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The armed services have been in the business of leadership development much longer than the corporate world has. Today's military leaders need tools and techniques to face a fast-changing and unpredictable type of enemy-so the armed services train their officers in ways that build a culture of readiness and commitment. Business leaders need to foster an adaptive culture to survive and succeed, given that they, too, face unprecedented uncertainty-and new types of competitors. Michael Useem and his colleagues at the Wharton School incorporate exposure to military leadership into MBA and executive MBA programs. Highlights include direct contact in the classroom with leaders in the U.S. Army, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the Department of Defense, along with field-training exercises and battlefield visits. The programs are designed to help students connect viscerally to essential leadership lessons. Four are featured in the article: (1) Meet the troops. Creating a personal link is crucial to leading people in challenging times, (2) Make decisions. Making good and timely calls is the crux of leadership, (3) Mission first. Focus on common purpose and eschew personal gain, (4) Convey strategic intent. Make the objectives clear, but give people the freedom to execute on them in their own way.

An economic downturn can quickly expose the shortcomings of your business strategy. But can you identify its weak points in good times as well? And can you focus on those weak points that really matter? Drawing on some 25 years of research, Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons identifies seven questions all executives should ask in order to ensure their strategies' success. Have you identified your primary customer? Decided whether shareholders, employees, or customers come first? Narrowed down which performance variables to track? Have you set creative boundaries? Are you generating creative tension? Are you promoting cooperation among your employees? And at the end of the day (and in the middle of the night), are you thinking about the right issues as you ponder how the future will change your business? The answers to these questions can be tough, and their full implications are not always immediately clear. Simons provides a real-world guide to the various alternatives and their risks, illustrating his points with examples from companies including Home Depot, McDonald's, Merck, and Pfizer. There is no magic bullet that can target the pitfalls of your business strategy, Simons concludes. But you must engage in ongoing, face-to-face dialogue with those around you concerning emerging data, unspoken assumptions, difficult choices, and, ultimately, action plans. You and they must be able to give clear, consistent answers to the seven questions Simons poses if you want to be sure that your strategy is firmly on track.

How do some entrepreneurs, corporate innovators, and investors turn adverse conditions to competitive advantage? Chakravorti, of McKinsey and Harvard Business School, has identified four areas that the most successful of these people consistently explore: (1) Entrepreneurs reroute resources that become redundant to meet new needs, as Jonathan Bush did at athenahealth. The company is now a leader in internet-based revenue-cycle management tools, (2) They round up unusual suspects and break industry orthodoxy, as Iqbal Quadir did with Grameenphone in Bangladesh, (3) They find small solutions to big problems, as Trey Moore and Cameron Powell did with their AirStrip OB smartphone app for mobile physicians who needed a major advance in wireless health care, (4) They focus on platform, not just product. That's how Fred Khosravi and Amar Sawhney broadened the field of surgical applications for Incept's hydrogel technology. The entrepreneurs who survive in the "new normal" will be those who find counterintuitive solutions to the bottlenecks, constraints, and other difficulties that adversity engenders. Call them the "new abnormals."

In virtually every industry, the focus of green competition is shifting from a race to launch new eco-friendly products to a battle over what constitutes a "green" product in the first place. The definition can vary from one sector or product to the next, but whatever your business, if you're not engaged in the debate and in shaping the rules, you risk being assessed against standards you can't meet. Once you understand what degree of standardization exists in your industry and what your company's internal capabilities are, you can choose from among four strategies the authors offer: adopt existing standards; co-opt them by negotiating beneficial modifications with a standard-setting body; define standards where none exist; or break away from the current standards by challenging and supplanting them. In the building sector, for example, LEED certification is considered definitive, so architects, construction companies, and office furnishings suppliers naturally choose to adopt LEED standards. But the coffee industry has more than a dozen competing standards, so Starbucks decided to create its own-the C.A.F.E. Practices.

Many firms sit on the sidelines of global competition, believing they need to develop innovative products or leading brands before venturing abroad. The international success of Spanish companies like Telefonica, Freixenet, Banco Santander, and ALSA proves such thinking dead wrong. They all became global players in their industries-by excelling at old-fashioned capabilities. The Spanish firms skipped the risky, expensive strategy of opening their own facilities overseas. Instead, they extended their reach through acquisitions and alliances, focusing first on Latin America and Europe. Political and networking savvy helped them break into highly regulated or complex markets. Speed has also been a factor in their success: Rapid project execution allowed them to pull ahead of other multinationals, and with their expertise in vertical integration, they've been able to get products quickly and cost-effectively to far-flung customers. Though all these skills may be humdrum, Spanish firms have made the most of them and have become industry giants as a result.

Social media are changing the way we do business and how leaders are perceived, from the shop floor to the CEO suite. But whereas the best businesses are creating comprehensive strategies in this area, research suggests that few corporate leaders have a social media presence-say, a Facebook or LinkedIn page-and that those who do don't use it strategically. Today's leaders must embrace social media for three reasons. First, they provide a low-cost, highly accessible platform on which to build your personal brand, communicating who you are both within and outside your company. Second, they allow you to engage rapidly and simultaneously with peers, employees, customers, and the broader public-in order to leverage relationships, show commitment to a cause, and demonstrate a capacity for reflection. Third, they give you an opportunity to learn from instant information and unvarnished feedback. To formulate your personal social media strategy, it helps to clarify your goals (personal, professional, or both), desired audience (private or public), and resources (can you justify using your company's?). You must also consider the risks of maintaining a large number of connections and of sharing content online. Active participation in social media can be a powerful tool-the difference between leading effectively and ineffectively, and between advancing and faltering in the pursuit of your goals.

Michael Wallent, twice married and the father of three, had been working at Microsoft for more than 11 years when he decided-with the full support of his wife-to transition to living as a woman. Rejecting the standard approach at big companies, whereby the HR department announces a transgendering (often at a meeting from which the affected employee is absent), Wallent chose to inform his superiors and his direct reports himself. He also urged them to ask whatever questions were on their minds. In large part as a result of the intimate conversations that followed, Megan Wallent's management style is quite different from Michael's. In the words of one employee, "She's becoming more of a coach, instead of a general."

The neurologist and best-selling author talks about career crossroads and gaining people's trust through empathy.

Any seasoned executive knows that information technology (IT) projects have a high failure rate. Large IT projects can become the business equivalent of what astrophysicists know as black holes, absorbing large quantities of matter and energy. Resources get sucked in, but little or nothing ever emerges. Of course, projects do not become black holes overnight. They get there one day at a time through a process known as escalating commitment to a failing course of action. Without executive intervention, these projects almost inevitably turn into black holes. This article sheds light on the insidious process through which projects that devour resources, yet fail to produce business value, are created and gradually evolve into black holes. It presents a framework that explains the creation of black hole projects as a sequence of three phases: drifting, treating symptoms, and rationalizing continuation. The framework is illustrated through two cases: EuroBank and California DMV. The article then presents recommendations to prevent escalating projects from becoming black holes and provides a means for detecting problems at an early stage.

The current discipline of project management is based on the model of the project life cycle or phased stage-gate approach to executing projects. This implies a clear definition of mission and system are given at the outset (to reduce uncertainty), and subsequent execution in phases with decision gates. It contrasts with the approach applied in the seminal projects that are credited with establishing the foundation of the discipline in the 1940s and 1950s. Those projects started out with missions that were beyond the currently possible; any solutions had to emerge over time. They succeeded by a combination of parallel trials (from which the best would then be selected) and trial-and-error iteration (allowing for the modification of solutions pursued over a period of time). Although the success of these approaches was well documented and explained by scientific study in the 1950s, today they seem to fly in the face of accepted professional standards, making managers uncomfortable when they are encountered. The project management discipline has been relegated to an "order taker niche"-the engineering execution of moderately novel projects with a clear mission. As a result, it has been prevented from taking center stage in the crucial strategic change initiatives facing many organizations today. The discipline of project management should be broadened in order to create greater value for organizations whose portfolios include novel and uncertain projects.

Behavioral biases can result in suboptimal acquisition decisions-with the potential for errors exacerbated in consolidating industries, where consolidators design serial acquisition strategies and fight escalating takeover battles for platform companies that may determine their future competitive position. To guide objective managerial judgment, and to rationally anticipate the irrational behavior of rival bidders or financial markets, this article proposes a modified option-game toolkit for serial acquisition strategy. It brings together insights from both strategy and finance, which quantify acquisition strategies, thus allowing executives to make rational intuitive decisions under uncertainty.

How do managers respond when confronted with the demands of activist stakeholders over whom they exercise no direct control? What strategies do managers adopt, and why? Which of these are most effective-and under what conditions? Increasingly, businesses today face difficult challenges in response to changing public expectations and newly emergent techniques of stakeholder influence. New communications technologies enable activists concerned about business behavior to mobilize supporters around the world in real time. Many firms conduct their work on a global stage, where damage to reputation in one location can quickly reverberate around the world. This article develops a typology of managerial strategies to respond to complex disputes with activist stakeholders. It argues that management strategies fall into four categories: wage a fight, withdraw, wait, or work it out. Which strategy is chosen is likely to vary according to: the firm's dependence on stakeholders for critical resources, the firm's power in the particular situation, and the urgency of the contested issue. Managers' effectiveness is, in large part, a function of their ability to assess these three conditions correctly.

Although firms from emerging markets are becoming significant global players, our knowledge about how these latecomers catch up with existing multinational firms remains limited. This article summarizes the patterns of internationalization strategies pursued by firms from these markets. These leading emerging markets firms can be best understood in terms of their levels of R&D intensity and marketing intensity and represent four types of firms: multinational challengers; global exporters and importers; OEM/ODM technology leaders and followers; and regional exporters and importers. Based on these analyses, this article develops a set of propositions that summarize the internationalization strategies of these firms.

This article explores what it is that managers actually do to successfully lead IT-enabled change. It is based on a three-year case study of the practice of leading IT-enabled change inside the global telecommunications company Ericsson. This organization managed to successfully change their finance and accounting department from an independent structure of numerous local finance and accounting organizations with their own information systems and their own way of doing things into one interdependent global network of shared service centers enabled by a single information system. Based on this and other studies, this article develops a commonality framework for IT-enabled change, which offers important guidelines to improve managerial practice.

In light of the trend towards open innovation, interorganizational technology transfer by means of alliances and licensing has often become a key component of open innovation processes. Inbound open innovation describes inward technology transfer, whereas outbound open innovation refers to outward technology transfer. Traditionally, inward technology transfer has received considerable attention because most practitioners and academics focus on the technology recipient's absorptive capacity. In contrast, the role of the technology source has been relatively neglected. This article addresses the concept of desorptive capacity, which refers to a firm's ability to identify technology transfer opportunities and to transfer technology to the recipient. The notion of market knowledge in the concept of desorptive capacity deepens our understanding of many firms' managerial difficulties in implementing active technology transfer strategies. Thus, desorptive capacity enriches our understanding of the dynamics of outward technology transfer. It provides new insights into the success or failure of interorganizational technology transactions.

Despite shocks such as the Gulf oil spill and the global banking crisis, corporations still treat the world as a predictable place. Instead, they should emulate the UK's Royal Marines, an organization whose success has much to do with its agility in the face of unexpected adversity. For the Royal Marines, planning a mission is about shaping strategic thinking and figuring out how to reach the desired end state while allowing for improvisation. As the UK's amphibious commandos, they don't always know what they will find when they arrive on land, yet they must achieve their mission regardless of conditions. They must also be prepared to change plans when disruptive events occur. For those reasons, it's essential that individuals can fall back on common procedures in response to the unforeseen-and can rely on their colleagues to do the same. So the organization uses a military planning technique called the Seven Questions. All members apply it, which means they all approach and analyze their missions in the same way, no matter where they are in the hierarchy. Planners develop a working understanding of the situation on the ground and their mission by answering the first three questions and then decide how to proceed by answering the remaining four. They revisit the questions as events unfold, to see if they need to change anything or even abort the mission. To illustrate the technique, the authors describe how Royal Marine Brigade planners used the Seven Questions to put together a mission plan for an assault on Iraq's Al Faw peninsula.

According to long-held U.S. Army tradition, leadership is based on a rigid hierarchy. Are you a young officer not sure what to do? Look one level up. But in modern warfare, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, teams of soldiers are distributed across-and embedded in-an entire population. This has sparked a movement toward leadership training that encompasses not only the skills of single individuals, but the effectiveness of the teams they lead. The U.S. Army's Center for the Advancement of Leader Development and Organizational Learning (CALDOL) at West Point has drawn on internet technology and social media to connect company commanders and platoon leaders informally-enabling them to learn from one another in real time. Through discussion forums, blogs, videos, and a Facebook-like "wall," these new leaders are exchanging ideas and experiences. Knowledge that was once concentrated near the top of the hierarchy is now "powering down" to the team level.

In 2005, the host unit of North Dakota's Grand Forks Air Force Base had to reinvent itself to stay relevant. Its large fleet of tanker aircraft was being replaced with a much smaller number of unmanned aerial vehicles. So, the base was left with a vast amount of infrastructure and a capable workforce-but an uncertain future due to its pending change in mission. Morale plummeted, and both military and civilian personnel exhibited an increase in destructive personal behaviors, such as alcohol abuse and suicide. Clearly something had to be done. The base's leaders took a page from positive leadership philosophies in business-most notably positive psychology, positive deviance, and appreciative inquiry. The idea was to energize people by appealing to their sense of purpose, encourage them to build mutually beneficial relationships internally and externally, and thus position Grand Forks to compete for additional mission opportunities. In a matter of months, the ailing culture began to recover: The DUI rate and the number of suicides dropped. Although the staff was cut by more than a third, voluntary involvement in base activities shot up. Perhaps most important, Grand Forks found a new mission as a federal center of excellence for remotely operated aircraft. The base learned to partner with universities, businesses, and others to achieve its goals and is now poised to lead the aviation community's fastest-growing segment: unmanned aerial vehicles.

When people think about innovation in customer service, they usually think about technological or process enhancements that make service delivery faster or more efficient. Restaurants have introduced hand-held devices that buzz customers when their table is ready, and supermarkets use self-service checkout lines. While such innovations can simplify matters for customers, service organizations rarely stop to consider the overall psychology that shapes service encounters. Indeed, many key psychological variables that influence customer perceptions-the subtle enhancements that help define a positive experience-have yet to be fully defined or articulated. Organizations often measure the outcomes of service encounters in concrete terms such as on-time flight arrivals or the time to resolve a customer's call. However, the subjective outcomes-the emotions and the feelings-are more difficult to describe: Did the passenger enjoy the flight? Did the customer who called the service center with a problem walk away feeling better about the provider? Just as having a deeper understanding of systems dynamics and process analysis has pushed companies to re-engineer their operations to achieve explicit outcomes, findings from behavioral decision-making, cognitive psychology, and social psychology can point service providers to ideas for redesigning the psychological or implicit aspects of service encounters. In this article, the authors examine how three factors-emotions, trust, and control-shape customer assessments of service experiences and their overall view of service providers. Drawing on research conducted at companies including Harrah's, MGM Grand, Dell, Farmers Insurance, the Seattle Supersonics, and McKinsey & Company, they argue that organizations seeking to excel in customer service need to attack the "soft side"of customer management with the same type of intensity they have previously used to reengineer workflow and supply chains.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. We are going about the way we measure the return on investment in social media completely backwards. Effective social media measurement should start by turning the traditional ROI approach on its head. That is, instead of emphasizing their own marketing investments and calculating the returns in terms of customer response, managers should begin by considering consumer motivations to use social media and then measure the social media investments customers make as they engage with the marketers' brands. Handling the measurements this way makes much more sense. It takes into account not only short term goals such as increasing sales in the next month via a social media marketing campaign, or reducing costs next quarter due to more responsive online support forums, but also the long-term returns of significant corporate investment in social media. The authors show how you can implement this new kind of measurement and point to the benefits of doing so.