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In India and other large emerging economies, rural markets hold great promise for boosting corporate earnings. Companies that sell in the countryside, however, face poor infrastructure, widely dispersed customers, and other challenges. To better understand the obstacles and how to overcome them, the authors--researchers with Accenture--conducted extensive surveys and interviews with Indian business leaders in multiple industries. Their three-year study revealed several successful strategies for increasing revenues and profits in rural markets: (1) Start with a good distribution plan. The most effective approaches are multipronged--for example, adding extra layers to existing networks and engaging local partners to create new ones; (2) Mine data to identify prospective customers. Combining site visits, market surveys, and GIS mapping can help companies discover new buyers; (3) Forge tight bonds with channel partners. It pays to spend time and money helping distributors and retailers improve their operations; and (4) Create durable ties with customers. Companies can build loyalty by addressing customers' welfare and winning the trust of community leaders.

Even at the highest levels of organizations, many otherwise dynamic women struggle in meetings. Some say their voices are drowned out; others can't find a way into the conversation at all. Their male counterparts perceive a problem, but they tend to dismiss it as resulting from timidity, defensiveness, lack of focus, or excessive emotion. Drawing on interviews, surveys, and decades of work as leadership coaches, the authors suggest steps women can take to feel more comfortable and become more effective. Women should master the "pre-meeting," connecting with colleagues to test ideas and gather support; come to meetings armed with cogent comments and questions that can move the conversation forward; keep an even keel, speaking in measured tones and being careful not to signal frustration through sarcasm or curtness; and move past confrontation without taking it personally. Bosses can also help ensure that women's voices are heard, by providing direct feedback about meeting behavior, inviting more women to the table, and proactively pulling women into the conversation. These changes can have profound results, enabling all team members, male and female, to contribute to their full potential.

The cook, critic, and fiction writer discusses her years as the last editor of "Gourmet": how she handled being a manager, modernized the magazine, and dealt with its closing.

It's long been known that time management and designated time off improves employees' quality of life. New research shows that it also dramatically increases companies' productivity. The key to success is not to focus on individual behavior but rather to empower teams to collectively manage their time.

Research on cross-border acquisitions shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, they don't hamper domestic operations--they add to their efficiency and productivity. By acquiring foreign companies, firms gain a great deal of knowledge through exposure to new market ecosystems, R&D capabilities, functional skills, organizational processes, and managerial practices.

For many qualified non-native English speakers, invisible barriers to high-level employment and to receiving funding for entrepreneurial ventures remain a fact of life. New research shows that this results from perceptions that accented speakers are lacking in political skills, and suggests actions individuals and companies can take to mitigate the problem.

Research on product adoption in the airline industry suggests that being first to market can make a big difference to an offering's success, even if the customers are companies rather than consumers.

The 75th secretary of the U.S. Navy writes about how to lead a large, complex organization that is interdependent with other large and complex entities. His approach begins with a narrow focus on the organization's unique strength and role. In the navy's case, that means presence.

The global CEO of the accounting firm Grant Thornton describes how as a boy he watched his father deal with customers and guide them toward the right tools for a project. The lessons he learned in his dad's hardware store are still pertinent today.

A Scottish engineer and economist named William Playfair pioneered line graphs, bar charts, and pie charts, making an inestimable contribution to what we now call data visualization. Here are three examples of his work, courtesy of the Baker Library Historical Collections.

Traditional sources of sustainable competitive advantage are very rare in today's heterogeneous and hypercompetitive global business environment. This article identifies and illustrates three dynamic capabilities-sensing local opportunities, enacting global complementarities, and appropriating local value-by which MNEs are able to operate successfully across emerging and established markets. For MNEs in these markets, strategic agility is a meta-capability that enables them to create and deploy these three capabilities in a dynamic balance over time. Doing so demands embracing the tensions between these capabilities effectively.

Firms struggle to create an agile organizational system since it requires the development of three enabling capacities: to make sense quickly, make decisions nimbly, and redeploy resources rapidly. While the study of strategic agility is of growing interest as a prime means of organizational growth, the ways by which key mechanisms of growth such as mergers and acquisitions (M&As) help in building this capability remain elusive. This article highlights the differences between platform acquisitions and bolt-on acquisitions (most bolt-on acquisitions in high technology industries can further be separated into product acquisitions on the one hand, and educational, technological and/or talent acquisitions on the other hand). These different forms of acquisitions can enhance strategic agility in distinct ways along different time horizons. When properly managed, acquisitions can enhance the gradual accumulation of the capabilities underlying strategic agility. This article presents a more complex picture of a non-linear reinforcing dual path between M&As and strategic agility.

Strategic agility evokes contradictions, such as stability-flexibility, commitment-change, and established routines-novel approaches. These competing demands pose challenges that require paradoxical leadership-practices seeking creative, both/and solutions that can enable fast- paced, adaptable decision making. Why is managing paradox critical to strategic agility? And which practices enable leaders to effectively manage tensions? This article describes the paradoxical nature of strategic agility. Drawing from data from five firms, Astro Studios, Digital Divide Data, IBM Global Services Canada, Lego, and Unilever, it proposes leadership practices to effectively respond to these challenges.

How can one tell which decisions are strategic? This article proposes a framework that helps distinguish strategic decisions from non-strategic ones. Whether a decision is strategic or non- strategic depends on how a decision ranks along two dimensions: its influence on the degree of commitment and its influence on the scope of the firm. Four distinct types of decisions emerge: strategic, neo-strategic, tactical, and operational. This categorization of decisions can help the firm prioritize decisions, allocate resources, and develop capabilities.

Organizations with social missions, such as nonprofits and social enterprises, are under growing pressure to demonstrate their impacts on pressing societal problems such as global poverty. This article draws on several cases to build a performance assessment framework premised on an organization's operational mission, scale, and scope. Not all organizations should measure their long-term impact, defined as lasting changes in the lives of people and their societies. Rather, some organizations would be better off measuring shorter-term outputs or individual outcomes. Funders such as foundations and impact investors are better positioned to measure systemic impacts.

The case describes the launch of a social media platform by the largest container shipping company in the world. Maersk Line garnered over 1 million fans on Facebook, 40,000 followers on Twitter, and 22,000 on Instagram. They also launched and became active on other social media networks such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ and created a social media home base for Maersk Line called Maersk Line Social that published articles and stories about the company in a less formal manner. The case discusses the organizational aspects of the program launch, as well as pressure from the marketing department to better integrate the largely independent social media operation into the company's broader marketing efforts.

VUCA is an acronym that has recently found its way into the business lexicon. The components it refers to--volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity--are words that have been variously used to describe an environment which defies confident diagnosis and befuddles executives. In a 'VUCA world,' both pundits and executives have said, core activities essential to driving organizational performance--like strategic planning--are viewed as mere exercises in futility. VUCA conditions render useless any efforts to understand the future and to plan responses. When leaders are left with little to do other than wring their hands, organizational performance quickly falls at risk. In this installment of Organizational Performance, we demonstrate that by overlooking important differences in the conditions that volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity describe, we have disempowered leaders. We show how leaders can appreciate the differences among each of these challenging situations in order to properly allocate scarce resources to preserve and enhance organizational performance.

Regulatory bodies in the United States and the United Kingdom recently issued revised guidelines concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials in marketing efforts. Of specific interest within these guidelines is the disclosure of a material connection when brand communications are sent within social media platforms such as Twitter. The findings of quantitative and qualitative survey data analysis indicate that consumers may be misled by current disclosure conventions. Managerial implications, policy recommendations, and suggestions for future research are presented in light of these findings.

In this Executive Digest, we make the case that aggregate individual expertise as a resource and intrinsic capability of the firm are hidden in plain sight, or worse, are assumed to exist where they do not. With high levels of complexity, business diversity, and number of geographical locations, the issue becomes even more acute. We propose strategic resource mapping (SRM) as a methodology designed to provide top managers with a rapid, comprehensive, and penetrating assessment of a firm's 'meta-capability': an actionable overview of the capabilities that exist within the firm. Based on multiple successful implementations, we describe the key features of SRM and provide several illustrations.

How do you get your organization to start using social technologies to become more innovative and productive? Where and with whom should you begin? We interviewed over 70 managers across 30 companies and found that the most successful firms employ one of three jumpstart strategies, depending on the organization's mission, work processes, culture, and industry. Some start at the bottom of the organization, finding and enabling 'young experimenters' to use social technologies to enhance their individual productivity. Others start in the middle, finding and helping 'corporate entrepreneurs' in middle management to use social technologies to improve collaboration on teams and projects. Others begin at the top, finding 'enlightened executives' who are open to new technology and the potential of social tools to strengthen their organizational culture. We combine our research with concepts from change management, technology adoption, and social networks to suggest ways managers can best introduce social collaboration tools into their organizations.