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If your company is intrigued by the opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid but is hesitant to plunge in, it's not alone: Despite the immensity of the markets and the volume of the hype, few multinational firms have built sizable businesses serving consumers or producers who survive on just a few dollars a day. The reason, say Karamchandani, Kubzansky, and Lalwani, is that it's far more difficult than many global corporations realized to get prices low enough to attract consumers and to manage distributed low-income producers. The authors, from Monitor Group, report on the results of a study of 700 market-based initiatives for social change in India and Africa. The obstacles to doing business at the bottom of the pyramid are significant: uncertain customer cash flow, difficulty gauging demand, distribution challenges, disaggregated providers, and undeveloped business ecosystems. Using examples from many diverse sectors-including microfinance, housing, insurance, and water purification-the authors explore innovative ways to surmount those obstacles and serve the world's poor.

Zoom buttons on digital devices let us examine images from many viewpoints. They also provide an apt metaphor for modes of strategic thinking. Some people prefer to see things up close, others from afar. Both perspectives have virtues. But they should not be fixed positions, says Harvard Business School's Kanter. To get a complete picture, leaders need to zoom in and zoom out. A close-in perspective is often found in relationship-intensive settings. It brings details into sharp focus and makes opportunities look large and compelling. But it can have significant downsides. Leaders who prefer to zoom in tend to create policies and systems that depend too much on politics and favors. They can focus too closely on personal status and on turf protection. And they often miss the big picture. When leaders zoom out, they can see events in context and as examples of general trends. They are able to make decisions based on principles. Yet a far-out perspective also has traps. Leaders can be so high above the fray that they don't recognize emerging threats. Having zoomed out to examine all possible routes, they may fail to notice when the moment is right for action on one path. They may also seem too remote and aloof to their staffs. The best leaders can zoom in to examine problems and then zoom out to look for patterns and causes. They don't divide the world into extremes-idiosyncratic or structural, situational or strategic, emotional or contextual. The point is not to choose one over the other but to learn to move across a continuum of perspectives.

Grockit, Farbood Nivi's online-education start-up, had only 15 employees in the spring of 2009 when Nivi's scooter was hit by a minivan, and the CEO found himself in the emergency room with a severely damaged kidney. He underwent surgery and was out of the office for about six weeks. Then, shortly after his return, he learned that he needed a second operation, which was followed by another long recovery period. Not until the following December was he back at work full time. Nivi's efforts to stay involved and keep Grockit afloat-with the help of some proactive employees-made clear to him that he needed more help in running his business. He hired a chief marketing officer and a chief business development and strategy officer, and stepped aside so that a veteran Google manager could come aboard as CEO. (Nivi now serves as president and chief product officer.) He believes that the accident changed his outlook in two key ways: He lives a little bit more for the things he really enjoys, and he's quicker to move on things that need to be changed.

One of the world's most celebrated architects talks about inspiration, teamwork, and the importance of good workplace design.

Attracting quality talent in emerging markets has long been a challenge for Western multinationals, but historically they've enjoyed a big advantage: local workers in places like China have viewed global companies as employers of choice, offering higher status and better career prospects than domestic companies. Now that attitude is shifting. Five strategies can help Western companies regain their hiring edge: They can reboot employment branding efforts, create local development opportunities, offer viable career paths, be smart about pay, and become a quasi-local company.

Companies spend billions of dollars on internet-generated sales leads, but most are far too slow to follow up on them.

In recent years IT professionals have been onshoring service work to low-cost American or European cities. But this can be problematic because of labor shortages, rising wages, and other pitfalls. Companies should take three steps to ensure the success of their IT onshoring: They must choose the location wisely, making sure they're the first company to move in and that the location has the talent they need; they should onshore only work that is restricted or requires special skills or knowledge of legacy systems; and they should minimize wage pressures by keeping employees fully engaged and attending to their professional growth.

A new study by Zakary Tormala of Stanford Business School looks at how the certainty of a person's opinion affects his ability to influence others. A lot depends on whether the opinion is from an expert or an amateur. The surprising finding: Experts are more persuasive when they express uncertainty, but amateurs are more compelling when they express confidence.

Roger Martin on a new challenge facing business schools: how to teach managers to look beyond the data and use factors such as empathy and trust when making important decisions.

The idea of making a deal with a handshake-what we generally call an incomplete contract-makes most of us uncomfortable. A handshake is fine between friends, but when it comes to vendors, partners, advisers, employees, or customers, we believe that incomplete contracts are a reckless way to do business. Indeed, firms try to make contracts as airtight as possible-specifying outcomes and contingencies in advance, thus lowering the chances for misunderstanding and uncertainty. But complete contracts have their own flaws, and business's increasing dependence on absurdly detailed contracts in every situation comes with its own downside.

Where and how do strategists find growth opportunities? Sometimes by literally drawing a map, using software that performs semantic-clustering analysis. By analyzing the text in millions of digital corporate documents, the software identifies individual companies' key phrases, or n-grams, and then links firms with similar n-grams on a map. The result reveals intriguing connections between industry sectors, as well as white spaces that offer untapped opportunities.

This article examines workplace bullying from a personal resources perspective. As workplace bullying emerges in unsupportive and stressful work environments, the threat of personal resource loss triggers the low cost, high reward resource-seeking behaviors that are typically reported as indicative of bullies in the workplace bullying research. Herein, we propose that these resource-seeking bullying behaviors allow bullies to create reinforcing resource gain cycles for them, but also create reinforcing resource loss cycles for targets and bystanders of bullying. As a potential remedy, we discuss recommendations for organizations to reduce the occurrence of workplace bullying.

Recently, we have seen a number of high profile examples of workplace violence. Large organizations are armed with many of the programs that have been developed to minimize the occurrence of workplace violence. In contrast, smaller organizations-which constitute the majority of businesses in the United States-possess neither the resources nor the manpower to implement the aforementioned programs. Additionally, due to a number of individual, social, and situational factors, small businesses appear to be more vulnerable to workplace violence than large businesses. Despite these disadvantages, however, it seems that small businesses do not experience higher levels of workplace violence than their more sizeable counterparts. In this article, we uncover a number of small business practices that may counteract the threat of workplace violence, and proffer these as lessons for all managers who wish to work toward that goal.

Over the last 10 to 15 years, a disturbing number of well-publicized cases of unethical worker behavior have made national headlines. These events have been associated with tragic consequences: countless people have lost their jobs and the associated health insurance and retirement benefits on which they depended; investors have lost their nest eggs; and the trust in the corporate world that is so critical to a thriving economy has been sullied. Pundits have offered simple explanations for these events (e.g., greed) and equally simple solutions (e.g., punish the wrong-doers). In this article, I draw attention to a trigger of unethical work behavior that has received less attention than is warranted: pressure to behave unethically (PBU) perpetrated by organizational authorities. Many instances in which employees violate ethical standards reflect acquiescence to managerial pressure. Herein, I introduce a comprehensive approach to reduce the frequency with which managers execute acts of PBU. My approach draws on a recent influence framework to target managers' motivation to perform PBU, and ability to achieve personal and organizational goals without resorting to PBU.

One of the more difficult responsibilities of employers is dealing with problem employees. Employee misconduct and poor performance can lead to productivity issues, morale problems, and inferior quality products. For these reasons, it behooves employers to address performance issues rather than allow them to fester. By understanding which federal employment laws can be triggered when making employment decisions, avoiding common mistakes in applying these laws, and implementing key policies, employers can provide structures in the workplace that allow them to address problems effectively and minimize their legal exposure.

While diversity has enjoyed significant popularity in the corporate world for the last two decades, researchers continue to put forward conflicting results regarding the business benefits of workplace diversity. Some say workplace diversity is good for businesses; others argue it is an undertaking full of challenges; and, yet others assert that it doesn't really matter. With this in mind, we attempted to synthesize the research that evaluates the impact of workplace diversity on the organizational bottom line. We find an over-emphasis on demonstrating the business case of diversity in economic denominations, which-to some extent-has limited our understanding of the complex dynamics associated with diversity. We identify a lack of attention toward institutional forces as one of the reasons that has restricted our focus on mere economic gains. Overall, we recommend broadening our definition of goals that organizations have when adopting diversity initiatives by including 'gain of legitimacy' and 'creation of goodwill' as part of the essential consequences of diversity programs.

In today's environment of fragmented mass media and popular technologies, such as DVR and TiVo, it is increasingly challenging for marketers to obtain quality face time with audiences. As more customers try to avoid advertisements, there has been growth in brand placement: the practice of integrating brands into entertainment media, particularly television and film. Brand placement engages the audience, limits viewers' ability to ignore commercial messages, and even impacts purchase behavior-as evidenced by the surge in Blackstone pinot noir wine sales after the brand's placement in the movie Sideways. Despite the prevalence of this practice, however, the industry often operates in a somewhat unfocused manner. In this article, we draw from academic literature and industry publications, offer insight regarding the growing popularity of brand placements, and suggest a specific set of guidelines to enhance the efficacy of placements in accomplishing a brand's marketing objectives.

Continued attention in both the popular and academic press regarding negotiation and the related concepts of influence and persuasion is nothing short of astonishing. The topics on which we focus in this article, however, are rarely-if ever-vetted in such outlets. We venture, with some measure of caution, into the dark side of negotiation: those tactics that may be duplicitous, unethical, and unprincipled. Such tactics provide a quintessential moral hazard, as they are both brutally effective and rarely illegal. It is not our intent to provide a treatise on unsuitable behavior. Rather, our objective is to establish that no one need be victimized by such behaviors, as all of these tactics are avoidable. It is in this spirit that we provide some guidelines on self-defense in a negotiation context to avert and attenuate the consequences of these behaviors.

Corporate entrepreneurship necessarily entails both risk and high levels of uncertainty; yet, established organizations are typically positioned as efficient engines that function best via cautious and routine progress, which can hinder attempts to inject innovative ideas into mature businesses. As such, conscious effort is required to build a corporation's capacity for sustainable entrepreneurship. While a few exceptional companies have built and maintained an enduring capability for entrepreneurship, the majority of firms possess a general resistance to these initiatives. Commitment to entrepreneurship may cycle between high or moderate support for the activity, to floundering interest or disbanded initiatives, as conditions in the internal and external environment shift. This cycling pattern, unfortunately, prevents the development of enduring capabilities. Herein, it is revealed how companies can progress their entrepreneurial capabilities over time, adjusting and improving them as the firm learns and adapts to change. To accomplish this, companies must develop strategic objectives to guide entrepreneurs, a management structure to support their work, and processes that inform assessment and decision making. Through an Evolve and Connect model, these three contexts can adjust to shifts in the external environment and the changes and progress happening within the organization. Over time, however, managers need to maintain a link between entrepreneurial activity and the organization's mainstream.

In 2010, a sticky accelerator pedal tarnished the once-vaunted reputation of the Toyota Motor Corporation. These authors, who have written two widely acclaimed books on Toyota, argue that the pedal’s stickiness was caused not by relaxed manufacturing standards, as was commonly believed, but rather by failing to reconcile the means with the ends in trying to meet a corporate goal. Readers who hope to create a culture of excellence will learn why that particular reconciliation is important and how to achieve it.