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While Facebook usage has seen explosive growth, scant research has explored returns on advertising dollars marketers invest in this emerging medium. Our two-stage study of eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-old college students suggests that many of the advertising dollars consumer goods firms spend on Facebook are likely wasted. This study highlights that, in addition to staying in touch with friends and relatives, Facebook users are primarily motivated by three desires: (1) to voyeuristically peer into others' lives, (2) to create a distinctive identity for themselves, and (3) to act on their inner narcissistic tendencies. These motivations also make them poor prospects for advertisers, as users seem disinterested in Facebook ads and disengaged from marketers' attempts to build brands. Herein, we discuss challenges for marketers, as well as opportunities for building brands and driving sales via Facebook.

Because federal law protects an employee's right to religious accommodation, managers cannot ignore the issue of religious diversity. The matter is far broader than simple legal compliance, though. Certainly, managers need to better understand the laws protecting employees' rights for accommodation and prohibiting disparate treatment, religious harassment, and retaliation. However, they also need to understand the various opportunities and challenges associated with acknowledging religious diversity. Concerning opportunities, research suggests that allowing employees to express aspects of their religion can enhance their work lives and, thus, the value they place on the organization. Furthermore, respect for religious diversity can encourage a useful mindset for communicating with other stakeholders in areas from advertising to the sports interests of salespeople. Since learning more about a range of faiths can lead to greater skills in working with diverse groups, we offer information on Prothero's God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World-and Why Their Differences Matter and on different religions' practices associated with death-related issues. In conclusion, we provide insight regarding the benefits of acknowledging religious diversity while respecting those who identify with no religion, and we do so without opening the door to proselytizing.

Bribery is pervasive in emerging markets, in part because of growth imperatives from headquarters, and companies can rack up millions in fines. CEB authors draw on research involving more than 700,000 employees at multinationals in more than 115 countries to suggest several steps managers can take to keep their employees on the right side of the law.

The authors' research on which types of businesses are most likely to manipulate reviews showed that small, independent hotels are more apt to praise their own properties and trash competitors'. There's not much that managers can do about competitors' suspicious positive reviews, but they can address negative reviews of their own establishment by rebutting suspicious claims.

Companies introducing a brand in China face special naming challenges because of the complexity of Chinese characters and pronunciations. The authors show four different approaches companies can take, favoring sound or meaning similarities, and describe the pros and cons of each.

Feeling strapped for time? Try giving a few hours away by helping someone else. Surprising new research shows that doing so makes people feel that they have more time, not less.

Western corporations seem to be taking for granted the favorable taxation policies they've enjoyed for the past 30 years. But companies that are hoarding cash should keep in mind that those policies could change. Their big reserves may soon prove irresistible to governments that are strapped for funds.

Every country's economy is a mix, but usually one group--producers or consumers--gets favored through tax breaks or subsidies. China and the U.S. stand at opposite extremes. If the U.S. economy is to get stronger, it should emulate Germany, which has a more balanced set of economic policies. Tariffs are high enough to protect German producers from Asian rivals but low enough to prevent them from becoming complacent. Taxes on fossil fuels go to support R&D in value-added manufacturing and clean energy sectors.

As the global economy continues to sputter, new businesses--and the jobs they create--are more important than ever. Here's a visual look at the factors in various countries that affect the entrepreneurial climate.

A few decades ago, Prada believed that its future depended on gaining market share through acquisitions in Western Europe and the United States. Today, however, it remains mostly focused on its core brands--Prada and Miu Miu--and the emerging markets. China alone now accounts for 22% of company revenue. Meanwhile, Prada has prospered, retaining its independence in an industry increasingly dominated by luxury conglomerates. According to Bertelli, what makes the difference is Prada's organizational culture. Despite all the changes and challenges the company has faced, the essential principles and values that guide managers' decisions and inform their communications with one another and with stakeholders have remained remarkably constant. The author illuminates the six Prada principles: control through transparency; go where the risk is; give respect to get performance; sell only your own designs; obsess over details; and give young managers real responsibilities. Bertelli describes himself as "a great fan of young people," especially those who experience the world. Right now that means Africa, which he believes will be a huge market in 10 or 15 years.

The innovation revolution spurred by venture capitalists decades ago has created the conditions in which scale enables big companies to shift from shackling innovation to unleashing it. Three trends are behind this shift: (1) The ease of innovation and its decreasing cost mean that start-ups now face the same short-term pressures that have constrained innovation at large companies. (2) Taking a page from start-up strategy, large companies are embracing open innovation and integrating entrepreneurial behaviors with their existing capabilities. (3) Innovation increasingly involves creating business models that tap big companies' unique strengths. In this context, entrepreneurial individuals, whom the author calls "catalysts," are working with corporations' resources, scale, and growing agility to develop solutions to global challenges. Here are the stories of four corporate catalysts: Keyne Monson, at Medtronic, spurred the creation of a program called Healthy Heart for All, which seeks to bring pacemaker technology to hundreds of thousands of Indians who desperately need it. Yuri Jain, at Unilever, sought and found a scalable solution to purifying drinking water--Pureit, a portable system that provides safe water at just half a cent per liter. Nick Musyoka, at Syngenta, devised a program called Uwezo (Swahili for "capability"), which uses the sachet distribution model to provide smallholding farmers with affordable, premeasured packages of crop protection chemicals. Colin Harrison, at IBM, was instrumental in developing the company's Smarter Cities program, which offers bundled technological infrastructure and related services to help cities save money and improve lives.

Many managers feel doomed to trade off the futile rigor of ordinary strategic planning for the hit-or-miss creativity of the alternatives. In fact, the two can be reconciled to produce novel but realistic strategies. The key is to recognize that conventional strategic planning, for all its analysis, is not actually scientific--it lacks the careful generation and testing of hypotheses that are at the heart of the scientific method. The authors outline a strategy-making process that combines rigor and creativity. A team begins by formulating options, or possibilities, and asks what must be true for each to succeed. Once it has listed all the conditions, it assesses their likelihood and thereby identifies the barriers to each choice. The team then tests the key barrier conditions to see which hold true. From here, choosing a strategy is simple: The group need only review the test results and choose the possibility with the fewest serious barriers. This is the path P&G took in the late 1990s, when it was looking to become a major global player in skin care. After testing the barrier conditions for several possibilities, it opted for a bold strategy that might never have surfaced in the traditional process: reinventing Olay as a prestigelike product also sold to mass consumers. The new Olay succeeded beyond expectations--showing what can happen when teams shift from asking "What is the right answer" and focus instead on figuring out "What are the right questions?"

How do successful companies shape their high-level strategies? A decade ago, London Business School's Sull and Stanford's Eisenhardt looked for the answer by studying the era's leading high-tech firms. They discovered that such firms relied not on complicated frameworks but on simple rules of thumb. Managers translated corporate objectives into a few straightforward guidelines that helped employees make on-the-spot decisions and adapt to constantly shifting environments, while keeping the big picture in mind. This article describes the authors' subsequent research into why simple rules work and how firms develop them. Typically, after setting its priorities, a company will identify a bottleneck preventing it from making progress toward them and then create rules for managing that bottleneck. At America Latina Logistica, for instance, the problem was capital spending: The railway had only a tenth of the funds it needed to invest in growth and infrastructure. So a cross-functional team came up with rules to guide spending: Any proposal had to remove obstacles to growth, minimize up-front costs, provide immediate benefits, and reuse existing resources. The rules allowed employees across departments to make difficult trade-offs and quickly innovate solutions that put the firm on the fast track. Effective rules, the authors say, are specific, not broad; draw from historical experience; and are made by their users, not the CEO. Moreover, as a company evolves, they evolve with it.

Many executives rely on a process for devising strategy suited to stable, predictable environments even when they know conditions are highly volatile and mutable. Why? Because, the authors contend, they lack a systematic way to match their strategy-making style to the particular circumstances of their industry, business function, or geographic market. These three BCG consultants offer a framework to do just that. It identifies four "strategic styles": classical, adaptive, shaping, and visionary. Which of these is best suited to your situation depends on how far and accurately you can confidently forecast demand, corporate performance, competitive dynamics, and market expectations (predictability) and to what extent you or your competitors can influence those factors (malleability). A classical style, familiar to most managers and business school graduates, is well suited to an industry whose environment is predictable but hard for your company to change. Oil is a good example of this. An adaptive style suits an unpredictable industry, such as fashion, that players can't alter. A shaping style is best when the industry is unpredictable but your company or another has the power to transform it. And a visionary style fits a predictable industry that is nevertheless amenable to change. Too often strategists focus only on how predictable their environment is and not the opportunities they--or others--may have to change it.

The rigor with which a problem is defined is the most important factor in finding a good solution. Many organizations, however, are not proficient at articulating their problems and identifying which ones are crucial to their strategies. They may even be trying to solve the wrong problems--missing opportunities and wasting resources in the process. The key is to ask the right questions. The author describes a process that his firm, InnoCentive, has used to help clients define and articulate business, technical, social, and policy challenges and then present them to an online community of more than 250,000 solvers. The four-step process consists of asking a series of questions and using the answers to create a problem statement that will elicit novel ideas from an array of experts: 1) Establish the need for a solution. What is the basic need? Who will benefit from a solution? 2) Justify the need. Why should your organization attempt to solve this problem? Is it aligned with your strategy? If a solution is found, who will implement it? 3) Contextualize the problem. What have you and others already tried? Are there internal and external constraints to implementing a solution? 4) Write the problem statement. What requirements must a solution meet? What language should you use to describe the problem? How will you evaluate solutions and measure success? EnterpriseWorks/VITA, a nonprofit organization, used this process to find a low-cost, lightweight, and convenient product that expands access to clean drinking water in the developing world.

Most managers know better than to blurt out, "This is no job for a woman." Yet many are surprisingly open about their bias against mothers and other caregivers. This type of discrimination takes the form of comments like "Don't you feel bad leaving your kids at home?"; assumptions about mothers' lack of commitment to work or inability to handle a tougher load; and blatant differences in salary and promotional opportunities. Such behavior can get your company into legal trouble, say the authors, a distinguished professor at the University of California's Hastings College of Law and an associate professor at Harvard Business School. In the United States, the number of family-responsibilities lawsuits jumped almost 400% from 1998 to 2008. In federal court, the success rate of plaintiffs in these cases is high; roughly two-thirds of them prevail--about twice as many as prevail in all employment discrimination cases. And it isn't just mothers who are taking firms to court: Men and people caring for elderly parents are also filing suits and winning them. Executives need to be aware of the costs, which include settlements that can run into the millions, negative publicity, and the loss of valued contributors. To avoid them, they should educate themselves--and their employees--about the law, work to eliminate any stigma associated with flextime in the office, and set clear policies about family-responsibilities discrimination.

To identify what influences the attitudes and behavior of customers, most companies rely on surveys, focus groups, and ethnographic research. The trouble is, surveys and focus groups tap customers' memories, which are unreliable, and the presence of observers can cause customers to alter their behavior. The authors, three academics, believe they have found a new research tool without those flaws: real-time experience tracking. Conducted over mobile phones, RET allows companies to inexpensively collect instant, unbiased feedback from customers 24 hours a day. In RET, participants supply the answers to a four-question survey every time they encounter a brand, be it through a direct interaction, such as a purchase or ad, or an indirect one, such as a conversation with another customer. The process is incredibly simple: They need only text a four-character message. One major benefit is that RET allows firms to track campaigns as they unfold and readjust them toward the most effective tactics. This article describes how a growing number of companies, such as Schweppes, Energizer, and Fox, are using RET to inform their marketing decisions, increase sales, and help customers improve their own experiences.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, banking can be both fair and profitable--in fact, fairness can be a source of competitive advantage. The evidence for this claim comes from a segment of the financial services industry seldom associated with fairness: consumer credit. The reputation of this business--which encompasses credit cards, personal loans, payday advances, and so on--is so questionable that any claims of "fairness" are viewed by customers with extreme skepticism. But TeamBank, a subsidiary of the German Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken banking group, has successfully developed a brand that transforms the fuzzy concept of fairness into a visible and credible set of product characteristics and operating processes. Overhauling its central offering, easyCredit, involved significant organizational change and the strength of mind to reject profitable products and features inconsistent with the company's core value: "We are an honorable merchant." Product developments included offering a 30-day customer retraction period, making repayment insurance optional rather than mandatory, eliminating the penalty on partial repayments, and even offering a "protection package" that would consider changes in a customer's circumstances, such as illness or loss of a job. TeamBank addressed concerns about the new strategy by providing extensive training to employees and partners and adopted an unusual catalytic device for values-driven innovation--a scale model town symbolizing the brand.

The process of becoming self-aware has traditionally been based on intuition and anecdotal feedback. But that reality is changing, thanks to the growing discipline of auto-analytics--the practice of voluntarily collecting and analyzing data about oneself in order to improve. H. James Wilson, a senior researcher at Babson Executive Education, introduces some of the auto-analytics tools that are increasingly being used by employees at all levels and across many industries. Citing tools in three domains--the physical self, the thinking self, and the emotional self--he describes the practical results that specific people have achieved after taking power in their own hands to gather and interpret data about the nuances of how they work and feel every day. The best outcomes are realized when, Wilson argues, the enterprise of self-measurement is undertaken with a plan in mind. It's still the early days for auto-analytics, but two trends are emerging: The tools are becoming more precise, and the analysis they offer is becoming more holistic. Applied the right way, auto-analytics is beginning to provide the hard evidence that people need and want to make their work and personal lives more productive and satisfying.

The first American woman astronaut in space and the founder of Sally Ride Science on becoming an astronaut and role model, collaborating in tight quarters, remembering the lessons of the Challenger disaster, and driving innovation in K-12 education. She died shortly after this interview took place, at age 61.