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Although not all firms invest in sustainability, firms that do have happier customers, employees, and investors and are no worse off financially. These authors met with some of the leading practitioners of sustainability and identified how organizations can start building sustainability into everything from supply chain activities to HR practices. After defining business sustainability and explaining the process for identifying the top reasons why businesses aren’t more sustainable, the article details these reasons — such as confusion over how to measure sustainability, and lack of incentive from governments — and remarks on the approaching paradigm in which society and business are no longer separate.

Leadership, an act or series of acts that moves people in a certain direction, is not merely the domain of CEOs and heads of state. This article argues that we need to recognize that leadership can arise from anyone who displays it, even as an occasional, discrete act of influence. It explores the fixation on the traditional concept of the ideal leader and explains how providing direction — which can come from many sources — is the essence of leadership. Finally, it shows how leadership within an organization can be provided by employees who don’t necessarily decide a new direction but rather influence others to accept one.

Organizations that understand the key capability of social technologies to enable employees to connect with others to boost job and organizational performance will realize significant benefits. Accordingly, organizations need to think strategically about using these technologies to help transform themselves into truly collaborative workplaces. This article provides the background on MITRE — an R&D consulting firm with U.S. government clients — and explains the value proposition of social technologies at MITRE and how building social technologies at MITRE resulted in higher performance. Finally, it lists four key lessons learned from social technology, including integrating social technologies into existing work practices and experimenting with various technologies.

The powerful combination of youth, technology, and rising consumerism across the globe is creating opportunities and challenges for companies looking for new customers. This article stresses the importance of markets with young populations and explores the phenomenon of wikibrands, or products, services, and brand identities co-created with customers. It ends with some caveats on wikibranding, including risk and uncertainty in young markets.

Chinese companies are not the standard setters when it comes to corporate social responsibility. But contrary to many published reports, they are implementing and following best practices, some of which Western companies have been using for some time. This article offers an up-to-date assessment of the successes and frustrations of corporate social responsibility in China. In doing so, it examines the country’s governmental and industrial forces, as well as pressures from communities, media, civil society, and unions.

Yves Doz is Professor of Strategic Management and the Timken Chaired Professor of Global Technology and Innovation at INSEAD, and Visiting Professor at the Helsinki School of Economics. He was Dean of Executive Education (1998-2002) and Associate Dean for Research and Development (1990-1995) at INSEAD. He has also taught at the Harvard Business School, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Seoul National University, and Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. <br><br>This interview touches on globalization, Chinese and Korean companies, the decline in U.S. business influence, and innovation.

There has long been the need for a theory of leadership built on a scientific foundation. This author’s new book, Driven to Lead: Good, Bad, and Misguided Leadership, seeks to provide such a theory using neuroscience and evolutionary biology. This article discusses the evolution of decision making, the four basic drives of humans, and how firms can keep their decision-making processes on track.

During the recession, companies like Procter & Gamble, Hyundai, and Best Buy used adaptive pricing strategies, such as introducing lower-priced versions of products and adapting products to maintain affordability, to avoid across-the-board price cuts that can be difficult to reverse later. Now, as we wait for the economy to return to full speed, smart companies will learn from these strategies and develop plans to help their own businesses regain lost ground.

By now everyone is familiar with the glass ceiling, the informal barrier that keeps women out of top positions. Newer research has focused on why women have a better chance of getting a top job when an organization is facing a crisis-a phenomenon called the glass cliff. Two recent studies suggest that women are more likely to be promoted into these perilous positions in organizations with a history of male leadership, partly because stereotypically female attributes, such as communication and team-building skills, are especially valued during turbulent times.

Consumers and businesses alike are flocking to sites like Groupon, the web-based social media service that offers deep discounts if a certain number of users sign up. But there's a weak link in the value chain: employees. Many businesses fail to anticipate how the rush of customers will affect staff, and if staff are unhappy, customers are apt to have a bad experience. You should prepare your employees when planning a special offer and compensate them for the lower tips and longer hours they typically endure.

What is the secret sauce for the ideal employee? Stanford Business School professor Francis J. Flynn believes that it's guilt. According to his research findings, guilt-ridden employees are hardworking high performers who get the big picture. In other words, they're leaders.

Technology itself has become the great general manager. It can monitor performance closely, provide instant feedback, and even create reports and presentations. That leaves people with general management skills in a very vulnerable position. They must make two crucial investments: the first in acquiring and building knowledge or competencies that are valuable and rare; the second in developing new areas of proficiency throughout their working lives.

Though all decisions involve opportunity costs, most companies don't factor them into their marketing messages. A few firms, however, have found that pointing out trade-offs to consumers is an effective way to influence their purchasing choices.

Many media strategists have been so busy bemoaning the demise of the TV commercial that they've failed to spot a new opportunity: People are combining TV watching and internet use in ways that could be highly valuable to advertisers. Research shows that multitaskers often take what they see in a TV ad and run to the internet, looking for more information. Smart advertisers will be a step ahead, waiting for them there.

Employers need not-and should not-wait for health care reform to be fully implemented. They already have the influence and the wherewithal to execute the single most effective reform strategy: prevention. That's what Johnson & Johnson has found as it continues to reap steady returns from its more than 30 years of investment in its well-honed employee wellness programs. Specifically, the company has made prevention efforts both effective and cost-efficient by targeting them to the health conditions that are the most devastating, cost the most to treat, and result in the greatest loss of productivity. It has ensured that its programs span the entire spectrum of wellness services. It has recognized the importance of personal, including financial, incentives for employees to engage in wellness activities. It has built a sustainable culture of health, starting at the top. And it has tracked progress by measuring real outcomes, not merely effort. The result of this comprehensive, multipronged approach: For every dollar J&J invests in workers' health, it gets a return of more than $4 in reduced health care costs, lower absenteeism, and improved productivity. From 2001 through 2009, the company avoided more than $21 million in health care expenditures. Numbers like those are hard to ignore.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. To understand the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of business analytics, MIT Sloan Management Review, in collaboration with the IBM Institute for Business Value, conducted a survey of more than 3,000 business executives, managers and analysts from organizations located around the world. The survey was part of the 2010 New Intelligent Enterprise Global Executive Study and Research Project, which attempts to understand better how all organizations are trying to capitalize on information and apply analytics today and in the future. One of the most significant findings is that there is a clear connection between performance and the competitive value of analytics. Survey respondents who agreed that the use of business information and analytics differentiated them were twice as likely to be top performers. Three stages, or capability levels, of analytics adoption emerged from the research: aspirational, experienced and transformed. The article provides a comprehensive description of each, enabling organizations to identify where they fall in the continuum. In addition, the authors include suggestions for the best entry points and techniques for each level, and measures to avoid the most common pitfalls. Based on insights from the survey, case studies and interviews with experts, the authors also describe an emerging five-point methodology for successfully implementing analytics-driven management and rapidly creating value -as leading businesses are already managing to do. These include (1) focus on the biggest and highest data priorities, (2) within each of those priorities, start by asking questions, not by looking at the available data, (3) embed insights into business processes to make them more understandable and actionable, (4) keep existing capabilities and tools while adding new ones and (5) develop an overarching information agenda that enables decision making and strategy for the future.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Credit insurance and debt protection product seller Assurant Solutions ran a classic customer service call center -operationally optimized, "skills-routed,"managerially enlightened. But when it explored analytics-based approaches to rethinking how the center worked, a strange thing happened: The success rate for customer interactions tripled. According to Cameron Hurst, vice president of Targeted Solutions at Assurant, the result surprised them. "We learned that operational efficiency and those traditional metrics of customer experience like abandon rate, service levels and average speed to answer are not the things that keep a customer on the books."They found instead that technology could assist the company in retaining customers by leveraging the fact that some customer service reps are extremely successful at dealing with certain types of customers. Matching each specific in-calling customer to a specific customer service rep made a huge difference. Science and analytics couldn't quite establish why a particular rapport would be likely to happen, but they could look at past experience and predict with a lot of accuracy that a rapport would be likely to happen. In this SMR case-study interview, Hurst explains how Assurant Solutions figured out the right questions to ask, used analytics to focus on new ways to match customers with reps and figured out the best ways to solve the problem of conflicting goals.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In industry after industry, managers have taken deliberate steps to separate their value chains and shift important activities and functions to outside suppliers. But what happens when companies become too dependent on outside suppliers and cede them too much control when they lack the same degree of understanding and awareness about how important product or service elements fit together and what's necessary? How can they go about reestablishing critical internal levers? These questions arose during a multiyear research project examining supply strategy relating to new product development at a major European automotive company. In the late 1980s, the company -the authors call it Alpha -had direct supply relationships with more than 3,000 suppliers, most of them small companies that were involved in component production. In the early 1990s, however, management began shifting increasing amounts of design and engineering work to suppliers -a trend that was hastened by the proliferation of electronics in cars. By the mid-1990s, Alpha began to outsource the design of complete systems, such as dashboards, seats and safety systems. Alpha management hoped to increase flexibility, reduce lead times and cut development costs while improving product quality. But as the internal engineering teams got smaller and less up to date on the specific design and technical issues, problems emerged with integrating systems and making decisions about trade-offs. The article examines the difference between integrating physical systems and integrating the performance of such systems. The authors found that successful new product development depends on three main factors: component-specific knowledge; learning by doing; and technological renewal. Modular product architecture may make good sense for dealing with physical integration, but it is not adequate for resolving issues of performance.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The increase in outsourcing and offshoring of complex work has resulted in innovation efforts that require coordination across cultural, geographic and legal boundaries. If that coordination is mishandled, companies can find themselves needing to make multimillion- or even billion-dollar changes. The authors show how problems often arise along the boundaries between organizations and activities -with the likelihood of trouble increasing with the complexity of the work being done. Then they provide guidance on how to define boundaries. Specifically: What activities to combine/ separate; what should be in-sourced or outsourced; and what to onshore or offshore. Once boundaries have been established, the authors explain how they can be spanned by rules, technology and people. Even so, the complexity of the task makes midcourse corrections likely. Managers must anticipate and adapt their processes in order to reduce risk and, ultimately, cost.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Historically, most managers equated innovation primarily with the development of new products and new technologies. But increasingly, innovation is seen as applying to the development of new service offerings, business models, pricing plans and routes to market, as well as new management practices. There is now a greater recognition that novel ideas can transform any part of the value chain -and that products and services represent just the tip of the innovation iceberg. This shift of focus has implications for who "owns"innovation. It used to be the preserve of a select band of employees -be they designers, engineers or scientists -whose responsibility it was to generate and pursue new ideas, often in a separate location. But increasingly, innovation has come to be seen as the responsibility of the entire organization. For many large companies, in fact, the new imperative is to view innovation as an "all the time, everywhere"capability that harnesses the skills and imagination of employees at all levels. Making innovation everyone's job is intuitively appealing but very hard to achieve, but many companies have tried -and nearly all believe that's it's critical to continue trying. To understand these challenges, and to identify the innovation practices that work, the authors spent three years studying the process of innovation in 13 global companies. Many of the standard arguments for how to encourage innovation in large organizations were confirmed, but some surprises were uncovered as well. In this article the authors focus on the key insights that emerged from their research, organized around five persistent "myths"that continue to haunt the innovation efforts of many companies. The five myths are: (1) The Eureka Moment; (2) Built It and They Will Come; (3) Open Innovation Is the Future; (4) Pay Is Paramount; and, (5) Bottom Up Innovation Is Best.