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An extensive global survey by three Harvard Business School professors finds that employees agree on core standards of corporate behavior. But meeting those standards will require new approaches to managing business conduct. The compliance and ethics programs of most companies today fall short of addressing multinationals' basic responsibilities, let alone such vexing issues as how to stay competitive in markets where rivals follow different rules. Companies must bring to the management of business conduct the same performance tools and concepts that they use to manage quality, innovation, and financial results.

Dynamic capabilities have been proposed as a useful way to understand how organizations are able to adapt to changes in technology and markets. Organizational ambidexterity, the ability of senior managers to seize opportunities through the orchestration and integration of existing assets to overcome inertia and path dependence, is a core dynamic capability. While promising, research on dynamic capabilities and ambidexterity has not yet been able to specify the specific mechanisms through which senior managers are actually able to reallocate resources and reconfigure assets to simultaneously explore and exploit. Using interviews and qualitative case studies from thirteen organizations, this article explores the actions senior managers took to implement ambidextrous designs and identify which ones helped or hindered them in their attempts. A set of interrelated choices of organization design and senior team process determine which attempts to build ambidextrous organizations are successful.

Companies operating in multiple countries face different and often changing regimes of environmental regulation. This regulatory turbulence raises the question of what environmental strategies multinational enterprises with a portfolio of divergent regulatory regimes should develop in relation to their international business expansion strategies. Forward-looking multinationals seeking to develop an effective environmental strategy should integrate relative regulatory stringency and international market interdependence. There are four environmental strategies that match different regulatory/market configurations for multinationals from both developed and emerging markets, and which identify the factors that drive strategic changes. The article presents a "regulatory turbulence tool" that describes relevant regulatory/market configurations and prescribes contingently effective, dynamic environmental strategies.

More than ever, commercializing new patent-based products requires drawing on multiple inventions typically spread among a variety of organizations. Success requires overcoming the organizational barriers and transaction costs involved with accessing intellectual property. Innovators must also evaluate how best to appropriate value from the unique combinations that they create. This article presents a framework that provides ways of approaching both these challenges. These include a set of guidelines to assist managers in choosing from among three types of commercialization arrangements: licensing, componentization, and integration. This article then explores three strategies for appropriating the value of the innovator's own patent(s): proprietary, defensive, and leveraging. The choice of a strategy determines the scope of the intellectual property portfolio that needs to be assembled to best capture value. Four case studies demonstrate the application of the key theoretical concepts in real-world situations.

Getting customers engaged is one of the most significant challenges for firm-sponsored virtual communities. This article describes the efforts that managers can undertake to foster and sustain customer engagement through a firm-sponsored virtual community. A sponsor must understand consumer needs and motivations, promote member participation, and motivate members to cooperate by making them feel embedded and empowered. In assessing and communicating the benefits of engagement, managers should consider three interlocking sources of engagement value, namely, participatory value, relational value, and financial value.

This article describes the leadership style of Coach Jack Clark, under whose leadership Cal Rugby has won 21 national championships during the last 25 years. The article examines his leadership philosophy and strategies to create a high performance team culture. It discusses how his experiences as an athlete and businessman helped shape his approach to leading and developing teams. He cites the importance of good recruitment practices, setting expectations, constant performance feedback, managing conflict, and having a shared definition of leadership as keys factors to a successful team. In 2010, Clark faced a series of unprecedented challenges, including having his team downgraded from varsity to club status because of budget cuts. This article describes how he addressed these challenges.

To work effectively in the global business arena, managers need a strong set of intercultural management skills. When dealing with clients, co-workers, and other stakeholders at home or abroad, managers with cross-cultural competence have a distinct competitive advantage in the multicultural marketplace. Although generally accepted as a valuable asset for doing business, cross-cultural competence defies easy definition. This study attempts to conceptualize the complex term from the practitioner's point of view. What does cross-cultural competence mean to global managers? From their perspective, which aspects of culture do business people need to understand? From the universe of cultural beliefs, values, attitudes, and country-specific information, what should an executive, with limited time, focus on to develop a basic level of cultural competence? This study asked Mexican managers what they needed to know about culture to do business with the U.S. In the process, they consistently identified certain basic components of cultural competence. Responses were surprisingly similar among the managers, indicating they had a clear picture of which cultural essentials were most important for global executives to learn. The results of the study reveal a working definition of cultural competence for global managers. This research also provides trainers and business educators a content framework for a short-term training program, based on the global managers' perceptions of cross-cultural competence.

Managerial decisions and behaviors in the international business arena have ethical implications across cultures and countries. The need for ethics and core values in business practice has been heightened by continued business scandals and ethical managerial lapses that have violated public trust. Global businesses can offer practical guidance and set ethical examples for others to follow by establishing corporate values beyond written business codes. Four key work values (Honesty, Fairness, Concern of Others, and Achievement) known to be present in businesses across cultures, are put forth as a baseline start for multinational corporation leaders. Offered is a process for making the core values unique to an organization, and for adopting and training managers in the use of core values. Presented is evidence of managerial implementation of the core work values, and managers' alignment of work values with organizational strategies. By addressing the values and principles of their workplaces, international businesses can achieve cross-cultural ethical practices, managerial alignment, and global social responsibility.

As the dynamic global business environment continues to force organizations to be agile and adaptive, international business (IB) education pedagogy is transforming. Building on previous literature describing gaps in IB pedagogy, as well as unaddressed stakeholder needs, we first use our institution-the United States Air Force Academy-as an example of IB program development. In examining our program's evolution, we develop five questions that may provide insight regarding more generalizable IB pedagogy trends. To assess this possible generalizability, we explore questions related to the development of our program using self-reported, publically-available websites of the top full-time MBA programs throughout the United States. Our questions focus on the role of foreign languages, study abroad opportunities, integrative courses, capstone/thesis projects, and faculty development. Our exploration indicates that these five questions are important not only for educators developing future programs, but also for students examining potential IB programs. Additionally, our research examines a sixth question focused on the development of competitive positioning and program differentiation in IB programs. We hope to motivate future inquiry into IB pedagogy, which could inform more effective means of improving IB education.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. There is no dearth of advice or resources on how to turn corporations into fountains of creative ideas. However, as veteran leaders of innovation campaigns know, the problem for most large organizations usually isn't a shortage of ideas -it's figuring out how to ferret out the good ones. As experienced executives know, delegating critical decisions comes with risks. The corporation may end up promoting ideas senior management does not deem worthy; alternatively, it may not pursue projects top management would have promoted had they known about them. Therefore, it's essential for senior managers to understand the mechanisms at work when their staff evaluates one another's ideas, so that executives can design an efficient idea selection process to hone in on the ideas that will make a real difference to the organization as they move through the innovation funnel. This article, based on research on more than 10,000 innovation proposals from within a large multinational corporation, examines what happens when ideas are screened through a large organization. Senior managers need to design systems, or funnels, where the ideas they are likely to favor are either (a) selected by subordinate managers for further evaluation at their level or (b) if the ideas are of sufficient importance or promise, flagged to the attention of top management for further evaluation. In a sense, the real challenge in selecting good ideas is optimizing the trade-off between the direct selection costs on the one hand and the costs of both missing out on good ideas and implementing the wrong ideas on the other. The author describes seven "setscrews"that senior managers can adjust to their particular context to ensure that the most promising innovation proposals -and only those -stand a good chance of being implemented.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Talking about "green technology"gets people excited. It's thrilling to think that a new wave of inventions and discoveries will revolutionize the way we live, halt the degradation of our planet, and conserve resources for future generations. And it's more than just talk: investors are committing real dollars. As the level of activity increases, however, discussions about green technology raise as many questions as they answer. Addressing the key questions is complicated by the fundamental uncertainties that are at the heart of the green technology market. The evolution of this market space depends on forces that are beyond the control of any individual entrepreneur or investor: government policies; availability of capital; and wild cards such as oil price volatility, geopolitical conflicts, the rate of economic growth, and public attitudes toward warnings of global climate change. History shows that the road to technological innovation is a long and winding one. Between 2005 and 2007, runaway enthusiasm led to the proliferation of hundreds of new green technology ventures, many of which ran into trouble during the great recession. Green technology companies need to develop staying power. In addition to understanding the opportunities, they need to get ahead-and stay ahead-of competitors.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Sometimes products and markets that seemingly have nothing in common 'taxonomically' can have 'thematic similarity,' which may open up important business opportunities.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. It seems that for most companies, no matter how much they invest in customer relationship management, neither the quality of their customer relationships nor the profitability of their business has increased commensurately. Of course, it was not supposed to turn out this way; relationship marketing was a "new paradigm" that would herald a golden age of marketing-more loyal and satisfied customers and much more profit for companies. The authors' evidence indicates that it is neither the quality of the CRM solutions nor their implementation that is to blame. Simply, companies have failed to prepare the ground adequately in advance of major CRM investments. Without development of the right capabilities, new technology fails to improve marketing practice. As a consequence, customer relationships are neither better nor more profitable. The authors' research reveals how operational managers can develop relationship marketing capabilities commensurate with the implementation of CRM to help make better investment decisions and exploit the opportunities profitably.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Charges of labor rights abuses and environmental harm are common for major brands that source from global supply chains. However, brand attempts to police supply chains to enforce company standards seldom serve as an effective long-term solution. Frustrated with the limitations of a typical compliance-oriented approach and after committing significant human and financial resources with senior management buy-in, apparel retailer Gap Inc. undertook a strategy of stakeholder engagement. Stakeholder theory suggests that such an approach should be more effective in fulfilling corporate social responsibility and other business goals than focusing on compliance, but many companies continue to focus on policing supply chain labor and environmental standards. Gap's successful experiment with stakeholder engagement confirmed academic intuition about the value of stakeholder engagement. For Gap, the transition to a strategy of stakeholder engagement helped build its image as a caring company and improve outcomes for subcontractor employees after labor violations were discovered. After just a few years of this practice, Gap succeeded in both further improving the working conditions of its contractors' employees and reducing the company's status as a target for anti-globalization protesters and other activists. Gap's long supply chain is not uncommon, nor is the challenge of monitoring the social performance of thousands of subcontractors. Proactive stakeholder engagement can help avert problems in the supply chain (and elsewhere); solve problems sooner when they do appear; and enhance the company's credibility and effectiveness through partnerships with labor, environmental activists, and the broader public.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. As the competitive landscape grows tougher, project leaders must sequence, time and articulate core messaging about their projects in much the same way a marketing manager would organize an external customer-facing branding effort to promote a company's products and services. And therein lies an opportunity; brand your projects in order to gain an edge in obtaining funds and the best staff. Just as product branding creates awareness and sustains value in the minds of an organization's external customers, shareholders, and constituents, a brand mindset can empower a project leader to develop strategically-timed messages to create visibility and engagement among key targets. Depending on the stage of the project, different project brand audiences may include senior business leaders, project sponsors, and team members with primary allegiances to vertical functions, as well as network partners external to the home organization. The savvy project leader will ensure that all parties up, down, across, and outside the organization understand, internalize, and embrace the promise of the project brand, agree on goals, and employ steadfast support for the initiative through its completion.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Consumers were surprised in October 2009 by the first of a series of highly publicized recalls of Toyota vehicles in the United States. Citing a potential problem in which poorly placed or incorrect floor mats under the driver's seat could lead to uncontrolled acceleration in a range of models, Toyota announced that it was recalling 3.8 million U.S. vehicles. For manufacturing executives who have strived for decades to emulate Toyota, the mere suggestion that it had quality issues was a serious matter. All over the world, executives paused to wonder if they had been chasing after the wrong manufacturing model. Despite Toyota's long record of building reliable, low-defect vehicles, public perceptions about quality are often greatly influenced by reports in the media and their overall timing, the author argues. The key question was the source of Toyota's problems: To what extent did they originate with the product designs and assembly, and to what extent could they be pegged to the company's supply and manufacturing systems? The author discusses two root causes for Toyota's quality problems. The first is an outgrowth of management's ambitions for rapid growth. Management's goal was to increase Toyota's global market share from 7.3% in 1995 to 10% over the next decade, then to 15% by 2010. The second is the result of the increasing complexity of the company's products. A typical auto sold in the United States or Europe has more than 60 electronic control units and more than 10 million lines of computer code -a fourfold increase over what was common a decade ago. However, the author notes that any thorough analysis would also need to acknowledge the role of the company's centralized management structure. The result: Top management in Japan was less sensitive to the expectations of regulators, culture, and politics in overseas markets, and consequently they were slower to respond to local problems.

Having analyzed more than 1,100 companies across a range of industries and geographies, the authors outline four strategies firms are using to make smart use of new forms of communication, depending on their tolerance for uncertainty and the levels of results sought.

Can you have both respect and power? Having researched hundreds of corporate leaders, the authors conclude that it's hard to gain both: Fair managers are often perceived as less powerful than others (less in control of resources, less able to reward and punish) and this may hurt their odds of gaining certain key, contentious leadership roles. But companies would benefit by placing more value on fairness: Studies show that the success of change initiatives depends largely on fair implementation.

Despite recent progress creating more-welcoming environments for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender employees, fully 48% of LGBT respondents surveyed report remaining "closeted" at work. Research shows that they are less likely than "out" workers to be promoted and more likely to leave their job within three years. For talent managers, creating a hospitable climate for all workers should be a key goal.

Professor Stefano Puntoni set out to prove that breast cancer awareness campaigns were more effective when they incorporated the color pink. Instead, his studies repeatedly showed that pink made women less likely to recognize their risk of cancer and less likely to donate to research. And that led him to explore the surprising effects of gender cues in marketing messages.