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Many boards and senior managers have embraced talent management in order to create high-performance organizations, yet many approaches are expensive and ineffective. This article presents Talent Management 2 and summarizes the results of a five-year investigation into the merits of different ways of improving corporate performance. It suggests that it is often cheaper to work with existing employees and to put the right support environment in place, rather than recruiting top talent. Evidence from early adopters of “performance support,” a key component of Talent Management 2, suggests that it represents a quick, cost-efficient way of securing large returns on investment and achieving multiple objectives. These adopters are building critical success factors into the processes for key activities and adopting cost-effective ways of helping employees emulate the methods of high performers. Instead of focusing on investing in talented employees who may not be retained long enough to yield returns on the company’s investment, Talent Management 2 focuses on boosting the performance of today’s key workgroups. Providing better support can enable more to be achieved by fewer and less costly staff.

Before the 1990s, wealth and power in India was highly concentrated in a few business families, the License Raj system stifled growth, basic necessities were in short supply, and the nation verged on defaulting. However, India would soon eliminate the License Raj, shift to exports and more free-market policies, and boost its literacy. The massive size of India’s population — including a middle class of 390 million in 2009 — is now an asset. <br><br>India’s progress has seen the explosive growth of various industries. The information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services industry has grown to $100 billion in 2011 and India is the world’s largest player in offshore delivery. This growth was due to a labour cost advantage and a talented pool of human resources. However, the industry is maturing and climbing the value chain to higher margin services such as consulting and niche services. Similar to the IT industry in the 1990s, the telecommunications industry in India has grown exponentially in the new millennium. The prime engine of India’s economic growth, it boasts 800 million mobile phone subscribers and revenues of $68 billion. A key impediment to India’s growth is power scarcity, with more than 60 per cent of rural households lacking power. The government has launched an ambitious solar energy plan and the sector has been granted subsidies and access to bank financing. Different approaches to solar include village-owned power grids and pay-per-use models. Firms that embrace India’s rapid development will be able to create viable and scalable business models around its many opportunities.

Past discussions on sustainability highlighted issues traditionally associated with it, such as reducing environmental impacts while growing the top line. More recent discussions focus on activities that extend beyond the firm, such as long-term collaborations. This article provides a top-ten list of initiatives to help companies become more sustainable in 2013, compiled by a network of sustainability leaders: 1. Create smart, integrated public policy. 2. Engage value chain members, including industry and non-governmental organization partners. 3. Build a national dialogue on responsible consumption. 4. Create organizational structures that support sustainability. 5. Embed sustainability in corporate culture. 6. Provide clear and equitable directives regarding Aboriginal rights and entitlements. 7. Create clear conditions that support sustainability-related innovation. 8. Incorporate a social license to operate into business strategy. 9. Prepare organizations and society to mitigate and adapt to climate change. 10. Lessen the burden of sustainability reporting.<br><br>The focus of sustainability has shifted outward and new challenges represent broad issues outside a firm involving multiple stakeholders, such as value chain collaboration and civic engagement. Two reasons for this shift could be that the “easy work” (e.g. technical improvements like going paperless) have already been done, and that it doesn’t pay to do sustainability half-way.

A study of 236 corporate directors by RHR International and Chief Executive magazine found that 95 per cent of respondents acknowledged CEO succession as a critical business continuity issue. Yet more than half rated themselves as ineffective in executing their responsibilities in the CEO succession process. This author, the CEO of the firm of management psychologists and consultants RHR International, has leveraged his research, client insights, and 30+ years of consultant experience to create a list of ten key dimensions of CEO succession. The first steps are 1. establish board ownership, involvement, and oversight; 2. set time frames; and 3. prepare for emergencies. The next dimensions, dealing with the “who, what, and where,” are 4. align strategy and profile; 5. build a talent pipeline; and 6. source external talent and manage search firms. The final dimensions, dealing with people and process, are 7. select the CEO; 8. proactively manage the transition; 9. measure performance and improve progress; and 10. manage the dynamics of CEO succession.

By 2025, a quarter of the world’s skilled workers might be Indian. How the cohort of Generation Y workers — those either just entering the workforce or who have been working for one or two years — make the transition to the workplace, and how firms develop and engage them to excel and become business leaders, are of key importance to Indian organizations. Gaps in education, skills, and vocational training are a big challenge that the government wants to address, and some non-governmental organizations are venturing into rural regions to provide basic vocational skills training. Generation Y needs promotion opportunities and transparency, as well as work-life balance, flexibility, and learning opportunities. The older generations must be proactive in nurturing talent in Generation Y. This article, by the senior director of people resources at McDonald’s India, concludes by proposing that firms operating in India should a) work with the government to reach semi-rural and rural youth and enhance their employability; b) create an engaged workforce through, for example, the use of social media and informal workplace forums that give workers the chance to hone their skills; and c) ensure that there is a talent-management process to harness the talents of youth.

The CEO of Destimoney, a Mumbai-based financial services firm, describes his company’s journey to success. After joining the equity brokerage services firm in 2011, he explored ways to make the business more viable and sustainable. Capital markets were in a downturn, retail investors were deserting, and global markets were near crisis — outside-the-box thinking was needed to survive. Costs had to be kept under control and the business needed growth. A focus on high net worth individuals and traders was decided on. Destimoney created a franchise network, which was more suited to a nation with many languages than setting up branches across the country. On the product side, the firm focused on bringing out options strategies based on the risk appetites of clients and market conditions, and might have been the first company in India to do so in a big way. The firm spotted an uptrend in commodity markets, acquired commodity brokerage licenses, and built a flourishing commodity brokerage business. Destimoney grew exponentially in 2011, despite the year being among the worst for Indian financial markets. It then developed an outsourcing model for non-core activities and diversified into third-party products like life insurance, focusing on the tier 2, 3, and 4 cities, where penetration was especially low. The firm also launched a small wealth management business in seven leading cities across country. As the article shows, penetration of financial services in India is very low, and business models that cater to the needs of the masses carry the potential for success.

Businesses should pay attention to the practices of pirate organizations, because piracy has reshaped industries and given birth to new ones since the dawn of capitalism. For example, sea pirates fought the monopolies of the East Indies companies in the 17th and 18th centuries and forced recognition of the freedom of the seas, pirate radio defeated the BBC’s broadcast monopoly, and online file sharing through Napster triggered an overhaul of the music industry. Rather than simply threatening capitalism, pirate organizations indicate the directions in which the economy is likely to move. This article discusses the history and future of piracy and puts forth five lessons for managers. 1. Take the long view and become an industry leader, recognizing the unsustainability of consensually legitimate industries. 2. Acknowledge that opposition to your industry might point to legitimate problems. 3. Don’t sue your customers. 4. Ally with pirate organizations if it suits economic opportunity. 5. Don’t slow down industry progress through monopolistic arrangements. The article concludes with an assessment of how the music industry violated these axioms in the late 1990s.

Recent failures such as the subprime mortgage crisis or the BP oil rig disaster are the result of failed corporate cultures, yet “corporate culture” is one of the most misunderstood terms in the business lexicon. After outlining common misconceptions about corporate culture, this article defines it as the collective belief systems that employees in an organization have about their ability to compete in the marketplace ethically, and how they act on those beliefs to bring value-added products and services to the customer in return for financial and business success. Far from being unimportant as it is often treated in the business world, corporate culture has a direct link to a company’s bottom line. Underperforming corporate cultures are categorized in the article as predatory, frozen, chaotic, political, or bureaucratic, while high-performing corporate cultures are categorized as service or new era. <br><br>A blueprint for building a strong corporate culture is proposed, which includes setting goals, prioritizing ethical conduct, creating a change-ready culture, incorporating flexibility, encouraging appropriate risk taking and innovation, identifying alternative critical success factors for managers, retaining innovative people and their ideas, identifying new qualities to be embedded in the culture, creating a democratic environment, and keeping the ultimate focus on the customer. Unfortunately, the change process is often blocked by bankruptcy, the exclusion of people from the change process, incremental responses to change, and poor attitudes. In the age of radical change, firms must develop a systematic change plan, identify change leaders, build a broad consensus for change, eliminate bias from the process, individualize change strategies, and go beyond the fads and “magic bullets.”

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. New markets and new possibilities for expansion and acquisition make the global competitive landscape more dynamic, creating both threats and opportunities. The task of the global strategist involves not only identifying where to leverage a company's existing strengths but also how to enhance and renew its capabilities. The authors argue that the risks of global expansion can be greatly reduced by taking a systematic approach to the decision-making process about entering a new country. They conclude that the experience of many global companies suggests that expensive mistakes are often made when companies don't ask certain key questions before they make such internationalization decisions. By better understanding the nature of their own competitive advantages and how those advantages might fit into or be augmented by a new market, companies can greatly improve their chances of success. The authors illustrate their argument by drawing on the examples of companies such as CEMEX, Telefänica, Accor, Wal-Mart and IKEA. The authors propose two tests for the global strategist, one to use when a company is considering replicating a successful strategy in a new country, and the other to use when a company is seeking to acquire a new capability in a new market.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. These days, 3-D printing is much in the news. Also known as "additive manufacturing"or "rapid prototyping,"3-D printing is the printing of solid, physical 3-D objects. Unlike machining processes, which are subtractive in nature, 3-D printing systems join together raw materials to form an object. Some see 3-D printing and related technologies as having transformative implications. "Just as the Web democratized innovation in bits, a new class of 'Äòrapid prototyping'technologies, from 3-D printers to laser cutters, is democratizing innovation in atoms,"Wired magazine's longtime editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, stated in his new book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. "A new digital revolution is coming, this time in fabrication,"MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld wrote in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs. But in addition to 3-D printing's technological implications, recent evolutions in 3-D printing offer important management lessons for executives about the changing face of technological innovation -and what that means for businesses. In this article, the authors examine the rapid emergence of a movement called open-source 3-D printing and how it fits into a general trend toward open-source innovation by collaborative online communities. They then discuss how existing companies can respond to -and sometimes benefit from -open-source innovation if it occurs in their industry.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Too often, conventional approaches to organizational transformation resemble the Big Bang theory. Change occurs all at once, on a large scale, and often in response to crisis. Yet we know from a great deal of experience that Big Bang transformation attempts often fail, fostering employee discontent and producing mediocre solutions with little lasting impact. Instead of undertaking a risky, large-scale makeover, organizations can seed transformation by collectively uncovering "everyday disconnects"-the disparities between our expectations about how work is carried out and how it is actually is. The discovery of such disconnects encourages people to think about how the work might be done differently. Continuously pursuing these smaller-scale changes -and then weaving them together -offers a practical middle path between large-scale transformation and smallscale pilot projects that run the risk of producing too little too late. The author has found that organizations take three approaches to discovery that are both particularly effective for uncovering everyday disconnects in the organization's work and seeding transformation from the bottom up. These techniques can be used together. The three techniques are: 1. Work Discovery Instead of assuming that you know how work is designed, examine it firsthand as it is actually conducted. Determine how to turn the (inevitable) surprises you uncover into assets. 2. Better Practices Instead of simply adopting the best practices of other organizations, screen the way work gets done in your organization through those best practices to generate new ideas. In other words, use best practices to generate even better practices. 3. Test Training Instead of locking down standard operating procedures during training, experiment with other, potentially better possibilities for changing the way the work will get done. Use training for testing these possibilities.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Although the initial concept for the human cloud was to create an eBay-like marketplace for talent and labor, there were obstacles. The simple auction model seemed ill-suited for large, complex undertakings. The model was also often perceived as too risky by managers, who had a hard time developing "virtual"rapport with workers. Today, four new human cloud models have developed, each aiming to overcome these problems in a distinct way: 1. The Facilitator model connects suppliers and buyers directly through a bidding process but offers increased visibility into the supplier's identity and work processes. Elance and oDesk are examples of this model. 2. The Arbitrator model enables buyers to compare the inputs of multiple providers before choosing which to purchase. Arbitrator platforms such as CrowdSpring and InnoCentive follow this approach. 3. The Aggregator model breaks down a job, such as proofreading, translation, transcription or tagging, into tiny bits of work -microtasks -and finds workers willing to complete these tasks, sometimes in the context of a game. Platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower offer such capabilities. 4. The most sophisticated model, the Governor, provides project management, supplier certification and quality control to assure qualified coordination and management of complex projects. The authors note that harnessing the human cloud's power will -as with earlier outsourcing waves -require hard work and learning. Buyers may find it helpful to think about managing a human cloud initiative much the same way that they manage the main phases of any outsourcing engagement.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. It's difficult to start a venture that gains traction with paying customers, but it's even harder to grow beyond certain levels of sales. Why? The authors point out that, as ventures grow, their complexity increases. Not only are there more "moving parts,"but interdependencies are more difficult to manage. The original business model must deal with new products or markets. Early leadership behaviors that worked in establishing the business are often not adequate to manage and grow it. SG&A (selling, general and administrative) costs often accelerate faster than revenues. The result: Each year thousands of promising ventures are either forced to go out of business or operate in small niches because they are unable to scale their sales activities. The authors illustrate with the example of a real company in the payroll services business. After a period of rapid growth, "BusinessProcessingCo."saw its revenue growth stall and the SG&A burden become untenable. The company had a costly ad hoc process for evaluating opportunities, forecasting and business development initiatives. The leadership team was unable to define its core customers. As the authors explain, different customers come with different transaction costs for the seller. This affects "upstream"capacity utilization in two respects: the product mix of the selling company (what kind of capacity is utilized) and how capacity is utilized (for example, production lines in manufacturing and the types of people and skills in a service business). The selection of customers also affects "downstream"after-sale economics and organizational requirements. The article discusses the importance of customer selection and how intelligent opportunity management can help companies scale their selling initiatives. It concludes with a general framework for helping executives analyze sales productivity and pipeline value.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Results from the fourth year of MIT Sloan Management Review's research collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group have found that managers who say sustainability has caused their organization to change its business model are also more likely to say that the organization's sustainability activities have added to profits. Respondents to the survey who not only changed their business model because of sustainability but also generated profits from their sustainability-related activities and decisions -"Sustainability-Driven Innovators"-represented 23% of the survey pool. The survey results suggest that business model change, top management support, collaboration with customers and having a business case are associated with creating economic value from sustainability activities and decisions. Ninety percent of all managers who said their companies have all these characteristics also say that their sustainability activities add to their profits. The authors'research suggests several ways in which companies can become more effective at connecting business model change with sustainability-based profits. Based on the behavior of Sustainability-Driven Innovators, they make three recommendations for how managers can improve their odds of profiting from their sustainability activities. First is to be prepared to change the business model, which may involve extensive corporate change, require significant top management attention and entail setting multiyear goals. Second is to learn how your customers think about sustainability and understand what they are willing to pay for in connection with sustainable products or services. The final recommendation involves increasing collaboration both internally and externally with customers, businesses and groups beyond the boundaries of the organization to improve operations and competitive advantage.

Innovative companies fund internal research and development to gain an edge in the marketplace. They also work closely with their suppliers in an effort to offer greater functionality and performance for their customers. However, some critical new product insights don't come from suppliers and customers working together but from the customer's customers. When suppliers and customers cooperate, the authors write, they can "tweak"the technology to provide big gains in value for the customer's customers. In contrast to recent research on how suppliers and customers cooperate to save on costs, the authors examine the innovation process to understand how to achieve outcomes for the end user that otherwise would not occur. Drawing on numerous examples from technology companies, they look at how suppliers and customers become open to tweaking the supplier's offering to better serve the customer's customers; what makes for successful tweaking; and various ways parties can share the fruits of collaboration so that everyone benefits. Although some progressive suppliers and customers saw the potential benefits of working together, many of the businesses the authors examined regarded this kind of cooperation as a last resort. Small suppliers saw large prospective customers as slow to make decisions and overly aggressive about claiming intellectual property that came out of collaborations; large customers also tended to withhold information about how they used the suppliers'technologies and their customers'applications. However, the authors found that some technology businesses consciously seek opportunities to cooperate with their customers and customer's customers. This was particularly true with small and medium-sized companies. The authors explore two key issues: the extent to which contact between the supplier and the customer's customer needs to be direct; and how businesses bridge across different partial understandings to improve their chances of success.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In the perennial tug of war between manufacturers and retailers, retailers seem to be winning. Today's retail industry is more concentrated than ever -in many industries and markets, a handful of retailers account for a majority of the sales. Their ability to control market access and influence consumer buying behavior means that manufacturers need retailers more than ever. And just imperatively, the authors argue, they need to understand what makes retailers tick. As retailer influence has grown, they note, power has moved downstream. For example, Wal-Mart's sale are approximately 4.5 times greater than those of its largest supplier, Procter & Gamble. Consolidation and the global scale of retailers have reduced the number of "buying points"that manufacturers can develop. Yet neither side is satisfied with the current system. Many retailers have difficulty converting trade promotion into profits. Rather than building longer-term partnerships with suppliers and nurturing store and shopper loyalty, retailers tend to compete on price and fritter away the trade support they extract from manufacturers. What can be done to improve the situation? While manufacturers are locked into large fixed investments and wedded to products and brands with long payback cycles, retailers have a variety of ways of making money. The particular approach, or the mixture of approaches, that a retailer selects defines the retailer's business model and how it differs from competitors. The article highlights four different retail business models, as exemplified by Tesco, which connects with consumers through its loyalty program; Loblaw, which relies heavily on private labels; Costco, which gets its suppliers to finance its inventory; and Wal-Mart, which focuses closely on margins.

The authors argue that strategy can be defined and created using a simple framework that entails answering five questions - the same five questions, no matter the type, size or context of the organization.

Thriving employees are less susceptible to stress and burnout - and much healthier, overall. When employees are thriving, they are not satisfied with the status quo, and behave proactively to co-create their job environment in ways that enable more thriving. The authors describe three individual and three organizational enablers of thriving, including providing decision making discretion and minimizing incivility.

The search for the secrets of high performance organizations has been intense, yielding countless best-selling books and imitators in the process. However, a newer quest has emerged on the organizational front, for something that cannot be as easily imitated: high integrity. Before you can increase integrity in your organization, the author argues, you must familiarize yourself with the obstacles in your way. These obstacles include greed, fear and rationalization. Once all of this is taken into account, he provides four concrete steps for leaders to take.

It's a fact of organizational life: some employees are more talented than others. Douglas Ready explains how to retain your 'high-potentials' (HiPos), who represent the top three-to- five per cent of your organization's workforce on two key dimensions: performance and living the company's values. He also discusses some of the downsides of being labeled a HiPo.