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In 1979 Michael Porter's five forces model transformed the field of strategy. But the 1996 article "Value-Based Business Strategy," by Adam Brandenburger and Harborne Stuart Jr., may prove to be even more significant, as it applied mathematics to the evaluation of strategic decisions. Ryall, of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, now introduces a model of competitive strategy that is built on Brandenburger and Stuart's mathematical work. The value capture model (VCM) has an explanatory, predictive power that no other theory of competitive strategy can claim. It defines competition in an industry as a tension between the value generated from transactions that a firm undertakes with a given set of agents and the forgone value it could have generated from transactions with other agents. An important implication is that strategists must shift from looking at how a firm competes with other players to examining how players compete for a firm. Work on the VCM is already revealing important insights to leaders who chart the strategic direction of their firms. A streamlined version with a reasonably full complement of input variables, bolstered by empirical research and further refinements, could illuminate the way to better business practices.

Though boards claim they strive for diversity, the number of female directors remains low; women held only 16.6% of Fortune 500 board seats in 2012. To find out why--and learn about the women appointed to boards and their experiences--Harvard Business School's Groysberg and organizational researcher Bell teamed up with Heidrick & Struggles and WomenCorporateDirectors to conduct annual surveys of board members. In this article they reveal the findings of their 2010 survey of 294 women and 104 men, presenting a profile of the typical female director, what directors thought about the benefits of diversity and the dynamics between men and women on boards, and best practices for recruiting and managing directors. Three themes emerged from the data: (1) Women had to be more qualified than men to be considered for boards. Contrary to popular belief, female directors had more operational and leadership experience than male directors. (2) Boards don't know how to leverage diversity. The women said they were not treated as full members of the group, though the men were largely oblivious to this problem. (3) Great talent is not enough to create a great board. Boards need processes and cultures that encourage inclusiveness as well as diversity.

Leaders find transitions into new roles the most challenging times in their professional lives, when they either build credibility and create momentum or stumble and sow doubts about their effectiveness. Much attention has therefore been given to how they should take charge in their early days--but far too little to how the organization should set them up for success from the start. Failure to announce appointments in the right way can undo all the work that went into the selection and and hobble even the strongest leader from the start. When someone unexpected is chosen, the transition can set off an emotional storm. To avoid a bad start, the leader who made the selection, his or her HR partner, and the communications, investor relations, and legal professionals who advise them must provide good answers to four fundamental questions: (1) What message is this appointment meant to convey? (2) Why is this person the right one for the job? (3) Which members of the organization need to be informed? (4) What should they be told and when? In the critical days following an appointment, senior leaders must continue to communicate the rationale for the appointment and signal consistent and enthusiastic support in words and deeds.

Do highly creative ads really inspire people to buy products? Studies have found that creative messages get more attention and lead to positive attitudes about the products, but there's little evidence linking those messages to purchase behavior. To address this gap, Reinartz and Saffert developed a consumer survey approach that measures perceived creativity along five dimensions--originality, flexibility, elaboration, synthesis, and artistic value--and applied the approach in a study of 437 TV ad campaigns for 90 fast-moving consumer goods brands in Germany. The study then linked the assessments to sales figures for the products. The findings confirm that creative campaigns are, in general, more effective than other types of ads. The research also shows that the various creativity dimensions deliver different results. Elaboration, for instance, had a far more powerful effect on sales than did originality, a more commonly used dimension. Indeed, many companies focus on the wrong dimensions in their campaigns. This article reveals which product categories are best suited to creative advertising and which dimensions of creativity have the most influence on sales.

As the cosmetics company L'Oreal has transformed itself from a very French business into a global leader, it has grappled with the tension that's at the heart of every global enterprise: Achieving economies of scale and scope requires some uniformity and integration of activities across markets. However, serving regional and national markets requires the adaptation of products, services, and business models to local conditions. Since the late 1990s, the L'Oreal Paris brand--which accounts for half the sales of the consumer products division--has dealt with that tension by nurturing a pool of managers with mixed cultural backgrounds, placing them at the center of knowledge-based interactions in the company's most critical activity: new-product development. L'Oreal Paris builds product development teams around these managers, who, by virtue of their upbringing and experiences, have gained familiarity with the norms and behaviors of multiple cultures and can switch easily among them. They are uniquely qualified to play several crucial roles: spotting new-product opportunities, facilitating communication across cultural boundaries, assimilating newcomers, and serving as a cultural buffer between executives and their direct reports and between subsidiaries and headquarters.

For more than 30 years, the TED conference series has presented enlightening talks that people enjoy watching. In this article, Anderson, TED's curator, shares five keys to great presentations: Frame your story (figure out where to start and where to end). Plan your delivery (decide whether to memorize your speech word for word or develop bullet points and then rehearse it-over and over). Work on stage presence (but remember that your story matters more than how you stand or whether you're visibly nervous). Plan the multimedia (whatever you do, don't read from PowerPoint slides). Put it together (play to your strengths and be authentic). According to Anderson, presentations rise or fall on the quality of the idea, the narrative, and the passion of the speaker. It's about substance-not style. In fact, it's fairly easy to "coach out" the problems in a talk, but there's no way to "coach in" the basic story-the presenter has to have the raw material. So if your thinking is not there yet, he advises, decline that invitation to speak. Instead, keep working until you have an idea that's worth sharing.

Arnold Palmer talks about his strategy for winning, his opinion of coaches, and learning from losses.

On April 5, 2012, President Barack Obama signed into law the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, dramatically changing the landscape for many companies raising capital. One of the most interesting sections of the Act is Title III, the CROWDFUND Act, which enables entrepreneurs and small business owners to sell limited amounts of equity in their companies to a large number of investors via social networks and various Internet platforms. Prior to the CROWDFUND Act, selling equity interests in companies via crowdfunding was for all practical purposes illegal under United States securities laws. The Act attempts to exempt crowdfunding from expensive registration requirements and allow crowdfunding websites to avoid the classification of broker, which would impose substantial registration costs on such sites. Through the CROWDFUND Act, equity-based crowdfunding has the potential to open funding opportunities to countless underfunded entrepreneurs and small businesses. In addition, it can provide investors with new ways to diversify their portfolios. However, the benefits of crowdfunding do not come without substantial risks. Given the combination of unsophisticated investors, inherently risky businesses, and the zeitgeist that changed regulations quickly, crowdfunding must be approached with caution.

Increasingly, service innovation is a source of competitive differentiation for product-dominant companies such as manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. However, the relative intangibility of services has led to uncertainty concerning how to apply product innovation expertise to the services space. We argue that meaningful service innovation by a product-dominant company must begin with the recognition that services are solutions to customer needs. As such, the primary goal of a product-dominant company seeking service innovation should not be to innovate service. Rather, it should be to help customers get a specific job done better or to help them get more jobs done. To this end, we offer three approaches for companies seeking new service innovation based on how customers define value.

Drawing from the literature on self-presentation, leader-member exchange (LMX), and developmental networks, we attempt to explain how employees might react to a Facebook 'friend' request from their supervisor and why they might react that way. We then examine blog comments to determine how individuals feel about such requests and determine whether their comments support any of the aforementioned theoretical frameworks. We conclude with suggestions for how Facebook can be used in the workplace.

Firms must allocate some minimum amount of value to stakeholders in order to retain access to the resources they provide. Stakeholder theory suggests managers optimize firm-level performance by allocating more than this minimum amount. However, how much is too much? This article addresses the misleading notion that more is always better when it comes to the treatment of stakeholders and, in doing so, provides needed refinement of the boundary of stakeholder theory's predictions. The upside for managers is guidance in distinguishing between the types of value-allocating behaviors that will lead to greater value creation in their firms and actions that are likely to reduce value overall.

Even in these financially challenging times, business performance always comes down to a firm's competitive advantages. Subsequently, how can companies sustain a long-run competitive advantage, especially in the face of increasing competition? Apart from the pat answer that innovation is critical to organizational survival, we argue that it is the innovation process and how companies manage it that forms the foundation of a resilient organization. Our research finds that organizational innovation processes take three main forms: reactive, proactive, and anticipatory innovators. It is from anticipatory innovators that resilient organizations emerge. Here, resilient organizations not only anticipate the needs of buyers but do so by creating an innovation orientation within the firm's culture. This culture-based focus goes beyond any specific innovation; it directs leaders to create an organizational culture that is receptive to innovative ideas and to the changes they produce. Here, the competitive advantage is not so much innovation per se but the organization's ability to continuously create competitive advantages based on innovations.

Transformational leadership has emerged as one of the most important approaches for understanding and influencing employee effectiveness. Inherent in this approach is the belief that transformational leaders inspire employees to greater levels of motivation and performance. Recent evidence has shown that this effect is accomplished by managing the meaning of work for employees, yet it is often unclear exactly how leaders may influence perceptions of work for their employees. Consequently, in this article, we present behavioral and verbal cues leaders may use to enact positive change in their employees.

This article aims to scrutinize an emerging and prominent type of work team in organizations: the spontaneous virtual team (SVT). Despite the promising benefits an SVT can provide, it is confronted with great challenges throughout its lifecycle. In this article, we first highlight the unique structure and characteristics of SVTs as compared to other conventional types of work teams. Furthermore, we decompose the lifecycle of an SVT into three stages. We then use interview data among SVT managers and participants across several industries to analyze the challenges, corresponding solutions, and the role of information and communication technologies in each of the three stages. Understanding the emerging SVTs will be of salient value to professionals and corporate executives who are interested in finding effective technology-enabled means and work patterns to improve organizational work performance. The current work can also serve as a basis for future academic research on exploring the SVT phenomenon.

Over the past 20 years, a convergence has occurred regarding the importance of building relationships with valuable customers as the cornerstone of service strategy. Customer satisfaction and delight have been associated with supporting the retention and growth of important relationships. More recently, firms have adopted penalties and fees as a central means of growing revenue. This has caused friction with the programs targeted at improving customer relations, and increased defections and spurred government regulation. In this article, we collect and analyze data to identify the aspects of penalties that generate customer dissatisfaction and negative emotional and behavioral responses. We offer guidelines for the implementation of penalties that balance the goals of revenue generation and customer loyalty. These include: preventing unintentional failures, managing the perceived magnitude of penalties, effectively educating customers on the offer, ensuring that penalties are clear and transparent, linking penalty decisions to responsibility for the transgression, taking into account narrowly missing avoiding a penalty, and consideration of the customer relationship and employee empowerment.

Recent trends in advertising and social media (e.g., facial/body recognition technologies) will change how people need to think about their digital representations and privacy, as well as how managers can use these technologies to interact with customers. The term avatar is usually associated with a video game character or a pictorial representation on a social network, and among other components of the definition of the concept is the notion that users control the avatar's appearance and actions. Facial recognition and video analytic technologies being applied in public digital signage displays and on social networks like Facebook capture and create an embodied biometric database that is essentially an avatar-like profile that will be used for marketing products and supporting consumer applications. In this article we discuss the nature of these new marketing avatars, which we call mavatars, and offer a framework for understanding where and how these embodied profiles are and will be used. We also discuss and speculate how these representations and the applications they spawn will evolve; where they will be used; and the ramifications of these embodied representations for consumers, managers, and society at large.

In this age of tough, global competition, companies in business-to-business markets need to rethink the way they manage their customer portfolio and interact with their customers. Customer managers with mainly sales- or relationship-oriented roles cannot leverage their business relationships with customers who seek co-creation. For such co-creation relationships, companies need to install network-oriented managers who systematically create value and reduce risk together with the customer. This article distinguishes three customer asset management perspectives (i.e., sales, relationship, and network) that may be employed by customer managers at the supplier-customer interface. Following an explication of the evolving network perspective, it describes how firms can nurture the network perspective and the corresponding customer manager role in terms of mindset, context, and competence.

Rational, analytical, directed approaches for strategy creation and execution may work for creating value by conventional, hierarchically structured organizations operating in stable environments. However, when the basis of competition shifts from product features to an experience delivered by a network of independently acting participants in a complex and fast-evolving market environment, approaches based on command and control do not work. For order to emerge from such chaos and to gain more control over success, strategy based on reason alone is not enough to inspire action in others. To understand what it takes to effectively make strategy under such circumstances, this article shows how the UK's Royal Marines, in collaboration with more than a dozen different stakeholder groups, developed a novel adaptation of wargaming to affect strategic change in Afghanistan. It also demonstrates the broad applicability of this strategic approach.

This article illuminates the drivers of exponential improvements in performance and cost and explains why some technologies experience more rapid improvements than others. It shows how exponential improvements in performance and cost are largely driven by two mechanisms: creating materials to better exploit their physical phenomena; and geometric scaling. Improvements in some technologies are directly experienced through these two mechanisms, while improvements in higher-level "systems" are indirectly experienced through improvements in specific "components." Understanding these drivers can help us better recognize when new technologies might become economically feasible and thus create appropriate policies for promoting improvements.

At the age of 32, Bill Marriott became the head of the company his father had built up from its beginnings as a root beer stand in 1927. Until 2012 it had had only two CEOs, and Marriott had always thought that one of his four children would succeed him in that role. Two of his sons have worked for the company for many years, and of them, John, seemed destined to succeed his father. But as time went on, Bill Marriott realized that it wasn't the right fit--either for John or for the company. He writes here about meeting Arne Sorenson, hiring him, and grooming him to become the current CEO. (An edited interview with Sorenson accompanies the article.) But that doesn't rule out another Marriott as the fourth chief executive, he says.