has stood Samsung in excellent stead. Relying on internal exhortations to cooperate often leads to a lack of dynamism, whereas untrammeled competition leaves proverbial synergies entirely untapped and spawns duplicative investments. Samsung, however, has succeeded by its ability to strike a balance between the two.

This article describes how hospitals can use the dynamic capabilities framework to achieve competitive advantage in today's difficult healthcare environment.