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Although women make up nearly half of the workforce in the United States, the number of women who hold senior management positions in large U.S. firms continues to be disproportionately low. This fact raises concerns about individual fairness and equality of opportunity. Herein, we demonstrate that the use of strong mentoring programs holds great promise as a way to increase the number of women in senior management roles. An extensive study supports the mentoring program recommendation, as do examples of foreign firms which far more readily employ women in executive positions than do U.S. firms.

Through the examples they set, leaders do a great deal to shape-for good or for ill-the culture of the organizations in which they serve. Leaders thus serve in a teaching role. But in order to learn how to set positive examples, leaders must also be students who seek to learn what they can from others' examples. Employing as a jumping-off point a recent high-profile and multi-faceted scandal involving Penn State University and decision makers affiliated with it, this article explores a number of ethical decision making lessons to be learned from that scandal and considers how those lessons can be applied to a variety of decisions faced by corporate leaders. Along the way, the article addresses ways in which common human tendencies impair the quality of thinking and decision making. It also offers ways for improving thinking quality and enhancing the ethical nature of resulting business decisions.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In many companies, pricing receives surprisingly little attention. Following work that included a study of pricing at 15 small and medium-sized companies, the authors conclude that most companies can improve their pricing capabilities -and thus their profitability -over time by taking a disciplined approach. The authors identify two key elements of pricing -price orientation and price getting -and five levels of pricing capabilities. They observe that the companies they studied that achieved better pricing had top managers who championed the development of pricing skills. While competition, costs and price sensitivity within a market affect the parameters within which companies set prices, superior pricing is almost always based on skill, the authors maintain. Companies differ substantially in their approach to price setting, but most fall into one of three buckets: cost-based pricing, competition-based pricing or customer value-based pricing. Customer value-based pricing uses data on the perceived customer value of the product as the main factor for determining the final selling price, and many scholars consider customer value-based pricing often to be a preferable approach to price setting for existing products. The authors argue that according to their research many companies can improve their pricing capabilities by cultivating their understanding of the value they bring their customers. But implementing customer value-based pricing is not easy, the authors caution. They find that developing and implementing a sophisticated, customer value-based pricing program is a multiyear project that demands a high degree of executive attention and requires substantial changes in processes and thinking within the company.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

"High sustainability" companies significantly outperformed their counterparts over an 18-year period in terms of both stock market and accounting criteria, such as return on assets and return on equity. They also exhibited lower performance volatility. Currently, organizations that exhibit a broad-based commitment to sustainability on the basis of their original corporate DNA are few and far between. For most companies, becoming sustainable involves a conscious and continuing effort to build long-term value for shareholders by contributing to a sustainable society. The authors studied the organizational models of companies that they refer to as "sustainable" by comparing them with companies that they call "traditional." They focused on two primary questions: (1) How do sustainable companies create the conditions that embed sustainability in the company's strategy and operations, and (2) What are the specific elements of sustainable companies' cultures that differentiate them from those of traditional companies? The authors have developed an identity and cultural model for how to create a sustainable company. While the model is straightforward, implementation is by no means easy, because it is grounded in largescale change - something that few companies seek out or do well. The first stage involves reframing the company's identity through leadership commitment and external engagement. The second stage involves codifying the new identity through employee engagement and mechanisms of execution. Both are ongoing processes. Once the second stage begins, the two stages reinforce each other. Employee engagement enables even more sophisticated external engagement, since a broader range of employees will be able to effectively engage with outside stakeholders. Mechanisms of execution bind leadership commitment, since these organizational-level attributes continue from one generation of leaders to the next.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

Human genomics promises to be a wellspring of innovation, diagnosis, and treatment--but it needs an industry cluster if it's to reach its full potential. How and where is such a cluster likely to arise?

Research shows that today's most sought-after young professionals are constantly looking for their next job. Gaps between what they want in terms of professional development and what their companies provide are largely to blame.

Detailed, hard-to-compile data on private equity, venture capital, and real estate firms shows that the number of women in senior finance positions is stuck in the single digits--and 60% of the firms studied had no female senior investment professionals at all.

In a new study by a scientist at the Planck Institute, people who simply believed that a championship golfer had used their club played better than other people who played with the same club. In this Q&A, the researcher discusses the psychological phenomenon that explains how people "catch" success from others: positive contagion.

Airline rewards are still based on miles flown. This is a mistake, according to Hal Brierley, the executive chairman and chief loyalty architect of Brierley + Partners. In this column, he points out the biggest problems with airline loyalty programs--and some ways to fix them.

The world needs more entrepreneurs--the people who make innovation real and advance the "frontier economy." It's a failure on the part of society if their ranks are too thin. But imagination in how to educate entrepreneurs seems to be lacking. Startup Weekend and The Launch Pad are two programs that show what works.

A snapshot of monthly activity on popular social sites, along with a depiction of key demographics.

Two days before Thanksgiving 2010, Kullman got a call from the CEO of Danisco, a Denmark-based leader in industrial biotechnology and nutritional ingredients, letting her know that his company was for sale. Danisco had been on DuPont's M&A radar screen for several years, but now Kullman had only six weeks to make an offer. DuPont's due diligence teams pushed tirelessly to understand Danisco's two core science-based businesses. Twenty minutes before the final bids were due, on January 7, Kullman and her CFO got a final briefing from all key parties. They made sure no information or opinions had been held back, and then settled on an offer, which Danisco accepted. Then began a long process: Regulatory approvals were needed from the U.S., the European Commission, and China. Meanwhile, hedge funds were trying to drive up the stock price. DuPont also needed agreement from 90% of shareholders to absorb Danisco and delist it from the Copenhagen Stock Exchange. Finally DuPont raised its price and got the deal done. The story offers lessons for any company involved in M&A: First, be prepared to strike. But make sure you don't fall in love with the deal before you have all the data. Stay open to every opinion, be flexible, and plan the integration even as you're working on the transaction. DuPont has achieved its initial target of $130 million in cost savings a year ahead of schedule.

Executives complain, with justification, that meddling and second-guessing from shareholders are making it ever harder for them to do their jobs effectively. Shareholders complain, with justification, of executives who pocket staggering paychecks while delivering mediocre results. Boards are stuck in the middle--and under increasing pressure to act as watchdogs and disciplinarians despite evidence that they're more effective as friendly advisers. Over many years shareholders have gained power but been frustrated by the results. Could the problem lie with them? Perhaps they aren't really suited to being corporate bosses. Their role, write the authors, has been to provide money, information, and discipline. But established corporations tend to finance investments out of retained earnings or borrowed money. Furthermore, high-frequency traders now account for as much as 70% of daily volume on the NYSE. As for information, shareholders communicate through stock prices--but human nature dictates that we pay more attention to simple recent signals than to complex long-run trends. And shareholders have only two major disciplinary tools at their disposal: selling their shares and casting their votes. But institutional investors, which own the lion's share of stock and have widely diversified portfolios, find it difficult to focus on the governance and performance of any one company. Fixing corporate governance, the authors conclude, must be about finding roles for other actors in the corporate equation who can assume some of the burden of providing money, information, and especially discipline.

In recent decades sales reps have become adept at discovering customers' needs and selling them "solutions." This worked because customers didn't know how to solve their own problems. But the world of B2B selling has changed: Companies today can readily define their own solutions and force suppliers into a price-driven bake-off. There's some good news, though, according to the authors, all directors at Corporate Executive Board. A select group of reps are flourishing in this environment--and lessons from the playbook they've devised can help other reps and organizations boost their performance. These star reps look for different sorts of organizations, targeting ones with emerging rather than established demand. Instead of waiting for the customer to identify a problem the supplier can solve, they engage early on and offer provocative ideas about what the customer should do. They seek out a different set of stakeholders, preferring skeptical change agents over friendly informants, and they coach those change agents on how to buy rather than quizzing them about their company's purchasing process. High-performing reps are still selling solutions--but more broadly, they're selling insights. And in this new world, that makes the difference between a pitch that goes nowhere and one that secures the customer's business.

No sales force consists entirely of stars; sales staffs are usually made up mainly of solid performers, with smaller groups of laggards and rainmakers. Though most compensation plans approach these three groups as if they were the same, research shows that each is motivated by something different. By accounting for those differences in their incentive programs, companies can coax better performance from all their salespeople. As the largest cadre, core performers typically represent the greatest opportunity, but they're often ignored by incentive plans. Contests with prizes that vary in nature and value (and don't all go to stars) will inspire them to ramp up their efforts, and tiered targets will guide them up the performance curve. Laggards need quarterly bonuses to stay on track; when they have only annual bonuses, their revenues will drop 10%, studies show. This group is also motivated by social pressure--especially from new talent on the sales bench. Stars tend to get the most attention in comp plans, but companies often go astray by capping their commissions to control costs. If firms instead remove commission ceilings and pay extra for overachievement, they'll see the sales needle really jump. The key is to treat sales compensation not as an expense to rein in but as a portfolio of investments to manage. Companies that do this will be rewarded with much higher returns.

Best-selling author and behavioral science and business thinker Daniel Pink writes in this essay that as sales becomes less formulaic and more about creative knowledge work, extrinsic motivators--commissions and bonuses--are becoming less relevant. The new breed of inventive, insight-selling reps wants challenging, meaningful, intrinsically rewarding work. Dan suggests that having reps work on commission may actually undermine performance--and he proposes that some firms eliminate commissions altogether.

Sophisticated sales organizations now have the ability to combine, sift, and sort vast troves of data to develop highly efficient strategies for selling into micromarkets. While B2C companies are typically adept at mining the petabytes of transactional and other purchasing data that consumers generate as they interact online, B2B sales organizations have only recently begun to use big data to both inform overall strategy and tailor sales pitches for specific customers in real time. Micromarket analyses involve five steps: defining the optimal micromarket size; determining the growth potential for each; gauging market share in each; understanding the causes of variation in market share across them; and prioritizing high-potential markets to focus on. Exploiting new-growth hot spots will be successful only if salespeople have a solid understanding of how micromarkets work and the simple tools for selling into them. Sales leaders must coach their teams in developing sales "plays" for groups of structurally similar micromarkets. That requires cross-functional collaboration--in particular, between sales and marketing. To sustain early wins, companies also need to change their approach to sales force management in three ways: They must rethink performance management, open new channels between sales and marketing, and invest in talent development.