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Private equity and venture capital firms are starting to share details about their investment strategy in public forums like social media-and it's paying off.

A research update shows that women are still choosing circuitous career paths, despite the recession.

A new study found that denying people access to a product made them desire it more and work harder to get it-but also made them less satisfied with it. That has important implications for companies that do not meet the demand for their products.

Successful enterprises create and adhere to distinct business ideologies-such as the Toyota Way and the Xerox Way-over time. These doctrines contain specific ideas about how to compete, performance measures, organization structures, and whom to reward. Every employee knows: That's the way we do things here. The problem is that those success factors turn into entrenched orthodoxies over time, and no one challenges them. That's why during a corporate transformation, the forgetting curve is sometimes more important than the learning curve.

To change CEOs' behavior, we need to change the numbers we measure and emphasize.

Marketers, here's how to make good use of Twitter's rich consumer data.

Studies from around the globe consistently link entrepreneurship with rapid job creation, GDP growth, and long-term productivity increases. That's why the new holy grail for governments in both emerging and developed countries is to create an environment that nurtures and sustains entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, many governments take a misguided approach to building entrepreneurship ecosystems. They pursue some unattainable ideal and look to economies that are completely unlike theirs for best practices. However, today the most effective practices often come from remote corners of the earth, where resources-as well as legal frameworks, transparent governance, and democratic values-may be scarce. Drawing from lessons learned in such countries as Rwanda, Chile, Iceland, Israel, and Colombia, this article defines nine principles for building a successful entrepreneurship ecosystem: (1) Stop emulating Silicon Valley. (2) Shape the ecosystem around local conditions. (3) Engage the private sector early. (4) Favor the high potentials. (5) Get a big win on the board. (6) Tackle cultural change head-on. (7) Stress the roots. (8) Don't overengineer clusters; help them grow organically. (9) Reform legal, regulatory, and bureaucratic frameworks. Each of these is critical to entrepreneurship-yet insufficient to sustain it. They key is to integrate them all into one holistic system.

CEOs tend to believe that company structure is closely tied to performance, so it makes sense that nearly half of all CEOs reorganize their companies during their first two years on the job. But Marcia W. Blenko, Michael C. Mankins, and Paul Rogers of Bain & Company report that of 57 reorganizations they studied between 2000 and 2006, less than one-third saw significant performance improvement. This failure, they believe, is rooted in a misunderstanding about the link between structure and outcome. In truth, a company's structure only results in improved performance if it allows the firm to make key decisions better and faster than the competition. Making sure this is the case requires a shift in the way we manage organizational change. We must start with an audit of assets, capabilities, risks, and weaknesses and move toward a decision audit, in which the goal is to understand which set of decisions are key to the success of the company's strategy and at what organizational level they should be made. If there is alignment between structure and decisions, then the organization will work better and performance will improve. To reorganize around decisions, leaders should follow six steps: Identify their firm's key decisions, figure out where in the company those decisions should happen, organize the macrostructure based on sources of value, determine how much authority decision makers need, align the rest of the organizational system with that related to decision making, and help managers acquire the skills they need to make decisions quickly and well.

Companies are experiencing a crisis in employee engagement. One of the problems is all the pressure companies are putting on employees to produce. Workers are trying to get more done in less time-and are burning out. But while time is finite, energy is not; people can increase their reserves of personal energy. The key is to establish rituals-such as shutting down your e-mail for a couple of hours a day so you can focus on priorities, or taking a daily 3 p.m. walk to get a breather-that renew your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy. These behavioral changes are sustainable, though, only if leaders at the most senior levels of an organization are willing to set a context for them, both by creating their own rituals and by setting a tone where people feel safe taking time out of the day on a regular basis. This is just what the leaders of Sony Pictures Entertainment did. Working with Tony Schwartz of the Energy Project, they implemented energy management training that has reached nearly half the company so far. To date, the reaction to the program has been overwhelmingly positive. Eighty-eight percent of participants say it has made them more focused and productive. More than 90% say it has helped them bring more energy to work every day. Eighty-four percent say they feel better able to manage their jobs' demands and are more engaged at work. Sony's leaders believe that these changes have helped boost the company's performance. Despite the recession, Sony Pictures had its most profitable year ever in 2008 and one of its highest revenue years in 2009.

No one disputes that firms have to make organizational changes when the business environment demands them. But the idea that a firm might want change for its own sake often provokes skepticism. Why inflict all that pain if you don't have to? That is a dangerous attitude. A company periodically needs to shake itself up, regardless of the competitive landscape. Even if the external environment is not changing in ways that demand a response, the internal environment probably is. The human dynamics within an organization are constantly shifting--and require the organization to change along with them. Over time, informal networks mirror the formal structure, which is how silos develop; restructuring gets people to start forming new networks, making the organization as a whole more creative. It also disrupts all the routines in an organization that collectively stifle innovation and adaptability. Finally, restructuring breaks up the outdated power structures that may be quietly misdirecting a company's resource allocation. All these processes--silo formation, the accretion of deadening routines, and the emergence of corporate baronies--take place all the time. But when everything is going well, you tend not to notice them, just as many seemingly fit people don't realize that their arteries may be dangerously clogged. A simple questionnaire can serve as a kind of cholesterol test for your company, enabling you to see if your regimen needs minor or major adjustments.

Some employees are more talented than others, and nearly every company has its method for identifying their high-potential managers. So how can you get on your company's high-potential list? Douglas A. Ready, of the talent-management research center ICEDR; Jay A. Conger, of Claremont McKenna College; and Harvard Business School's Linda A. Hill have studied programs for high-potential leaders for 15 years. They have found that the rising stars who make the grade are remarkably similar in their core characteristics, the most intangible of which they call "X factors": a drive to excel, a catalytic learning capability, an enterprising spirit, and dynamic sensors that detect opportunities and obstacles. The authors' in-depth interviews with high potentials, their managers, and their HR departments reveal how you can develop your four X factors and, if you manage to get on your company's high-potential list, how to avoid falling off. The article also discusses the pros and cons companies face as they decide whether to make their high-potential lists transparent.

The pressure to grow the top line is so intense that most companies pay too much attention to expansion, and not enough to building strong internal capabilities. A few companies start from the other direction: They figure out what they're really good at and then develop those capabilities (three to six at most) until they've created a set of complementary, best-in-class competencies. For them, strategy then becomes a matter of aligning what they do well with the right marketplace opportunities-and the market rewards them with sustainable, superior returns.

Most companies know that they need to be greening their offerings-if not to gain advantage, then simply to keep up. In this article the authors offer a framework for embarking on the green-product development process, introducing three broad strategies that companies can use to align their green goals and capabilities. An "accentuate" strategy involves evaluating products in the company's current portfolio and playing up or extending latent or existing green attributes (as Arm and Hammer did when it repositioned its 150-year-old baking soda as "the #1 environmentally sensible alternative for cleaning and deodorizing"). An "acquire" strategy involves buying someone else's green brand-an approach used effectively by L'Oreal when it acquired The Body Shop, Unilever when it acquired Ben & Jerry's, and Colgate-Palmolive when it acquired Tom's of Maine. Finally, companies with innovation expertise can use an "architect" strategy, building green products from scratch, as Clorox did when it developed its celebrated Green Works line. Unruh and Ettenson offer case studies, outline benefits and hazards, and describe the optimal organizational and competitive circumstances for each strategy.

To achieve growth and profitability in the world's third-largest economy, multinationals need strong leadership-but China is tough on top executives. Pulsating with opportunity, China attracts foreigners, yet HR professionals continue to rank it as one of the most challenging destinations for expatriates. The problem, says the author, is that many executives sent to lead China operations are ill equipped to tackle the country's unique challenges. And it's hard to overcome that handicap, because leading in China calls for skills that go beyond and in some cases conflict with standard business teaching and practice. Foreign executives must be adept at reworking management orthodoxies in real time to do well there. The author's research-which includes interviews with the China business heads of around two dozen companies-confirms that success requires cultural understanding and adaptability, market knowledge, the ability to sense and respond to rapid change, and support from headquarters. Most important, effective leaders have the crucial ability to play roles that Westerners often view as contradictory: For instance, they are strategic yet hands-on; authoritative yet nurturing; and action driven yet circumspect. Above all, they have the intellectual dexterity to develop new frameworks and capabilities to meet China's particular circumstances. This article illustrates how CEOs have modified accepted wisdom to tackle their biggest challenges in China. Though some of the lessons may seem like common sense to experienced China hands, they're anything but to a freshman expat. Leaders must (1) understand the market, but work with the state; (2) adapt to local conditions, but implement global standards; (3) pay for performance, but build a people-centric workplace; (4) drive costs down, but maintain quality; and (5) recognize complexity, but define clear priorities.

India's HCL Technologies has, according to Fortune, the world's most modern management. BusinessWeek says that HCL is one of the top five emerging companies in the world to watch. That's mainly because of a transformation effort that the author, who took over leadership of the $5 billion IT services company in 2005, launched. Nayar learned from talking with customers that what they valued most-above products, services, and technologies-was HCL's employees. So he came up with a radical idea, Employees First, Customers Second, to bring about organizational change. In this article, he explains how he got stakeholders-HCL's founder and chairman, the board of directors, senior executives, managers, and employees-to back his campaign for radical change.

If you're unhappy at work, and changing roles or companies may be unrealistic given the tough economy, what can you do? A growing body of research suggests that a process called job crafting can be a powerful tool for reenergizing and reimagining your life at work. It involves redefining your current job description to better incorporate your motives, strengths, and passions. The exercise prompts you to visualize your job graphically, map its elements, and reorganize them to shape the job to better suit you. In this way, you can put your own personal touches on the way you see and do your job; and you'll gain a greater sense of control at work-all of which is especially critical at a time when you're probably working longer and harder and will be retiring later. Perhaps job crafting's best feature is that it's driven by you, not your supervisor. Research with a range of organizations indicates that employees who engage in job crafting often end up more engaged and satisfied with their work lives, achieve higher levels of performance in their organizations, and report greater personal resilience. And organizations have a lot to gain by enabling job crafting: The exercise lets managers turn the reins over to employees, empowering them to become "job entrepreneurs." And when pay resources are constrained or promotions impossible, job crafting may give companies a different way to motivate and retain their most talented employees.

Joe Girardi had wanted to play for the Chicago Cubs since he was a boy. He achieved that ambition, went on to coach for the Yankees, and is now the New York team's manager. He reflects in this interview on the value of numbers, how to keep players focused, and the challenges that come with being the most successful sports franchise in American history.

In tough times, charities are often called upon to provide help and services that are normally rendered by governments or private entities. And we have been living in tough times. So, this seems to be a good year to investigate the research being conducted on altruism; specifically, charitable giving. Though this research does not focus solely on the antecedents or outcomes of altruistic behavior, it does help us to better understand how and why people respond to charitable requests.

In this article, we focus primarily on operational capabilities, developing the concept in a way that is easy to understand and visualize. We then briefly differentiate between operational capabilities and other closely related concepts, focusing on implications for managers.

Organizations typically depend upon performance evaluation measures to provide feedback to managers regarding the achievement of strategic objectives. However, performance evaluation is often focused on negative aspects of performance, suggesting that managers may not be receiving enough reinforcement of the positive elements of their decisions. When applied effectively, performance measures not only create desirable motivation, but also encourage communication and the exchange of information among managers. Under this scenario, individual managers achieve their personal goals, while the organization satisfies its strategic objectives. The application of positive organizational scholarship principles to performance evaluation metrics can help make the evaluation process more effective. Using performance measures framed in a positive manner can help generate more creativity, more problem-solving ability, and greater communication among managers, leading to progress toward organizational objectives. We illustrate this approach with the application of positive metrics to the balanced scorecard for mid-level managers in implementing business strategy.