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As companies internationalize, their employees lose shared assumptions and norms. People in different countries react to inputs differently, communicate differently, and make decisions differently. Organically grown corporate cultures begin to break down; miscommunication becomes more frequent, and trust erodes, especially between the head office and the regional units. In their efforts to fix these problems, companies risk compromising attributes that underlie their commercial success. INSEAD's Erin Meyer presents five principles that can prevent disintegration. Managers should: (1) Identify the dimensions of difference between the corporate culture and local ones; (2) Make sure every cultural group has a voice; (3) Protect the most creative units, letting communication and job descriptions remain more ambiguous; (4) Train everyone in key norms; and (5) Ensure diversity in every location. Getting culture right should never be an afterthought. Companies that don't plan for how individual employees and the organization as a whole will adapt to working in a global marketplace will sooner or later stumble because of unnoticed potholes. By the time they regain their balance, their economic opportunity may have passed.

Many companies today rely on employees around the world, leveraging their diversity and local expertise to gain a competitive edge. However, geographically dispersed teams face a big challenge: Physical separation and cultural differences can create social distance, or a lack of emotional connection, that leads to misunderstandings and mistrust. To help global team leaders manage effectively, the author shares her SPLIT framework for mitigating social distance. It has five components: (1) Structure. If a team is made up of groups with different views about their relative power, the leader should connect frequently with those who are farthest away and emphasize unity. (2) Process. Meeting processes should allow for informal interactions that build empathy. (3) Language. Everyone, regardless of language fluency, should be empowered to speak up. (4) Identity. Team members must be active cultural learners and teachers to understand one another's identity and avoid misinterpreting behaviors. (5) Technology. When choosing between videoconferencing, e-mail, and other modes of communication, leaders should ask themselves if real-time conversation is desirable, if their message needs reinforcement, and if they are opting for the technology they want others to use.

The author of the book "Global Dexterity: How to Adapt Your Behavior Across Cultures Without Losing Yourself in the Process," Molinsky draws on his years of field research, teaching, and consulting to advise managers who must learn to adapt to a new culture. He focuses on how people practice new behaviors in actual situations, such as speaking up in a meeting or giving performance feedback, rather than on the differences between cultures. He suggests an approach that consists of three stages: (1) Figure out what the cultural norms are and how they differ from the home culture in directness, enthusiasm, formality, assertiveness, self-promotion, and self-disclosure. (2) Figure out what the "zone of appropriateness" is in the new culture for each of those six dimensions. (3) Once you know what adaptations you can (and are willing) to make, practice them to develop "muscle memory." Certain psychological barriers may arise in the process. People get anxious about whether they're being authentic, or they feel incompetent and worry that others see them that way, or they become resentful of the hard and stressful work of adapting. But they often learn something interesting about themselves, Molinsky says, and that can be exciting.

Customers' assessments of quality and value, buying decisions, and recommendations are all influenced by emotions. But too often companies don't adequately anticipate those emotions and therefore can't mitigate negative ones. This is especially true for "high-emotion services"--those that trigger strong feelings before the service even begins. Services relating to major life events, such as birth, marriage, illness, and death, fall into this category, as do airline travel, car repair, and home buying, selling, and renovation. They may elicit intense feelings for the following reasons: lack of familiarity with the service, lack of control over its performance, major consequences if things go wrong, complexity that makes the service a black box, and a long duration. The authors have identified four guidelines that can help managers influence expectations and perceptions of quality and value, enhancing customers' satisfaction and loyalty: (1) Identify emotional triggers; (2) Respond early to intense emotions; (3) Enhance customers' control; and (4) Hire the right people. They use some leading providers of cancer care to illustrate the application of these guidelines.

The evolution of products into intelligent, connected devices is revolutionizing business. In a November 2014 article, "How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition," Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and PTC president and CEO James Heppelmann looked at how this shift is changing the structure of industries and forcing firms to rethink their strategies. In this companion article, the authors look at the effects inside firms, examining the impact that smart, connected products have on operations and organizational structure. The new capabilities and vast quantities of data that smart, connected products offer are redefining the activities of the core functions of companies--sometimes radically. As software and cloud-based operating systems become integral to products, new product-development principles emerge, manufacturing components and processes change, and IT security becomes the job of every function. Companies need different skills and expertise, which creates new imperatives for HR. In the marketing function, the ability to track a product's condition and use shifts the focus to maximizing the product's value to the customer over time. Customer relationships become continuous and open-ended, service becomes more efficient and proactive, and new business models are enabled. The rich data on location and environment that products provide take logistics to a whole new level.

People in creative roles may seem immune to others' input. The authors, who studied populations from toy developers to R&D scientists, say that creative types sometimes react in this way not so much because of ego but, rather, a sense of identity as an artist. The authors explore the particular characteristics of the "artist identity" and suggest four tactics for working with artists: (1) Offer broad suggestions. Artists may see specific, fully formed ideas as attempts to wrest creative control. Plant just the seed of a concept, and you inspire continued engagement. (2) Temper your enthusiasm. If you're too invested in your idea, you may imply that the artist can't contribute much. A dispassionate demeanor works better. (3) Delay decision making. Expect initial resistance, and give the artist ample time to consider your ideas on their merits. (4) Show respect and like-mindedness. Acknowledging an artist's prior thinking and work will reassure him or her that your ideas are not off-base.

The tennis star talks about his legendary comeback, managing his emotions on the court, and what makes a great coach.

Amazon began life as an online bookseller, of course, but now there are few products you can't buy on the site. New research led by HBS's Feng Zhu investigates a common worry of Amazon's third-party sellers: What happens when, instead of just matching buyers and sellers, the platform decides to offer competing products itself? Zhu's team examined 164,000 products sold exclusively by third parties and found that 10 months later, Amazon had begun directly selling items in 3% of those product categories. Further, the items sold directly by Amazon often became the default option in search results. The team recommends that sellers using the Amazon platform take some defensive steps: They can reduce the odds of Amazon's entering the market by signing exclusive deals with suppliers (or manufacturing some products themselves) and focusing on a large selection of niche products rather than widely popular items. This reprint contains three additional Idea Watch articles. "Do CMOs Really Add Value?" looks at extensive new research aimed at providing a once-and-for-all answer to this persistent question (the conclusion, in brief: Yes). "The Wrong Way to Reduce Churn" describes a study of a wireless communication firm whose seemingly customer-friendly outreach effort--offering overspending consumers a better plan--backfired and cost it customers, and offers some theories as to why. And "Quitting Time" is a visual depiction of when employees in a million-person sample left their companies--showing that in today's candidate-driven job market, people move on surprisingly soon.

A new set of experiments reveals that being let down induces surprisingly collaborative behavior in people.

Agricultural inventions from 18th-century noble estates in France, including a wheat thresher, a tree transporter, and an incubation shed for chicken eggs.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. A survey of top business executives from major international organizations found that 79% said it was extremely important to have leaders who act on behalf of the entire organization, not just their units. The rest said it was very important. Nearly 65% said they expected at least half of their senior and midlevel managers to behave as enterprise leaders -that is, executives who are as successful at serving the needs of the enterprise as they are at growing the units they head. The expectation that managers will know what's happening elsewhere in the enterprise is rising, authors Douglas A. Ready and M. Ellen Peebles write, but few organizations have been set up to support the development of such enterprise leaders. So how are managers learning to become effective enterprise leaders, and how can organizations encourage their development? The authors surveyed and interviewed scores of executives from the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and focused on three companies: Pfizer, Li & Fung, and Unilever. They found that regardless of the business or the location, enterprise leaders developed their capabilities in similar ways -through a combination of deliberate personal development, high-level mentoring, and opportunities afforded by their work that enabled strong unit performers to become even more effective as enterprise leaders. According to the authors, the essence of enterprise leadership lies in combining two often incompatible roles -those of builder and broker. That means executives need to build their unit's vision and integrate it into the wider corporate vision, clarifying where the enterprise is going and how their teams can best contribute, both within and beyond unit boundaries. They must build unit capabilities and share resources and business know-how across units to contribute to enterprisewide organizational capability.

Although learning executives such as chief learning officers must shoulder the burden of developing the company's talent capabilities and supporting strategic priorities, the authors argue that CEOs and other top executives have a critical role to play. Personal engagement and leadership on the part of the CEO can make a big difference in setting the right tone for the organization. While companies often begin with training-needs assessments, the authors recommend starting by mapping what they call the "CEO agenda"to ensure that learning gets properly aligned with strategy. This connects learning and development with the company's specific needs and cuts through the noise of multiple initiatives vying for attention -highlighting the critical "must-win battles"that the CEO has identified. The next task is to operationalize the learning agenda through a portfolio of learning and development activities. This involves doing an inventory of existing learning and development resources. Companies should repeat this on a regular basis, the authors say, to ensure that the activities in place reflect the company's learning strategy. Companies should be wary about making wholesale changes to learning portfolios and organizational structures, the authors warn, unless there are major shifts in the company's mission or business context. Reorganizations "should be limited to situations where they are warranted -for example, when the learning agenda is misaligned with corporate strategy or the strategy changes." Like the CEO agenda, the company's learning agenda should articulate the essential strategic initiatives for corporate learning. Choices about what to include or eliminate to bring learning activities in line with current priorities should not be made in isolation, and the authors say it's important to get input and buy-in from both the learning organization and business leaders -all the way to the CEO level.

But what is the right way to apply this theory? What are its core elements, and how predictive is it? In this article, authors Andrew A. King and Baljir Baatartogtokh examine these questions. To begin with, they found that the theory's essential validity and generalizability has been seldom tested in the academic literature. The studies that have been published fail to provide confirmatory evidence for the theory. To assess the theory, the authors surveyed and interviewed experts on each of 77 cases discussed in Christensen's two books, The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution (the latter with coauthor Michael E. Raynor). Based on the interviews, the authors found that many of the theory's exemplary cases did not fit its conditions and predictions. A handful corresponded with all of the theory's elements (for instance, the disruptions by salesforce.com, Intuit QuickBooks, and Amazon.com). But the majority were found to include different motivating forces, and some displayed unpredicted outcomes. Among them were cases involving legacy costs, the effect of numerous competitors, and changing economies of scale. The threats faced by the companies in the sample, the authors say, cannot be understood from a single viewpoint or solved by a single prescription. "Instead,"they write, "managers need to evaluate difficult problems from a number of different perspectives. In that spirit, we do not advocate discarding the theory of disruption. Rather, we recommend using its best parts in addition to classical approaches to strategic analysis."Case studies about disruptive innovation "can provide warnings of what may happen,"the authors argue, "but they are no substitute for critical thinking. High-level theories can give managers encouragement, but they are no replacement for careful analysis and difficult choices."

The authors conducted two surveys, yielding responses from more than 1,200 young professionals, and had 18 in-depth interviews to examine the work behaviors and experiences of early-career, highly skilled employees. They found that young professionals have short average tenures at organizations. Ninety-two percent of them are on the lookout for other job opportunities while employed, and their job search continues even if they seem engaged in their current job. They consider jobs with high stakes, top management support, and ample formal training the most valuable and important for their career development, and they want more coaching, mentoring, and formal training from employers than is currently given to them. The authors organize their conclusions around three themes: the rewards of job change, the job-search behaviors of this footloose group of professionals, and the management-development practices that may keep them with employers. The researchers note that their findings on the relationship between employer changes and promotions represent a radical departure from both previous empirical research and past conventional wisdom about job hopping and career success. A decade ago, it was generally believed that promotions accompanied with a disproportionately large increase in responsibility were more likely to be given to insiders than outsiders. This advantage seems to have eroded: The authors found no marked differences between the promotion patterns of job hoppers and those who stayed with the same employer during the early stage of their career. Young professionals have marked and ambitious career goals that are often not linked to any particular organization, and they don't see frequent jumps across employers in a negative light. In fact, this relentless job search is not necessarily driven by dissatisfaction with the job and the intention to leave the organization, as traditional models of job search and turnover might assume.

A prototypical high-road company the author cites is Southwest Airlines Co., which has been the most profitable airline in the U.S. over the past 30 years and has also often been rated as one of the best places in the U.S. to work. Also mentioned is Market Basket, a family-owned grocery store chain headquartered in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. In the summer of 2014, Market Basket's legacy of low prices, good customer service, and good-quality jobs was highlighted when a family feud broke out among members of its board of directors and the family member who had been serving as CEO and was popular among employees was fired. After a six-week "strike"by nonunion employees and managers that had broad community and media support (it caused an astounding 92% reduction in the company's revenues), the board agreed to sell the business to the ousted CEO, whose reinstatement employees had sought. Standard economics argues that the higher labor costs are as a proportion of total costs, the more important it is to control these costs. However, the author explains, high-road companies take another view, relying heavily on practices including screening employees for their strong technical, problem-solving, and collaborative skills; investment in training and development of the full workforce; compensation systems that align employee and company interests through profit sharing and/or payment for attaining higher levels of skills; and labor-management partnerships.

However, he writes, there is an important third dimension: the detection lead time. This is the amount of warning time during which a company can prepare for the disruption and mitigate its effects. As the author explains, some disruptions involve long-term trends that are widely discussed in the media (for example, aging populations in the Western world, China, and Japan) or are prescheduled events (such as new regulations or labor union contract deadlines; some (for instance, hurricanes) occur after a short warning of a few days; while others such as fires, earthquakes, or power outages occur without warning. Still other disruptions (such as product contaminations or design defects) may not be discovered until well after they've occurred or may never be recognized (for example, industrial espionage or cyberattacks). Drawing on examples from companies including Dow Chemical, Ikea, BNSF Railway, Walgreen's, Cisco Systems, UPS, and FedEx, the article presents nine data sources that leading companies use to improve their ability to detect potential disruptions early: monitoring the weather; tracking the news; using data from sensors; monitoring the supply base; visiting suppliers; being on the alert for deception; developing traceability capabilities; monitoring social media; and tracking regulatory developments. The article then discusses four ways companies can improve their abilities to both detect and respond to disruptions: (1) mapping the supply chain to determine the locations of their suppliers to assess supplier risks, (2) assessing global events to identify potential disruptions that could affect production or revenues, (3) creating supply chain control towers with technology, people, and processes that capture and use supply chain data to enable better short- and long-term decision making, and (4) improving response time through data and analysis.

For many firms it is time for an image checkup, especially if their budget, direction and markets have changed along with consumer attention trends. Everyone knows how important it is to make a good impression. But understanding how little time there is to do so is equally crucial, especially if firms want to ensure that their marketing materials are sufficient. Research suggests that firms have just a matter of seconds to attract the average person’s attention — and that’s assuming the targeted eyeballs in question are even looking their brand’s way. Firms should understand how best to reach target customers. Most users navigate digital media through sustained attention, selective attention, or alternating attention. Companies should examine their marketing materials and discard anything outdated. They should reflect on their culture and current approach to marketing. If they have made any changes to the company (new names, new slogans, new approaches, etc.) and not informed the market, then they need to make some announcements. Ultimately, they must think long and hard about their future vision and direction and communicate these to their audience.

Being a business executive is about leading, competing and winning — which is why sports stories can be valuable reference points for decision making and motivating. Take, for example, the National Football League’s Super Bowl XLIX, which was lost due to a terrible judgement call by the Seattle Seahawks coaches that provides a vivid illustration of something that is critical to business success — the willingness of leaders to listen, and the willingness of staff to speak up when they disagree with the boss. History is full of mistakes caused by leaders who set courses of action that went unchallenged even when everyone else saw them as folly. Leaders should ask for feedback before taking courses of action, because it is easier for staff to be critical of a position the leader has not yet taken. The viewpoints of staff should be carefully listened to, and private conversations should be initiated with those staff members who do not speak up. Staff can be heard more effectively if they are prepared and well-informed, because nothing makes a leader stop listening faster than half-baked criticism.

In identifying high-potential employees and leaders, the HR world tends to prefer “all-rounders,” meaning individuals who score well across a range of competencies deemed necessary to lead and grow businesses. As a result, many HR departments focus executive development plans on individuals with limited weaknesses — weaknesses that can be fairly easily “rounded off” or trained away. The logic behind this appears sound. But this reasoning can eliminate leadership candidates with one or two significant soft spots even when they are outsized talents in other areas. And that’s not something that everyone on the executive floor accepts. Indeed, to many members of the C-suite, clear gaps in competencies are seen as the price that must be paid for an individual’s clear strengths — especially when those strengths are in areas that drive business performance. <br><br> An emerging body of evidence suggests that managers who are exceptional in key areas and weak in others have a much greater impact on corporate performance than individuals who are exceptionally well rounded. While more work needs to be done in this area, the existing work indicates that having an executive team with some distinct capability “spikes” rather than smooth across-the-board capabilities can make a significant difference to business performance. Thus, when selecting leaders, the HR world should not discount individuals with a distinctly uneven capability profile, especially when those distinctive capabilities are likely to be key performance drivers. In other words, mind the spikes, don’t mind the gaps.

As our political, social and institutional environment has become increasingly volatile, we have developed new expectations of how leaders should act. Today's most effective leaders do much more than get results: they also build the capabilities of the people around them and build effective teams and systems, so that unimagined results can be achieved. If this sounds like a job that requires a great deal of thought, that's because it does. The author presents a revised leadership model that reconciles the key theories about 'what leaders do' into an integrated model that includes the thinking of John Kotter, Daniel Kahneman and Roger Martin.