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Sponsorship of large sporting and cultural events has become a major marketing communication tool, particularly when firms obtain exclusive rights and garner the hype associated with this honor. Concomitantly, ambush marketing-defined as attempts by competitors to exploit the event-has also increased in prominence. This article outlines what is known as the Li Ning affair, whereby major Olympic sponsor Adidas was ambushed by lesser-known Chinese sportswear company Li Ning, whose namesake founder was the most decorated Chinese Olympian and who lit the Olympic flame at the 2008 Beijing Olympiad. Data collected immediately following the closing of the Beijing Games isolates what we call the Li Ning effect-or, being incorrectly identified as an official sponsor-and the positive effects this has on measures of brand attitude and recommendation likelihood. As presented herein, seven lessons about ambush marketing can be derived from the Li Ning affair, which sponsors and those considering sponsorship opportunity might wish to learn.

One unfortunate consequence of the focus on "charismatic," "transformational," and "visionary" leader behaviors during the past few decades has been the tendency to diminish the importance that transactional leadership behaviors have on leadership effectiveness. We say that this is unfortunate because recent research has shown that transactional leadership, in the form of contingent reward and punishment behaviors, can have substantial effects on a variety of important employee attitudes, perceptions, and measures of job performance. Therefore, in this article we discuss some possible reasons why transactional leadership has been relegated to a lesser role than transformational leadership, summarize the research that indicates the importance of leader contingent reward and punishment behavior to leadership effectiveness, and identify some of the mechanisms that these forms of leadership behavior work through to influence employee attitudes and behaviors. Following this, we address ten misconceptions managers often have regarding the administration of rewards and punishments, and provide some recommendations about how leaders can improve their effectiveness in administering recognition and discipline in organizational settings.

In this article, we present the findings of a study examining the exploding problem of counterfeit trade via the opinions of U.S. executives as compared to their counterparts from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Tahiti. Their responses provide insight as to how companies in different countries are attacking piracy and consumer complicity with counterfeit products. Per our study, executives in Australia, Tahiti, and the U.S. had similar perspectives: they viewed the seller as the main driver of counterfeit trade for reasons of profit. These executives perceived the demand for counterfeits as being driven by desirable product attributes and the ease of obtaining them. Likewise, they cited two anti-counterfeiting actions-site licenses and reduced price/rebates-as being able to reduce the demand for illicit products. In contrast, South African executives observed the main reason for piracy as weak enforcement of intellectual property (IP) and the lure of exorbitant profits, with little value in any anti-counterfeiting actions other than special packaging. These executives put forth that South African consumers are complicit due to limited education and low disposable income, and the ready availability of counterfeits. Executives from New Zealand were the most optimistic, believing that piracy and complicity can be reduced by many anti-counterfeiting actions, including special packaging, reducing price, emphasizing product benefits/warranties, stressing the harmful effects of using fake products, offering site licenses, and listing of authorized sellers.

Faced with the challenges of consumer resistance due to the separation of roles between producer and consumer, as well as overpowering marketing tools and techniques, a company can resolve the problem by letting consumers join in the process of value co-creation. Advocating the consumer-oriented perspective, this article explains how and why consumers co-create, which leads to the development of a typology of consumers' co-creative practices. Four interrelated categories (participation-for-self, creation-for-self, participation-for-others, creation-for-others) are illustrated with the proposed four Cs strategies-choice, complement, cause, and communality-to foster these different practices accordingly. From well-established to newly-developed, these consumer-oriented strategies work to enhance deeper consumer involvement yielding a possibility to attain continual and interconnected benefits for a company. However, implementation is based on a company's readiness and willingness to achieve different degrees of commitment. This article promotes collaborative efforts between consumers and companies, and highlights mutuality of benefits which leads to sustainable relationships.

Peer-to-Peer networking technology and related innovations have had a major impact on the music and motion picture industries. While digital technology has improved the quality of audio and video recordings and decreased distribution costs, it has also made unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material and its transmission over the Internet easier. The media industry attributes an erosion of its sales after 1999 to the illegal copying and sharing of digital files and has taken steps to tighten copyright laws and prosecute violators. Others attribute the downturn to a lack of innovative products and futile efforts by the industry to retain a business model made obsolete by technological innovation. In the meantime, unauthorized file-sharing via Peer-to-Peer networks continues unabated and its real financial impact on the industry remains unclear. The market perceives illegal file-sharing to be a significant threat to the long-term profitability of the media industry and regards current legal initiatives to protect its intellectual capital as beneficial. This article discusses several strategies and business models that the media industry may consider to respond to the current threat and better cater to changing customer tastes.

This article examines the concept of ambient communication, its evolution, basic categories, and experiential marketing principles. It explores the variety of heterogeneous out-of-home communication tools, whose diversity and innovativeness have so far resulted in a lack of clear understanding and a failure to exploit their full marketing potential. By taking the urban landscape as the core feature of all conventional and unconventional outdoor communication tools, marketers can develop a comprehensive approach to improving ambient communication's effectiveness by focusing on its impact on consumer brand engagement.

In developing countries, firms encounter distinct challenges that place them in situations where they take on functions typically handled by the public sector. These functions range from the provision of health care and education for local communities to the development of political capacity and public policy. Drawing on 30 case studies of companies operating in developing regions of the world, this article presents a typology of four strategies that describe the different ways in which firms can engage in public responsibilities. For each strategy, it outlines the key challenges faced by firms along with suggestions for overcoming them. The burdens firms bear in providing services in response to public policy failures are substantial. Only by effectively developing an appropriate strategic orientation can programs be created that add value both to businesses and to the communities in which they operate.

Many startup companies go through the so-called "entrepreneurial crisis" when they reach a headcount somewhere between 50 and 100 employees. At this point, the CEO and her team have to transition from a personal to a professional management style. Management systems play a critical role in managing this transition effectively. Contrary to the popular belief that the development of such systems kills the entrepreneurial spirit, startups that implement these systems are associated with faster growth, larger size, and a lower turnover of their CEOs. Venture capital backed startups are more likely to implement these systems faster. This article also examines why these systems are adopted and the different roles they play in high-growth companies.

This article explores how firms can benefit from opening up the new product development process by integrating the principles of open innovation with the Stage-Gate process. It examines the potential opportunities of employing the principles of both inbound and outbound open innovation within new product development at a firm in the upstream oil & gas industry. A practitioner-oriented work model, named the open Stage-Gate model, can exploit the advantages of "openness." This model allows explicit consideration of import and export of know-how and technology through gate evaluations and also enables firms to continuously assess their core capabilities and business model. The application of this model can assist firms in capturing value from both internal and external technology exploitation in increasingly open innovation processes.

One of the key elements of Fiat's recent resurgence is the superiority of its clean, fuel-efficient engine technologies that were mostly developed during the 1990s by Centro Ricerche Fiat (CRF), the Fiat Group company in charge of R&D and technology development. In the early 1990s, when the Italian carmaker was going through troubling times (along with many other players in the automotive industry), CEO Gian Carlo Michellone radically turned around CRF's organization and innovation strategy, adopting and mastering a strategic approach to innovation that resembles what would become known as the open innovation paradigm. This revolution allowed the Fiat Group to keep its "innovation engine" running, despite the heavy downturn of the industry. The CRF case demonstrates how open innovation can protect the firm's innovation capability from the risk of severe resource rationalizations during periods of crisis while proffering a starting point to replicate innovation capability once the downturn is over. The efforts to streamline the adoption of open innovation need to be targeted at several aspects of a firm's organization, i.e., the structures, organizational roles, the planning and control and performance management systems, corporate values, and individual competencies and attitudes. The role played by the senior executive leadership in promoting the successful implementation of open innovation is critical, especially during tough economic times.

Executives know that how they respond to the sustainability challenge will profoundly affect the competitiveness of their organizations - and perhaps even their survival. Yet most are struggling with how to integrate environmental efforts into their core business strategies. Many have a hodgepodge of green initiatives but no overarching vision or plan. The problem is not that they don't see sustainability as a strategic issue. Rather it's that they think they're facing an unprecedented challenge. But there is a roadmap, say authors David Lubin and Dan Esty. They argue that sustainability is a "megatrend," a transformative change in the competitive landscape - like the rise of the quality movement in the 1970s and IT in the 1980s and 1990s - whose course can be predicted. By understanding how firms won in prior megatrends, executives can craft the strategies and systems they'll need to gain advantage in this one. The key: Companies that pulled ahead in prior megatrends developed early capabilities in leadership, tools and assessment methods, strategy development, management integration, and reporting and communication.

Practically every company these days has some form of program designed to nurture high-potential employees. But a recent study by the Corporate Executive Board demonstrates that nearly 40% of internal job moves made by people identified by their companies as "high potentials" end in failure. Disengagement within this cohort of employees also is remarkable: One in three emerging stars reported feeling disengaged from his or her company. Even more striking, 12% of all the high potentials in the study said they were actively searching for a new job-suggesting that as the economy rebounds and the labor market warms up, organizations may see their most promising employees take flight in large numbers. Why do companies have so much trouble bringing along their next generation of leaders? The Corporate Executive Board's research showed that senior managers make misguided assumptions about these employees and take actions on their behalf that actually hinder their development. When dealing with high-potential employees, firms tend to make six common errors: assuming that all of them are highly engaged, equating current performance with future potential, delegating the management of high potentials down in the organization, shielding promising employees from early derailment, expecting stars to share the pain of organization-wide cutbacks, and failing to link high potentials and their careers to corporate strategy. These mistakes can doom a company's talent investments to irrelevance-or worse.

Generation X employees will bring a new sensibility to the leadership of corporations, precisely because they are broadly dissatisfied with corporate life. Alternative thinkers with a strong streak of realism, they're ready to take charge-by leading differently. Gen Xers grew up during times of major restructuring, and many of them reject status-quo definitions of success, such as climbing the corporate ladder, in favor of work/life balance. This point of view equips them to engage in five context-creating leadership activities that are well suited for today: fostering collaborative capacity; asking compelling questions; embracing complexity and welcoming disruptive information; actively shaping corporate (collective) identity; and appreciating diversity. Xers may feel like underappreciated workhorses, squeezed between two much larger cohorts: Baby Boomers and the twenty-something members of Generation Y. And they worry that management jobs will skip a generation because Boomers and Gen Y share a natural kinship. But if we give them the chance to lead as their time arrives, their affinity for realism over idealism will serve modern corporations extremely well.

The makeup of the global workforce is about to undergo a seismic shift. In four years, Millennials-the people born between 1977 and 1997-will account for half the employees in the world. In some companies, they already constitute the majority. That shift may sound daunting to the managers charged with coaching these young workers, who have a reputation for being attention sponges. However, recent research into the varying expectations and needs of employees across four generations, involving 2,200 professionals, offers a more nuanced view of Millennials and reveals several resource-efficient ways to mentor them: reverse mentoring, group mentoring, anonymous feedback, and microfeedback. Using such innovative approaches, companies can give Millennials the guidance that they need-and that they want immediately-without having their experienced managers spend all their time coaching.

You've been ordered to reduce overhead by 10%, 20%, or even (wince) 30%. How do you do it? First, don't expect to reach your target with a single big idea; you'll need a combination of 10 or more separate actions. Second, match the kinds of opportunities you examine and implement to the degree of cost-reduction required. To cut 10%, use an incremental approach-for instance, reduce spending on department management, hold down pay increases, and repropose previously rejected cost-saving ideas. To get to 20%, think in terms of redesign or reorganization. Strive to eliminate any work for which the cost exceeds the value. This will involve changes in process, mind-set, and how departments serve one another. Finally, to reach 30%, you'll need to broaden your perspective even more. For example, try coordinating parallel activities in the organization, doing away with low-value meetings and forums, and eliminating entire programs.

Surprisingly, your best tool for getting customers to see beyond price may be the price itself. New research finds that four pricing moves in particular can cause buyers to stop treating your offering as a commodity and instead consider its quality and relevance to their individual needs. You can change the basis of your pricing structure, as Goodyear did when it priced tires according to how many miles they would last. You can stimulate curiosity with willful overpricing, as Burt's Bees does with its natural beauty products. You can partition a price into component charges to make customers notice a key benefit-as IKEA does by charging separately for a table's top and legs, reminding people of its useful modularity. Or you can price the options you provide uniformly-as Apple does when it charges 99 cents for any track on iTunes-so that customers simply focus on their preferences. The power of each of these strategies is illuminated by controlled studies the authors conducted to understand the link between price and customer attention.

Despite the popular image of entrepreneurs as risk-loving cowboys, the reality is that great entrepreneurs don't take risks-they manage them. The authors counsel managers to recognize that not all risks are created equal: When you're launching a new venture, first consider deal-killer risks that, if left unexamined, could kill the whole business. Next tackle the risks that could sabotage the project if it took a path you're not currently anticipating. Then focus on high-ROI risks-the questions you can answer without spending much money (but that will trip you up if left unanswered). Once you've identified the most important risks facing your new venture, manage those risks the way the best venture capitalists do: Spend a little bit of money at a time; create experiments that will test your assumptions; keep your timeline as short as you can; test only one thing at a time; and listen carefully for what an experiment's results are really telling you. Hint: You should be trying to prove that your assumptions are wrong, not simply to confirm your own biases.

Multinational companies are pinning their hopes for growth on emerging markets, specifically in the BRIC countries-Brazil, Russia, India, and China, which together account for 15%-20% of today's global economy. But these companies face a critical obstacle: a cutthroat war for talent. Despite the enormous labor forces in BRIC, top-notch talent is hard to find. India produces as many young engineers as the United States, but according to the McKinsey Global Institute, only 25% of them are suitable for employment by multinationals. Fewer than one out of 10 university graduates in China are prepared to succeed in a multinational environment. To better understand the talent dynamics in emerging markets and how multinational companies can succeed there, the authors launched a study of 4,350 college-educated men and women in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the United Arab Emirates. They found that the talent solution is in plain sight: Millions of educated women have entered the professional workforce in these countries over the past two decades. Though this talent pool is currently neglected and underleveraged, it represents the future. Women in emerging markets are enormously ambitious and passionate about their work, but they face complicated challenges that are fundamentally different from those of women in the developed world. Here's what companies like Google, Siemens, Intel, GE, and Pfizer are doing to shape talent models that work, especially for women in emerging markets.

Six years ago, Google's IPO was the most hotly anticipated public offering of the year. But in classic Google style, the offering was neither typical nor uneventful. Here's the story of how the process began, what it involved, and the obstacles the company encountered along the way.

Some leaders drain all the intelligence and capability out of their teams. Because they need to be the most capable person in the room, these managers shut down the smarts of others, ultimately stifling the flow of ideas. At the other extreme are leaders who care less about flaunting their own IQs and more about fostering a culture of intelligence in their companies. Under these "multipliers," employees don't just feel smarter; they become smarter. This article explores the ways in which multipliers manage five areas-talent, culture, strategy, decision making, and execution-much differently than their less-enlightened colleagues (the diminishers).