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An American sculptor who works with massive sheets of rolled steel shares insights about large-scale innovation and collaboration.

Green retailing, generally viewed as the incorporation of environmental protection measures into retail operations, has become a common phenomenon. Despite an increasing interest among practitioners, there is a lack of understanding about what green retailing is and what the success factors are for its implementation. This article examines the practices of leading green retailers, shedding light on the different coordinator roles of retailers between suppliers and customers in greening their value chains. It identifies three broad dimensions of green retailing-internal-improvement, external-coordination, and supportive-development-and notes the critical capabilities required for firms to achieve success. It also presents a strategy loop with practical steps to help retailing executives incorporate green practices.

Identifying the right business model for addressing global customers and formalizing that model into a global customer management program is a key challenge for any firm with global aspirations. The key to success is embedding the program firmly within the firm's corporate strategy. Simply leveraging domestic or regional account management into such a program will not deliver the desired results. This article presents a framework for successfully introducing a global customer management program, describing key challenges companies face at each stage of the process. It also identifies specific strategies and key principles to help firms transition to becoming truly customer-centric on a global basis.

Remanufactured products do not always cannibalize new product sales. To minimize cannibalization and create additional profits, managers need to understand how consumers value remanufactured products. This is not a static decision and should be re-evaluated over the entire product life cycle. While managers have a responsibility to maximize profits for the firm, this is not necessarily equivalent to maximizing new product sales. A portfolio that includes remanufactured products can enable firms to reach additional market segments and help block competition from new low-end products or third-party remanufacturers.

This article refines virtual co-creation from a social exchange theory perspective. It looks into who participates in virtual new product development activities, why they do so, and what they expect from their participation. A study of consumers from 10 different virtual co-creation projects provides insights into what, how, and with whom consumers want to interact when engaging in virtual co-creation projects. It shows that consumers' co-creation expectations differ along various dimensions such as the preferred interaction partner, the intensity and extent of participation, and the consumers' motivations. This analysis identifies several types of participation motives-monetary reward, recognition, challenge, intrinsic interest, and curiosity-that help explain different consumer expectations. Participants also vary in their personal characteristics and expectations towards virtual co-creation. The article also offers practical recommendations for designing a rewarding virtual co-creation platform.

Holdup, the danger that a party other than the one investing will capture some of the return from an investment, plays an important role in business decision making about firms' organizational and investment strategies. Oliver Williamson was among the first to identify the importance of holdup and investigate its consequences. Much of our understanding of holdup in strategy and in other areas of scholarship can be traced back to his contributions.

Oliver Williamson has made fundamental contributions to antitrust economics, going back to 1966 when he was Special Economic Assistant to the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust in the U.S. Department of Justice. Williamson was ahead of his time. In the intervening years, antitrust law has followed in the direction charted by Williamson.

What is the significance of Oliver Williamson's Nobel prize? This short article is an attempt to answer this question succinctly. First, he demonstrated when it is more efficient for a firm to make a component in-house rather than outsource it to another firm. Second, his work was path breaking because economic research at the time was largely fixated on market transactions and treated firms as black boxes of production. Williamson's work made economic scholars realize the need to analyze governance and incentives within and between firms in order to better understand how efficiency can be maintained in a capitalist society. Third, his original insights and the research area he pioneered-transaction costs economics-offer clear guidance for business strategy and public policy.

Although unknown to most CEOs, at least until his recent recognition by the Nobel Economics Prize Committee, Oliver Williamson has had a large impact on management theory and practice. There are many organization and strategy questions where his research is highly relevant. Williamson has spent much of his career trying to understand how things ought to be organized to promote efficiency, minimize manageable contractual risk, and achieve profitability. He developed transaction cost economics as a framework to assist managers in making critical strategic decisions.

Probabilities are a tricky business: people tend to overestimate when they should underestimate, and vice versa. Author Michael B. Metzger takes a closer look at probabilities and provides insight to the reader on the subject.

Recent corporate scandals highlight that an exclusive focus on financial performance, to the exclusion of broader stakeholder-related performance criteria, can be detrimental to overall firm value creation. Among the ways to enhance leaders' focus on stakeholder value creation is the development and executive championing of an effective code of ethics. Such "Ethics Code Commitment" (ECC)-which incorporates characteristics of the code and behaviors by top management-affects a broad number of organizational stakeholders, yielding value for them, thus increasing their psychological and/or financial commitment to the organization while strengthening the firm's corporate culture. This article develops a model highlighting the various benefits of ECC to key stakeholders and the subsequent effects on an organization's culture and competitiveness. In particular, we focus on the need to include community leaders and key employees in the ethics code development process; the importance of moving away from a purely legalistic document to one that inspires stakeholders; the importance of linking ethics to strategy; and managerial approaches that can enhance the effectiveness of the code of ethics through ethics-related dialog. When developed and implemented correctly, ECC can prove to be an important source of competitive advantage via the effects it has on relationships between the firm and key stakeholders.

While recent recalls and scares have focused greatly on Chinese manufactured toys and foodstuffs, the issue of product safety extends to a wide variety of Chinese-produced goods. The supply chain in China is characterized by cost pressures and quality fade, multiple levels of outsourcing often involving small producers, a large number of counterfeit goods, Chinese cleverness at evading detection, and poor product safety surveillance by both the Chinese and U.S. governments. While some of these characteristics are present in other developing economies, few countries-save China-face all of these issues. To best counteract these forces, companies which outsource goods from China need a well-defined strategy to improve product safety. This strategy should encompass the practices of developing an organizational unit responsible for product safety, securing greater control over raw material sourcing in China, using extreme care in choosing Chinese subcontractors, conducting continuous product testing by multiple parties, being especially vigilant for counterfeits, and improving product traceability. Toward the end of ensuring items which meet quality standards, product safety auditing allows firms to assess their management of product safety of Chinese-made goods.

The concept of Social Media is top of the agenda for many business executives today. Decision makers, as well as consultants, try to identify ways in which firms can make profitable use of applications such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life, and Twitter. Yet despite this interest, there seems to be very limited understanding of what the term "Social Media" exactly means; this article intends to provide some clarification. We begin by describing the concept of Social Media, and discuss how it differs from related concepts such as Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. Based on this definition, we then provide a classification of Social Media which groups applications currently subsumed under the generalized term into more specific categories by characteristic: collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds. Finally, we present 10 pieces of advice for companies which decide to utilize Social Media.

As if the challenges facing a business leader today weren't already formidable, along comes one that may be the most difficult and least understood of all. Emerging risks, unanticipated and unplanned for, such as the eruption of a volcano in Iceland earlier this year, are having a serious impact on companies' long-term strategies and earnings. Though a relatively new phenomenon, emerging risks can be managed, and this author describes what leaders can and need to do to prepare their companies for them.

Many a good idea has been sabotaged by a co-worker who, during a presentation, cuts right in to say, That's a good idea but. Readers of this article will learn what tactics they can use to effectively disarm and discourage such a saboteur and allow their ideas to be heard fully and ultimately win acceptance.

Creating wealth is considerably different than sustaining that wealth, particularly if you are an entrepreneur or corporate executive. The path to this particular type of sustainability can be a perilous one, but a Family Office can smooth that path and ensure that it remains clear for those who will inherit the wealth.

In the book Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, co-authors Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan essentially wrote that, It's all in the execution. Perhaps the most important step in executing well is to build a bridge that connects the vision and the strategy to the execution plan. Readers will learn what those bridges are and how they can build them to last.

Changing the Canadian public service has been a perennial goal of almost every government. But the failure of the change exercises, has highlighted how the best-intended change management can be outdone by a lack of clarity, resolve and purpose. This author suggests what managers need to do to get the job done

There is risk management as we know it, and then there is CSRisk, as this author defines it, a triad of Creativity, Strategy and Risk Management. As he writes, the development and merging together of these three capabilities will allow CEOs to build globally competitive businesses and rest secure knowing that their exposure is limited to the absolute minimum. Readers will learn how to build a CSRisk capability in this article.

Attention must be paid, wrote the great American playwright, Arthur Miller. If only companies did pay attention to workers on the bottom rungs of the organizational ladder - like those on the top rungs - what would happen? As the authors discovered in their research, the company will benefit as much as the employees themselves.