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This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Markets are changing, competition is shifting, and businesses may be suffering or perhaps thriving. Whatever the immediate circumstances, corporate managers ask the same questions: where do we go from here, and which strategy will get us there? To understand how to choose the right strategy at the right time, the authors analyzed the logic of the leading strategic frameworks used in business and engineering schools around the world. They matched those frameworks with the key strategic choices faced by dozens of industry leaders at different times, during periods of stability and of change. Two insights emerged from their analysis. First, the frameworks divided into three archetypes: strategies of position, strategies of leverage, and strategies of opportunity. What's right for a company depends on its circumstances, its available resources, and how management combines those resources. Second, many of the assumptions about competitive advantage didn't hold. For example, although strategy gurus talk about strategically valuable resources, sometimes competitive advantage came from very ordinary resources assembled well. To figure out when it makes sense to pursue strategies of position, leverage, or opportunity, the authors advise managers to understand their company's immediate circumstances, take stock of their current resources, and determine the relationships among the various resources. Understanding these factors, they argue, will help managers select the right strategic framework.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. As the data deluge continues to grow, more companies are under increasing pressure to develop systems that create both business value and competitive advantage. According to a survey conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review, in partnership with IBM Institute for Business Value, more than 58% of the more than 4,500 respondents said their companies were gaining competitive value from analytics -up from just 37% who thought this last year. The authors found that rather than having the right tools, technology and people, organizational factors are one of the most important predictors of the ability to create competitive advantage. Managers who responded to the survey cite management support for analytics, including top-down mandates, and having analytics sponsors and champions as key, in addition to practices such as using analytics to identify and address strategic threats and opportunities. Data-oriented organizational cultures have three key characteristics: (1) analytics is used as a strategic asset, (2) management supports analytics throughout the organizations and (3) insights are widely available to those who need them. In addition, organizations that excel at using analytics are sophisticated in their information management, and possess real analytics expertise. The path to developing these competencies takes time and has distinct challenges. The authors summarize each, and propose ways to assess current organizational culture and choose the approach with the best likelihood of success.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Managers have used business analytics to inform their decision making for years. And while few companies would qualify as being what management innovation and strategy expert Thomas H. Davenport has dubbed 'Äòanalytic competitors,'more and more businesses are moving in that direction. Which best practices do the most experienced project managers involved in business analytics projects employ, and how would they advise their less experienced peers? The authors found that the most important qualities could be sorted into five areas: having a delivery orientation and a bias towards execution; seeing value in use and value of learning; working to gain commitment; relying on intelligent experimentation; and promoting smart use of information technology. Although many of the business analytics project managers the authors interviewed report to the IT department, they identify with the business side of their organizations. Best-in-class CIOs realize that IT and business can't afford to continue to be at loggerheads with one another. IT should pursue opportunities to deliver faster implementation cycles, maintaining just enough process and architectural hygiene to ensure quality and professional support.

Traditional metrics like satisfaction and Net Promoter scores correlate poorly with what matters most: share of wallet. Managers need to think about how they rank versus their competitors and apply a new formula, the Wallet Allocation Rule, to predict and improve their share of wallet.

Top management teams in highly dynamic businesses perform better when they accept, even relish, interruptions and do multiple tasks at once.

Standardizing parts in a product line, a practice known as commonality, is not the sure-fire path to profits that many companies think. Here's how to better exploit the synergies and extract the profits available from commonality.

New research from Wharton reveals that competitors who are slightly behind at halftime win more often than those who are slightly ahead. People who are slightly behind, the study shows, increase their effort much more than people who are ahead, in a tie, or trailing badly-and that suggests companies ought to rethink the ways they motivate performance.

The best way to counter the effects of a horrible boss is to cultivate a strong network of colleagues.

If people want to fix health care in the U.S., they need to set aside the prevailing myths that the system is broken or just needs to become more competitive and "businesslike." Instead, they should focus on spreading the adoption of good, effective management practices that are already in use.

It's the ultimate bottom-of-the-pyramid challenge: How do you create a well-designed, safe, and affordable house for the world's poorest people? When Vijay Govindarajan and Christian Sarkar posed that question in an HBR.org blog post in August 2010, they offered their own simple sketch of a possible solution-and wondered if a version could be mass-produced for $300. Since then the $300 house has become a full-fledged movement, with a growing list of advisers, a website (300house.com), and corporate sponsors. In June 2011 the group announced the winner of its first design contest, sponsored by Ingersoll Rand. Here is the first-place entry, as voted on by members of the online community at jovoto.com.

What are the timeless truths of advertising? How can agency leaders manage their teams, creative talent, and clients? To answer these and other questions, the mythology of the "Golden Age of Advertising" is examined and analyzed herein. Specifically, using ad-man Don Draper-protagonist of the fictional but already culturally iconic television series Mad Men-as a mythic archetype, lessons are extracted for contemporary advertising practitioners. Ten timeless rules are proposed and explicated in the areas of managing intra-agency leadership processes, managing creative processes, and managing client relationships.

Managers and stakeholders are increasingly aware of the importance of the environmental impact of a firm's operations when assessing risk and attempting to determine future profitability. Unfortunately, financial accounting systems often fail to fully disclose these environmentally-related costs. The reasons underlying this incomplete disclosure are myriad, ranging from measurement issues to the structure of the firm's chart of accounts. In many ways, the issues facing managers and stakeholders who are attempting to assess environmental costs arising from business operations resemble the issues faced when attempting to determine the costs of producing poor quality products. The negative impact on the environment from business operations can be viewed as a failure in the same way that the negative impact of producing a defective product can be seen as a production control failure. Similarly, costs are incurred to prevent and detect environmental failures, and the cost of failure-particularly if not addressed within the firm-can be huge and unknowable. Drawing on the experiences of firms employing quality measures and reporting, this article presents an environmental cost reporting model to provide greater transparency on environmental impact of business operations to managers and firm stakeholders.

Recent economic, social-political, and natural disasters have all served to highlight the fragility of the global marketplace. As such, it is no longer questioned as to whether or not companies should be good corporate citizens; that is a given. Rather, concern in the 21st century centers on how businesses can become better global corporate citizens. Unfortunately, without clear guidance regarding how this may be accomplished, global corporate citizenship will remain a fringe activity and not become a critical component of an organization's core business strategy. The integrated framework presented herein identifies key elements and tips for implementing a business-based approach to global corporate citizenship.

New research shows that a surprisingly high number of technology projects go wildly over budget, sinking careers and companies. Managers contemplating technology initiatives need to take steps to avoid IT "black swans."

Having studied the relationship between how newly merged companies brand themselves and their subsequent stock performance, the authors find that a "fusion" branding strategy-one that combines elements of the two companies' names and logos-leads to superior financial returns three years out. The reason, they believe, is that this approach sends reassuring signals to employees, customers, and ultimately investors.

The authors describe how the new science of social network analysis helps pharmaceutical companies determine which doctors have the most influence on other doctors' prescribing preferences and would be the most valuable potential customers for pharma companies to target. The tool has great potential in other fields as well.

Could the presence of teddy bears make executives behave more ethically? New research shows that adults cheat less and are more generous when reminders of children are near.

Behavioral economists know that because people struggle to think about money and risk in a systematic way, they may make irrational, counterproductive financial decisions for themselves and their organizations. The world of personal financial advice provides an example: Most people estimate that they'll need 75% of their current salary in retirement-because that's the benchmark they've heard from financial advisers. But when they describe how they expect to live, it turns out they'll actually need 135%.

A campaign to make management more of a profession-one that adheres to higher aims that self-interest or economic benefit-is under way. But professions actually have another defining feature: a specialized body of knowledge that practitioners must apply in their daily work. In law, people must pass an exam to gain admission to the bar. In medicine, doctors are required to complete continuing education. The idea of setting knowledge standards for managers is starting to gain traction, but if it is to take hold, business schools, management publications, and public and private organizations will need to take action.

At its corporate headquarters, the pharmaceutical giant Lilly has broken free from the tyranny of the cube farm, redesigning its offices with flexible, customized spaces. The result: lower overhead and costs and higher creativity and productivity. Here's a closer look at what 21st century office space looks like.