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When eBay's IPO in September 1998 made Omidyar wealthier than he'd ever imagined, he and his fiancee, Pam (now his wife), decided to create a nonprofit family foundation. For a few years they made grants randomly, according to whatever needs resonated with them. But that was just charity, by Omidyar's definition: an important but never-ending effort to alleviate suffering. He wanted to be involved in philanthropy: improving the state of humanity and the world by addressing the root causes of suffering. He began looking for ways to harness the incredible power of business to make the world better. After running up against the complexities of the tax code regarding nonprofits, he ended up creating a limited liability corporation called Omidyar Network, whose staff would be able to handle both nonprofit grants and for-profit investments. This hybrid philanthropic model faced cultural challenges, in part because a program officer's due diligence for a foundation is vastly different from an investment analyst's due diligence for a venture capital firm, and in part because it was difficult to incentivize the for-profit employees without disincentivizing the nonprofit ones. Eventually the organization was restructured to be more like a venture capital firm, though more than half of its $442 million in commitments has gone to nonprofits, with a focus on microfinance. Omidyar believes that a true philanthropist will use every tool he can to create impact, and business is a key part of the equation.

U.S. health care costs currently exceed 17% of GDP and continue to rise. One fundamental reason that providers are unable to reverse the trend is that they don't understand what it costs to deliver patient care or how those costs compare with outcomes. To put it bluntly, few health care providers measure the actual costs for treating a given patient with a given medical condition over a full cycle of care, or compare the costs they incur with the outcomes they achieve. What isn't measured cannot be managed or improved, and this is all too true in health care, where poor costing systems mean that effective and efficient providers go unrewarded, and inefficient ones have little incentive to improve. But all this can be remedied by exploring the concept of value in health care and carefully measuring costs. This article describes a new way to analyze costs that uses patients and their conditions-not organizational units or narrow diagnostic treatment groups-as the fundamental unit of analysis for measuring costs and outcomes. The new approach, called time-driven activity-based costing, is currently being implemented in pilots at the Head and Neck Center at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, the Cleft Lip and Palate Program at Children's Hospital in Boston, and units performing knee replacements at Schon Klinik in Germany and Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston. As providers and payors better understand costs, they will be positioned to achieve a true "bending of the cost curve" from within the system, not in response to top-down mandates. Accurate costing also unlocks a whole cascade of opportunities, such as process improvement, better organization of care, and new reimbursement approaches that will accelerate the pace of innovation and value creation.

Business life has always featured the unpredictable, the surprising, and the unexpected. But in today's hyperconnected world, complexity is the norm. Systems that used to be separate are now intertwined and interdependent, and knowing the starting conditions is no guide to predicting outcomes; too many continuously changing interactive elements are in play. Managers looking to navigate these difficulties need to adopt new approaches. They should drop outmoded forecasting tools-for example, ones that rely on averages, which are often less important than outliers. Instead, they should use models that simulate the behavior of the system. They should also make sure that their data include a good amount of future-oriented information. Risk mitigation is crucial as well. Managers should minimize the need to rely on predictions-for instance, they can give users a say in product design. They can decouple elements in a system and build in redundancy to minimize the consequences of a partial system failure, and turn to outside partners to extend their own company's capabilities. They can complement hard analysis with "soft" methods such as storytelling to make potentially important future possibilities more real. And they can make trade-offs that keep early failures small and provide the diversity of thought needed in a nimble organization faced with complexity on virtually every front.

As the world has become more complex, companies have steadily increased their performance requirements: Now they strive to offer low prices and high quality; to customize products for local markets and standardize them for greater returns; to innovate and be efficient. The typical corporate response to such conflicting goals complicates things further: Firms restructure and try to align their organizations with extra coordinating functions, processes, and incentives. This approach does more harm than good. Managers' time gets sucked up by reports and meetings, leaving little time to work with employees. But there is a better way, says BCG senior partner Yves Morieux: Instead of strangling employees with new rules and procedures, create an environment in which they're compelled to work with one another to develop solutions to complex challenges. Managers can create this environment by applying six "smart rules": (1) improve understanding of what coworkers do and the real constraints they face, (2) determine which people are the firm's natural integrators and strengthen their roles, (3) expand the amount of power available to everyone, (4) increase the need for reciprocity in the system, (5) make employees feel the "shadow of the future," and (6) hold uncooperative people accountable. By tapping employees' ingenuity through the use of smart rules, firms can manage complexity quickly and creatively-and streamline their organizations.

Mauboussin is the chief investment strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management and a leading exponent of how to navigate complex systems in financial markets and other aspects of life. He points out that biology is full of complex adaptive systems: an ant colony is a prime example. Each ant has a decision role but works only with local information; it has no sense of the global system. Ant colonies solve very complicated, very challenging problems with no leadership or strategic plan. People, however, are hard-wired to link cause and effect-which aren't clear in complex adaptive systems-and they believe that certain causes will lead to particular effects. In addition, they tend to listen to experts and to aggregate information poorly. To best deal with complexity, managers should surround themselves with cognitive diversity and extract unshared information for evaluation. Small experiments with controls can be a valuable aid.

In 2009, as financial institutions faced plummeting profits and public scorn, the star of Standard Chartered Bank was on the rise. The bank posted its seventh straight year of income growth (with no help from government funding) and increased its lending by 13%. Why was it thriving in such a difficult time? Because a different approach to leadership had taken hold there, say the authors, a team from the TruePoint consultancy. Mervyn Davies, who took Standard Chartered's reins in 2001, and his successor, Peter Sands, represent a new breed of CEO. Not content with achieving only strong economic returns, these CEOs drive their companies toward high performance on three fronts at once: creating long-term value, producing benefits for the wider community, and building strong social capital within the organization. Many CEOs do well in one of these areas, but what sets these "higher-ambition leaders" apart is their ability to excel in all three. In pursuing their aggressive agendas, higher-ambition leaders do three things: They draw on a much broader view of their companies' organizational and cultural assets to forge more-powerful strategic visions. They build widespread commitment to achieve those visions by turning their companies into communities of shared purpose. And they demonstrate the grit to commit to their visions over the long term. As each of these activities reinforces the others, the full human and business potential of the organization is unlocked, allowing these CEOs to lead their companies to remarkable success, even in the face of daunting challenges.

Market capitalism, a system that has proven to be a remarkable engine of wealth creation, is poised for a breakdown. That sounds dire, and it is. Increasing income inequality, migration, weaknesses in the global financial system, environmental degradation, and inadequate government and international institutions are just a few of the forces that threaten to disrupt global market capitalism in the decades ahead. In conversations with business leaders around the world, the authors found that virtually all of them shared a deep concern for the sustainability of the market system, but their beliefs about how to respond varied widely. Some said that changing their behavior would be unnecessary or even inappropriate. Others were unsure how to deal with issues seldom thought to be the responsibility of individual firms. The authors call for business to be both innovator and activist in protecting and strengthening market capitalism. Instead of seeing themselves as narrowly self-interested players in a system that is overseen by others, business leaders must spearhead entrepreneurial activity on a massive scale-devising strategies that provide employment for the billions now outside the system, inventing business models that make better use of scarce resources, and creating institutional arrangements for coordinating and governing neglected and dysfunctional aspects of market capitalism.

Many companies in mature markets assume that the only reason to enter emerging markets is to pursue new customers. They haven't yet realized the potential for innovation in developing countries-though a few visionary multinationals are tapping that potential for much-needed ideas in products and services. General Electric, with its portable ultrasound technology, and Intel, with its inexpensive Classmate PC, are two examples. Other companies see the potential but find it hugely difficult to develop ideas in unfamiliar settings, much less turn them into global businesses: C-level executives may resist disruptive concepts, or their organizations may lack the processes necessary for absorbing outside innovation. The authors' research shows that a new kind of manager-a "global bridger"-can help these companies take advantage of the innovative energy that permeates emerging markets. Global bridgers tend to be good at developing and maintaining relationships of trust; they understand emerging markets; they have long tenure with their companies; and they are skilled at selling their ideas internally. They have learned to intentionally observe customers, suppliers, and competitors. They cultivate "translators"-people with insights into the local environment. And they test their ideas before taking them back to headquarters, where they rely on advocates to help promote their ideas.

Everybody knows that an empowered team enhances everyone's performance, including the manager's. Vlachoutsicos, of the Athens University of Economics and Business, argues that the vital, particular ingredient in buoying employees is fostering a sense of mutual dependence, or "mutuality," every time you interact with subordinates. He offers six lessons in achieving mutuality: (1) Be modest. Specifically, avoid talking about your track record and instead focus on your people's present needs, (2) Listen seriously-and show it. Don't assume that folks recognize how attentive you are. Make sure the outward signs reflect it, (3) Invite disagreement. But deliver the invitation artfully so that people really do pipe up, (4) Focus the agenda. Don't let discussion run amok in the name of openness. Streamline it so that the progress is palpable to all participants, (5) Don't try to have all the answers. See yourself more as a catalyst for problem solving than as a problem solver per se, and (6) Don't insist that a decision must be made. Give the decision-making process time to breathe, even if that sometimes means delaying a conclusion. The author richly illustrates each of these lessons with a compelling story from his lifelong experience.

As a young woman, Bachelet was tortured and exiled by the Chilean government. She went on to become the country's first female president. Here's a look at her approach to leadership.

A few years back, a seminal report came out, warning that India and China were educating thousands more innovators per year than the Western world and urging the U.S. to focus more on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. While this movement has since gained in strength, the authors show that there is little evidence to support it. They argue that great innovators like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg embrace both the Sciences (how things work) and the Arts (how people work), and in addition, they learn to think in ways that enable them to build new models that connect the two spheres. Teaching the model-building skill of Integrative Thinking, they argue, entails going beyond both hysteria about STEM and nostalgia about the Liberal Arts. The central goal of modern education must be the building of an 'integrative capacity', and the country that builds it first and best will enjoy the prosperity benefits.

In this interview, the director of Lincoln Centre's educational initiatives argues that what we think is what we see: most of us interpret new information in ways that bend toward our preconceptions and confirm them, and this tendancy shapes how we move through the world as individuals. Unfortunately, this tendency is magnified exponentially when we join together in groups. He provides several tools for avoiding such 'path dependence'-- including thinking inside the box and 'making room for awe' -- and explains why imagination is our greatest renewable resource.

Businesses would look quite different if managers thought like designers, the authors argue. For one, they would always begin with empathy - a deep understanding of their customer. Secondly, they would view themselves as creators of new-to-the-world products and services. And third, they would be in the habit of iterating their way to a solution - 'learning as they go' and incorporating the new learning into the next iteration. While many managers appreciate the power of design, a formal process has been elusive; until now. The authors describe a four-step process for bringing design thinking to life that begins with asking, 'What if?' and ends with asking 'What Works?' - the launch and learn stage. In the end, they show that an unavoidable but healthy tension will always exist between creating the new and preserving the best of the present, and as a manager, your key challenge is to learn how to manage that tension.

The 2.6 billion global citizens living on less than $2 a day face considerable barriers to effective healthcare, including limited health insurance, low health literacy, and residence in slums or remote areas that are frequently underserved. The authors describe how some highly innovative private healthcare companies have considered these barriers in the design of their products or services. They show that organizations such as India's Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital achieve their innovations by addressing three functional areas concurrently: marketing, finance and operations. They describe the four shared characteristics of these business models and show how these 'innovative exemplars' can inspire innovation across industries.

The ancient Eastern concept of Zen represents an entirely different way of looking at the world. When most of us approach problems, we focus on what is there, and what to do, rather than on what isn't there, and what to stop doing. The author argues that by shifting to the Zen perspective, we realize that when it comes to a product, service, strategy or experience--what isn't there can often be as or more powerful than what is. He provides an introduction to the seven key Zen sensibilities and sketches their evolution from and incorporation into art, architecture and commercial and corporate design.

Few people will be surprised to hear that the number-one reason for customer complaints these days is poor service: long wait times, impersonal delivery, inconvenient hours and locations - the list goes on. Perhaps this is because everything from marketing slogans ("have it your way," "affordable luxury") to new technologies ("always-on," "on demand") has led us to believe that the customer is always right, no matter what. But the same trends that have led us to expect instant gratification are also enabling businesses to develop innovative models for accommodating customers' intensified demands. The authors introduce the concept of Collaborative Service and show how it provides an opportunity to discover what is truly meaningful to your customers and design category-changing service gestures that not only better serve people, but also make a strong statement about your brand.

In the past decade, Procter & Gamble has transformed Oil of Olay from "oil of old lady" into Olay Total Effects -- one of its strongest brands. Is one of your brands a diamond in the rough? The authors outline five key questions that can help you assess whether or not to invest in brand reinvention. If a brand can answer all of them in the affirmative, chances are good that it has the potential to be transformed from a laggard into a star. The authors present the five components of their Brand Reinvention Framework: proposition, target, offerings, production, and channel, describing in detail how to approach each element.

Orthodoxies -- unstated assumptions that go unquestioned -- are present within every organization. They can range from seemingly-innocuous biases or conventions to, at their most extreme, something that approaches religious-like devotion to a specific set of ideals. In most cases, they are not explicitly recognized, instead lurking below the surface, invisible icebergs on which a seemingly flourishing company might founder. The end result: people fall into autopilot mode and fail to imagine better ways to tackle challenges and everyday activities. The authors present a five-step plan for 'flipping' orthodoxies in your organization that can enable people to imagine a different future that encompasses more than just business as usual.

Much has changed since advertising's 1950s heyday - the Mad Men era, when you could count the number of TV channels on one hand and advertising was all about informing and persuading consumers. Today, that model has been turned on its head: the most significant conversations happen not between advertisers and consumers, but between consumers and other consumers. However, the author - who has worked in advertising since 1974 -- argues that despite the rampant changes, many of the key lessons he learned early on continue to endure. He provides ten guidelines that would have worked in the 1950s and can still be used to create strong advertising in today's McLuhan-esque world. He describes these guidelines - which include 'cut through the clutter' and 'leave a lasting impression' -- in detail and shows how brands from Charles Schwab to Dove to Doritos have used them to successfully engage consumers.

In an excerpt from the 2011 Skoll World Forum, leaders from Danone, Cisco and Novartis describe how they are working to develop scalable solutions to some of the world's most pressing issues by engaging local communities in the solution. They describe their initiatives - which include tackling malnutrition in Bangladesh, health care treatment in rural India, and educating youth for the technologically-driven 21st century - in detail and discuss lessons learned to date, providing inspiration and proof that public companies can drive large-scale change in the world.