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When bad things happen, most of us have a gut reaction. Psychological resilience-the capacity to respond quickly and constructively in a crisis-can be hard to muster when a manager is paralyzed by fear, anger, confusion, or a tendency to assign blame. Resilient managers are able to shift quickly from endlessly dissecting traumatic events to looking forward, determining the best course of action given new realities. They understand the size and scope of the crisis and the levels of control and impact they may have in a bad situation. The authors present a regimen for boosting personal resilience that begins with recognizing four dimensions of an adverse event- influence, impact, breadth, and duration-and continues with a series of pointed questions designed to get managers out of their own heads. Specifying questions help them identify particular points of intervention when dealing with a crisis. Visualizing questions help them look beyond problems and toward actual solutions. Collaborating questions inspire them to reach out to others, not for affirmation of wrongdoing, or commiseration, but for assistance. Managers can use these questions to tamp down unproductive responses to adversity, to replace negativity with creativity and resourcefulness, and to get things done despite real or perceived obstacles.

Companies have never before had such powerful technologies for understanding and interacting with customers. Yet too many firms operate as if they're stuck in the 1960s, an era of mass marketing, mass media, and impersonal transactions. To compete in an aggressively interactive environment, companies must shift their focus from driving transactions to maximizing customer lifetime value. That means products and brands must be made subservient to customer relationships. And that means transforming the marketing department-traditionally focused on current sales-into a "customer department" by: replacing the CMO with a chief customer officer, cultivating customers rather than pushing products, adopting new performance metrics, and bringing under the marketing umbrella all customer-focused departments, including R&D and customer service.

Historically the U.S. economy has been about ideas, experiment, and exploration. U.S. dynamism-the country's ability and proclivity to innovate-depends on multiplicity: variety among new ideas, a pluralism of beliefs among financiers, and diversity among consumers. Dynamism has been in decline over the past decade. Venture capitalists bemoan a dearth of innovative ideas, and investors bewail a precipitous drop in their returns. Total venture investment is running at less than $20 billion per year. The current financial system chokes off funds for innovation. As an antidote, this article proposes the establishment of a new government-sponsored enterprise - the First National Bank of Innovation. It would be structured as a network of "merchant" banks that invest in and lend to innovative projects, and it would have some features of the Farm Credit System in the United States. A dedicated funding arm would raise money in the capital markets at attractive rates. Banks would pass these funds on to entrepreneurs at rates commensurate with the risks of their projects. The banks in the network would be dedicated to "relationship-based" investing and lending. Thanks to comprehensive risk-based disclosure, strict oversight and transparency would emerge.

A lot of people have blamed short-term thinking for causing our current economic troubles, which has set off a debate about what time window we should use to assess a CEO's performance. Today boards of directors, senior managers, and investors intensely want to know how CEOs handle the ups and downs of running businesses over an extended period. Many executive compensation plans define the "long term" as a three-year horizon, but the real test of a CEO's leadership has to be how the company does over his or her full tenure. This article contains a list of the 50 CEOs of large public companies who performed best over their entire time in office-or, for those still in the job, up until September 30, 2009. To compile the results, the authors collected data on close to 2,000 CEOs worldwide. They asked, Who had led firms that, on the basis of stock returns, outperformed other firms in the same country and industry? The ranking combines three measures: country-adjusted return, industry-adjusted return, and change in market capitalization during tenure. While it may come as no shock that Steve Jobs of Apple tops the list, the ranking does contains a few surprises. You'll see some relatively unknown faces at the top. The inverse is also true: Some obvious candidates based on reputation don't make the top 50. The authors' analysis of the factors that increased the likelihood that an executive would place high in the ranking turned up a few more surprises. Although one might expect context to have a big effect, they found a wide diversity of countries and industries represented in the top performers. The CEO's background did matter, however, as did the situation left behind by his or her predecessor.

Fully half of all joint ventures are a failure. That's worrying, given that partnerships and alliances are central to many companies' business models. The reasons are not mysterious: the partners have divergent strategies; the goals set for the venture are ambiguous; partnership agreements quickly become obsolete; and middle managers don't have clear strategic principles to work from. The problems can be remedied if companies switch their focus from operations and contractual obligations to strategy and commitment. This article describes how Solvay Pharmaceuticals and biopharmaceutical services firm Quintiles used the balanced scorecard and strategy maps to help them define strategic goals, create a governance structure, develop metrics, and align the two groups. The new approach yielded impressive results: The alliance reduced cycle time for clinical studies by approximately 40%, an achievement that brings new products to market much faster and leads to tremendous cost reductions.

Russia is no longer a failing superpower. After Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, Goldman Sachs predicted that Russia, along with Brazil, China, and India, would soon be among the world's most important economies. Although Russia's growth hasn't kept up with China's and India's, the world economy cannot ignore Russia. Over the past ten years, Putin has strengthened Russia's nascent capitalist economies and institutions. In the process, he has stoked the Kremlin's apparently infinite appetite for power. That represents a growing threat, not only to Russia's development but also to companies wishing to do business there. Instead of looking solely at growth rates, CEOs should come to grips with Russia's still-evolving capitalism, particularly the tensions between the state and business, to craft an effective strategy. There is money to be made in Russia, as long as companies play by the rules imposed during Putin's tenure as president. The very different experiences of Shell, BP, and Enel-each of entering the energy industry-illustrate the importance of government relations. Multinational companies must fit in with the prevailing definition of Russia's national interest; they cannot hope to succeed in spite of it. The bottom line: It is safe to invest in Russia as long as you have the right partner, which is the state or a well-connected local company.

"The Aflac Duck is a rock star in Japan," writes the company CEO. From 2003, when the duck was introduced in that country, to 2008, Aflac's revenues increased by 44%, to $16.6 billion. Seventy percent of that increase came from Japan. This article tells the often comical story of how the duck came into existence in the United States, its instant success in CNN ads on New Year's Day in 2000, its transmogrification into a popular stuffed animal, and its export to Japan-where U.S. duck wranglers had to be flown in because the Japanese were unaccustomed to using live animals in commercials. In 2009 Aflac's Japanese marketing team introduced a new incarnation of the duck: Maneki Neko Duck, which incorporates the traditional Asian good-luck white cat. A giant plush version of the cat duck toured Japan by bus, drawing crowds as big as 20,000 in city after city. At each event the company set up tables where it sold policies to enthusiastic fans.

The average baby boomer switches jobs 10 times in his or her career. Though such moves are just about inevitable, they're seldom easy-and they often lead to a noticeable decline in both short- and long-term performance. That's because people make them for the wrong reasons. Drawing on an extensive survey of executive search consultants, as well as surveys of HR heads and interviews with C-level executives around the world, the authors have identified senior managers' five most common career missteps: not doing enough research, leaving for money, going "from" rather than "to," overestimating yourself, and thinking short term. These mistakes follow predictable patterns and persist throughout the course of a career; they're often a direct result of psychological, social, and time pressures. What if you do take the wrong job? The authors' research indicates that you should cut your losses and leave. But fleeing to another bad situation is not the answer. Make your next move strategically-and wherever you are in the search process, don't hesitate to go down another road when it becomes evident that a certain kind of change wouldn't be right.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has made a career of arriving in positions of power during difficult times and, critics say, without the requisite experience. HBR talks to Dr. Rice about making transitions between sectors, managing without management experience, and relearning lessons in new contexts.

To cut global emissions in half over the next 40 years, as scientists recommend, clean technologies must be rapidly rolled out on a vast scale-but in the past they have taken up to 30 years to get to the mass market. How can we speed things up and make time-to-market more predictable? For starters, by comparing rates of technology implementation and patenting activity.

Chinese business culture is unique-but not in all the ways outsiders tend to assume. The authors' research reveals three principal myths, kernels of which are true.

Managers often focus on cost and ignore benefits to customers when pricing products. That's a big mistake, because not all components are valued equally.

A neuroscience research team at MIT has discovered that success can rewire your brain-and that failure has no impact at all.

A look at global bailout and stimulus levels as percentages of GDP helps identify which economies will be stressed and which will have the resources to bounce back.

It's not what you say; it's how you say it, and MIT professor Sandy Pentland has the data to prove it. He has created ingenious devices that record the social signals people send-their tone of voice, length of conversation, gesticulation, proximity to others, and the like. In short, the devices allow Pentland to measure subjects' charisma. Armed with that information, he can predict who will prevail in competitive business situations, such as business plan contests or salary negotiations, without even knowing what they have to say. In this article, he explains his studies to HBR.

For the past 33 years, Prahalad, a professor of strategy at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, has ended all his MBA and executive education courses with an exhortation: Managers must remember that they are the custodians of society's most powerful institutions, and as such they must hold themselves to a higher standard. They must strive to achieve success with responsibility. He offers 11 specific pieces of advice intended to spur his listeners to reexamine their values before plunging into everyday routines. Among them are 1) Display a commitment to learning and developing yourself. 2) Put personal performance in perspective. 3) Realize the importance of loyalty to organization, profession, community, society, and, above all, family.

If emotional decisions guide later rational moments, well, then we're not terribly sophisticated decision makers, are we?

In chaotic times like these, an executive's instinct may be to strive for greater efficiency by tightening control. At least two companies, CSC Germany and ANADIGICS, have done the opposite - to impressive effect.

Research shows that if a CEO focuses primarily on maximizing profit, employees' view of the organization will suffer.

Face-to-face team communication thrives when employees' cubicles are located along main routes of circulation and near a variety of informal gathering spots.