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Teams that take the time to inventory and discuss each member's relevant knowledge before embarking on a task outperform others. Engaging in such reflection changes the criterion for power on the team from social influence to informational influence and helps members tune out irrelevant factors such as confidence, extroversion, status, experience, tenure, assertiveness, gender, and race.

Some 40% to 80% of mergers fail to meet objectives--and new research shows that human factors, especially collective leadership capability, are a key driver of M&A success.

A new study reveals the powerful effects of perceptions.

The CEO of Campbell's Soup on remaking a "play it safe" culture and nurturing the courage to embrace change.

The former CEO of Kaiser Permanente on the benefits and pitfalls of activating "us versus them" energy.

A look at the history of railroads and the decentralized organizational structure they used to coordinate operations on an unprecedented scale.

Launched in 1956 in California's emerging wine region, Williams-Sonoma soon moved to San Francisco because so many of its customers lived there. In 1970 the founder created a catalog to serve people around the country--and that was the beginning of the company's data collection and analysis. Knowing where its catalog customers lived informed decisions about where to locate its stores. As the company grew its brick-and-mortar presence, it also built up its mail-order business, acquiring a garden products catalog, the Hold Everything catalog, and Pottery Barn. In 2000 it launched fully transactional websites for its two leading brands. Today analytics infuses and enhances all areas of the business, from personalized website content for each visiting shopper to shipping and inventory management to extremely high-touch customer care centers. Williams-Sonoma comprises seven brands and has annual revenue approaching $5 billion. It accounts for 4% of all home furnishings sales in the United States, almost half of which come through the web, making it the 21st largest online retailer in the country.

Though corporate profits are high, and the stock market is booming, most Americans are not sharing in the economic recovery. While the top 0.1% of income recipients reap almost all the income gains, good jobs keep disappearing, and new ones tend to be insecure and underpaid. One of the major causes: Instead of investing their profits in growth opportunities, corporations are using them for stock repurchases. Take the 449 firms in the S&P 500 that were publicly listed from 2003 through 2012. During that period, they used 54% of their earnings--a total of $2.4 trillion--to buy back their own stock. Dividends absorbed an extra 37% of their earnings. That left little to fund productive capabilities or better incomes for workers. Why are such massive resources dedicated to stock buybacks? Because stock-based instruments make up the majority of executives' pay, and buybacks drive up short-term stock prices. Buybacks contribute to runaway executive compensation and economic inequality in a major way. Because they extract value rather than create it, their overuse undermines the economy's health. To restore true prosperity to the country, government and business leaders must take steps to rein them in.

The author, a strategy and international-business professor at Harvard Business School, has come to a conclusion that may surprise you: Trying to apply management practices uniformly across geographies is a fool's errand. Best practices simply don't travel well across borders. That's because conditions not just of economic development but of institutional maturity, educational norms, language, and culture vary enormously from place to place. Students of managerial practice once thought that their technical knowledge of best manufacturing practices (to take one example) was sufficiently developed that processes simply needed to be tweaked to fit local conditions. More often, it turns out, they have to be reworked quite radically--not because the technology is wrong but because everything around it changes how it will work. There's nothing wrong with the tools we have at our disposal, but their application requires contextual intelligence: the ability to understand the limits of our knowledge and to adapt that knowledge to a context different from the one in which it was acquired. Until we can better develop and apply contextual intelligence, failure rates for cross-border businesses will remain high, what we learn from experiments unfolding around the world will remain limited, and the promise of healthy growth in all parts of the world will remain unfulfilled.

Language pervades every aspect of organizational life. Yet leaders of global organizations--where unrestricted multilingualism can create friction--often pay too little attention to it in their approach to talent management. By managing language carefully, firms can hire and develop the best employees, improve collaboration on global teams, and strengthen the company's footing in local markets. Language proficiency--either in a lingua franca, or shared language, or in a local language--does not guarantee high performance. Recruiters may favor fluency over other capabilities. They may rely on external hires with language skills rather than grooming internal candidates with the capacity and motivation to learn new languages. And leaders may give expatriate assignments not to the best candidates but to people who speak certain languages. To hire and promote the best people, firms may need to provide training to meet global and local language needs. Fluency in a language also does not equal cultural fluency. For leaders, understanding the cultural background of each team member and customers is as essential as learning to conjugate new verbs. The same can be said for employees at all levels: Even when they are fluent in the lingua franca, a lack of cultural understanding can cause significant misunderstandings. To prevent such rifts, language training must include cross-cultural education.

Executives on the front lines of managing across borders share their insights: Luc Minguet, of France's Michelin, talks about the importance of cultural training not just for managers taking on assignments abroad but also for local employees who work with colleagues from around the world. He describes how his own experience learning to communicate across cultures reflects the tire-maker's broader practices. Eduardo Caride, of Madrid-based Telefonica, explains how the relatively young multinational is investing in a diverse talent mix as it strives to become a truly global company. Whereas early on, leaders relied on exporting Spanish managers abroad, he notes, the street now runs both ways. Takeo Yamaguchi, of Japan's Hitachi, details his efforts to create standardized global HR systems and processes across the conglomerate's 948 separate companies. "Three years ago, we had no systematic way of tracking employees, evaluating performance, or identifying future leaders," Yamaguchi says. "Today we do." And Shane Tedjarati, from the United States' Honeywell, talks about how the industrial powerhouse is shifting its strategy toward new regions, such as China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia. "We call these markets 'high-growth regions' instead of emerging markets," says Tedjarati, "because they now account for more than half of Honeywell's total growth."

A quarter century into the digital revolution, many companies still agonize over whether to invest significant resources in digital capabilities. Meanwhile, customers--who are used to weaving their digital and physical worlds tightly together--wonder why companies haven't done the same. The author and his colleagues at Bain have worked with and studied hundreds of companies around the globe that are trying to cope with the swiftly changing marketplace. Most industries, he writes, are still in the early stages of what he calls "digical" transformation--and the greatest barrier they face is inexperience with its execution. Drawing on Bain's study of leaders from 20 global industries, he presents five rules that can help: (1) Build your strategy around digital-physical fusion. It can be your new competitive edge. (2) Add links and strengthen linkages in the customer experience. (3) Transform the way you approach innovation. (4) Organizational separation is just an interim step. (5) Build a digical-savvy leadership team that includes the CEO. Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Nike, Disney, and Burberry are among the companies whose efforts in this realm have paid off mightily.

The 2013 cyberattack on Target is just one recent example of a growing phenomenon: attacks involving connected companies or direct employees. According to various estimates, at least 80 million of these attacks occur in the United States each year--but the number may be much higher, because they often go unreported. Upton and Creese head an international research project whose goal is to aid organizations in detecting and neutralizing threats from insiders. Their team includes computer security specialists, management educators, psychologists, and criminologists, and their findings challenge conventional views and practices. "The doors that leave organizations vulnerable to insider attacks," they write, "are mundane and ubiquitous." In this article they discuss the causes of growth in the number of insider cyberattacks, the reasons behind them, and five ways to tackle the problem: Adopt a robust insider policy at every level of the organization; raise awareness of phishing and other ploys; screen new hires thoroughly; employ rigorous subcontracting processes; and monitor employees, letting them know that you will observe their cyberactivity to the extent permitted by law.

At first glance, China, which is known for large, often inefficient state-owned enterprises, might appear an unlikely source of fresh management thinking. Yet Chinese companies have a lot to teach the world about today's business imperatives: responsiveness, improvisation, flexibility, and speed. To cope with their turbulent environment, the Chinese have developed those capabilities and learned to build everything--from skilled recruits to suppliers to capital sources--from scratch. They manage very differently, too: Eschewing Western-style matrix organizations, they favor flat, loose structures that allow them to jump on new opportunities and expand quickly. They roll out new products constantly and localize offerings with a vengeance. They're also adept at nonmarket strategies, particularly navigating local politics and relationships with the state. Indeed, China's entrepreneurial companies may well be the vanguard of an era in which the ability to adapt quickly, navigate messy environments, and use unproven talent yields a global competitive advantage.

Stressed out. Overcommitted. Distracted. This is how many people feel today. Everyone is struggling to have meaningful work, domestic bliss, community engagement, and a satisfying inner life. But committing to better work/life balance isn't the answer. It assumes you must make trade-offs among the four main aspects of your life: work, home, community, and self. A more realistic and gratifying goal is better integration through "four-way wins," which improve performance in all domains. Integration starts with embracing three principles: be real, be whole, and be innovative. This article outlines the skills that bring those principles to life and shows how to hone several critical skills with exercises such as: "Four circles," in which you assess the importance of each domain and then diagram the extent to which the values you pursue in them are compatible; "Talent transfer," in which you examine all your skills, from mentoring colleagues to organizing family activities, and how each might be used to achieve different ends; "Crowdsourcing," in which you gather solutions for problems from creative friends and test them out. Through these and other exercises, you can find the path to a more fulfilling and less hectic life.

J. Craig Venter made waves in 1998 when he and his for-profit company, Celera, challenged the public Human Genome Project to a DNA sequencing race. (It ended in a tie two years later.) Fired from Celera in 2002, the biologist now runs a nonprofit institute and two biotech firms, overseeing the development of synthetic cells to be used in plastics, food supplements, and vaccines.

Innovations often fail due to one simple fact: innovators have a flawed understanding of the psychology of their end user. The author shows that, contrary to the view of traditional Economics, consumers are not driven purely by rational considerations. Real consumers are emotional; they are lazy (both physically and cognitively); and they are systematically influenced by context in making decisions. After describing several common biases, the author provides four recommendations that can help to reverse innovation's dismal success rate to date.

Modern organizations contain a wide variety of tensions that leaders must face every day: collaboration vs. control, flexibility vs. efficiency and profit vs. social responsibility, to name just a few. The authors present an approach for handling these tensions: the paradox perspective. Paradox Theory presumes that tensions are integral to complex systems, and that sustainability depends upon attending to contradictory-yet-interwoven demands simultaneously. The authors introduce a new skill that enables leaders to embrace paradox: 'dynamic equilibrium'.

The former senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada and new Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto discusses the ongoing quest for a balanced economy, why service exports should be the next big thing, and the personal challenge that lies ahead for him at the Rotman School.

The author argues that far too many companies continue to focus on a numbers- and data-driven approach to innovation. Strategy and innovation, he says, should not be a mere exercise in analytics, but a qualitative process in which analysis serves the insights born out of individual observation and reflection. He explains why so many business people are uncomfortable with the 'qualitative' world, providing six strategies for improving qualitative judgment in an organization.