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From Asia to the Americas, populations are getting older, and so far, business and policy leaders have done little to prepare for it. The authors -- from Accenture's Institute for High Performance -- describe some of the key myths that are standing in the way of leaders' understanding of this demographic certainty. For example, one myth is that 'Older consumers are an unattractive demographic for marketers.' The authors debunk this and six other myths and show how to embrace this burgeoning market.

The 'founding mother' of the organic, locally-grown and slow-food movements describes the roots of her vision and the importance of teaching young children how to eat. She describes how she created a new model for fine dining that took the best elements from intimidating French restaurants and relaxed, 'cheap and cheerful' restaurants to create a welcoming environment with top-calibre service. She also describes how her food philosophy evolved, beginning with the teachings of Maria Montessori and the importance of educating all five of the senses.

Social influence marketing is a powerful tool--but understanding how influence actually works is more complicated than it might appear, because correlation and causation are easily confused. Robust analytics can help marketers get it right, enabling them to design effective campaigns and avoid costly mistakes.

To optimize your forecast of the success of a product at launch, combine computer analysis with the judgment of several experts, in specific proportions depending on how uncertain the context is.

Top female executives usually start out with pay comparable to their male counterparts', but a gap emerges and increases over the course of their tenure. Four strategies can help them maintain pay parity.

What's in a signature? If yours is large, it's an indicator that you may be a narcissist. And if you're a CEO, that doesn't bode well for your company.

Today's organization must develop young, customer-facing employees who are (a) committed to the company's mission and (b) capable of taking decisions and initiative, not just direction.

Employees today will be asked to come up with solutions to problems that weren't even on the radar when they were hired.

A new study by researchers at Steelcase, the office furniture company, uncovers six dimensions of workplace culture that shape an office's social dynamics.

This article identifies and explores 13 analytical tools and techniques to understand the unique dilemmas and paradoxes faced by family firms. They are presented here as tools to better analyze family business cases and develop effective responses to family business situations. However, they are equally useful for families in business and advisors to family businesses as they seek to deal with the complex issues created by the conflict of family and business systems in family enterprises. Tools focused on understanding the family business system as a whole are separated from family-focused and business-focused ones. The six dual systems-focused techniques aid understanding of the key stakeholders, current status, past history, and desired future of the firm. The three family-focused techniques in the tool kit aim to better understand the relationships between and the perspectives of the key stakeholders, and the overall health of the family system. The four business system-focused conceptual techniques enable understanding of the nature and extent of the family's involvement in the business, its key directions, performance, and continuity. Careful application of appropriate tools will deepen understanding of the core issues being faced by a decision maker and assist in the development of effective and actionable recommendations.

According to "bottom of the pyramid" theory, poor consumers pay much higher prices for most things than middle-class consumers do, meaning there's real opportunity for large multinationals to capture market share by offering high-quality goods at lower prices. But research on the ground in India shows that today, the poverty premium is often illusory. Companies need to be aware of how hard it is to compete solely on price.

When a company brings out a new product, it often raises the prices of its existing products--which means that you can follow suit without risking customer defections over price. Companies that understand this can avoid reflexive, and expensive, defensive measures.

New research finds five strategies that can help produce a highly successful merger.

Are the experts who successfully predict unusual events geniuses, or did they just get lucky? A new study indicates that their correct guesses were most likely flukes. It looked at the track records of forecasters who had one or two big wins and found that in the long run they were wrong more often than not.

When leaders behave capriciously, they signal their power and, often, the authority they need to drive valuable change. But this behavior can also take a toll on employees and potentially undermine organizational performance.

The former chairman and CEO of Mattel shares one of his secrets to leading effectively: Say "thank you" often--and mean it when you do.

If countries hope to boost their GDPs, they ought to promote the economic advancement of women. See how more than 100 countries measure up on policy support for female workers, the level of economic success their female citizens have achieved, and GDP per capita--and how the three are interrelated.

When the Chinese government outlawed direct selling, Amway's signature marketing model, the company's executives had to decide whether to pull up stakes or find a new way to sell. They chose to stay put and cooperate. To comply with regulatory changes, the company established conventional retail stores and manufactured products in China instead of importing them from the United States. It changed its entire distributor compensation system. It could no longer rely on word-of-mouth marketing, so it turned to brand advertising. Throughout the process, Amway worked to demonstrate that it would be an honorable corporate citizen in China. Eventually legislation was passed allowing it to return to a direct sales business model. It received a new license in 2006, and today China is its largest market, with more than $4 billion in annual sales.

New products and services are created to enable people to do tasks better than they previously could or do things they couldn't before. But innovations also carry risks. Just how risky an innovation turns out to be depends in great measure on the choices people make in using it. Attempts to gauge the riskiness of an innovation must take into account the limitations of the models--formal and informal--on which people base their decisions about how to use the innovation, warns Robert C. Merton, MIT professor and Nobel laureate in economics. Some models turn out to be fundamentally flawed and should be jettisoned, he argues, while others are merely incomplete and can be improved upon. Some models require sophisticated users to produce good results; others are suitable only to certain applications. And even when people employ appropriate models to make choices about how to use an innovation--striking the right balance between risk and performance--experience shows that it is almost impossible to predict how their changed behavior will influence the riskiness of other choices and behaviors they make, often in apparently unrelated domains. It's the old story of unintended consequences. The more complex the system an innovation enters, the more likely and severe its unintended consequences will be. Indeed, many of the risks associated with an innovation stem not from the innovation itself but from the infrastructure into which it is introduced. In the end, any innovation involves a leap into the unknowable. If we are to make progress, however, that's a fact we need to accept and to manage.

From Apple to Merck to Wikipedia, more and more organizations are turning to crowds for help in solving their most vexing innovation and research questions, but managers remain understandably cautious. It seems risky and even unnatural to push problems out to vast groups of strangers distributed around the world, particularly for companies built on a history of internal innovation. How can intellectual property be protected? How can a crowdsourced solution be integrated into corporate operations? What about the costs? These concerns are all reasonable, the authors write, but excluding crowdsourcing from the corporate innovation tool kit means losing an opportunity. After a decade of study, they have identified when crowds tend to outperform internal organizations (or not). They outline four ways to tap into crowd-powered problem solving--contests, collaborative communities, complementors, and labor markets--and offer a system for picking the best one in a given situation. Contests, for example, are suited to highly challenging technical, analytical, and scientific problems; design problems; and creative or aesthetic projects. They are akin to running a series of independent experiments that generate multiple solutions--and if those solutions cluster at some extreme, a company can gain insight into where a problem's "technical frontier" lies. (Internal R&D may generate far less information.)