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Online advertisers frequently fall victim to dishonest, tech-savvy publishers. Here's a sampling of common scams with some advice on how to outwit their perpetrators.

The CEO of the office furniture maker Herman Miller talks about his ambitious, perhaps impossible-sounding goal of relying completely on green energy by 2010.

Workplace weight-loss programs are a win-win tool that companies can use to boost both health and wealth. The financial payoff - for one Texas employer, about $2.50 in return for every dollar spent - stems from lower health care costs and reduced absenteeism.

Realizing that customer retention is more critical than ever, companies have ramped up their efforts to listen to customers. But many struggle to convert their findings into practical prescriptions for customer-facing employees. Some companies are addressing that challenge, say three Bain & Company consultants, by creating feedback loops that start at the front line. They forgo elaborate, centralized feedback mechanisms in favor of quickly polling customers with the question, How likely are you to recommend us? Firms use the responses to calculate their Net Promoter Score (NPS), a metric everyone in the organization can track. The greatest impact comes from relaying the results immediately to the employees who just served the customers - and empowering those employees to act on any issues raised. Allianz used this method to pinpoint make-or-break customer experiences. Claims representatives in a European insurance operation, for instance, learned that delays in reimbursement were a huge source of frustration for customers. Workers rapidly solved the problem by developing a new set of protocols, which spurred a sizable increase in NPS - and in policy renewals. Over time, NPS feedback can also be compiled into a baseline of customer experience, which firms can then draw upon to field-test ideas or make process and policy refinements. The household fixture maker Grohe did this by tracking the effect that the number of sales calls had on NPS in one of its markets. Grohe saw that scores spiked at three visits and then fell off. In response, it cut back on unproductive customer contact and freed up 25% more sales capacity.

Peace and harmony are overrated. Though conflict-free teamwork is often held up as the be-all and end-all of organizational life, it actually can be the worst thing to ever happen to a company. Look at Lehman Brothers. When Dick Fuld took over, he transformed a notoriously contentious workplace into one of Wall Street's most harmonious firms. But his efforts backfired - directors and managers became too agreeable, afraid to rock the boat by pointing out that the firm was heading into a crisis. Research shows that the single greatest predictor of poor company performance is complacency, which is why every organization needs a healthy dose of dissent. Not all kinds of conflict are productive, of course - companies need to find the right balance of alignment and competition and make sure that people's energies are pointed in a positive direction. In this article, two seasoned business advisers lay down ground rules for the right kinds of fights. First, the stakes must be worthwhile: The issue should involve a noble purpose or create noticeable - preferably game-changing - value. Next, good fights focus on the future; they're never about placing blame for the past. And it's critical for leaders to keep fights sportsmanlike, allow informal give-and-take in the trenches, and help soften the blow for the losing parties.

"How do I find innovative people for my organization? And how can I become more innovative myself?" These are questions that stump most senior executives, who know that the ability to innovate is the "secret sauce" of business success. Perhaps for this reason most of us stand in awe of the work of visionary entrepreneurs such as Apple's Steve Jobs, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, eBay's Pierre Omidyar, and P&G's A.G. Lafley. How do these individuals come up with groundbreaking new ideas? In this article, Dyer, of Brigham Young University; Gregersen, of Insead; and Christensen, of Harvard Business School, reveal how innovative entrepreneurs differ from typical executives. Their study demonstrates that five "discovery skills" distinguish the most creative executives: Associating helps them discover new directions by making connections among seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas. Questioning allows innovators to break out of the status quo and consider new ideas. Through observing, innovators carefully and consistently look out for small behavioral details - in the activities of customers, suppliers, and other companies - to gain insights about new ways of doing things. In experimenting, they relentlessly try on new experiences and explore the world. And through networking with diverse individuals from an array of backgrounds, they gain radically different perspectives.

A recession often forces you to cut R&D as you refocus on your core. But innovation need not go by the wayside. By placing certain assets and projects outside your walls, you can actually preserve opportunities for future growth while you shore up the fortress. Chesbrough, of Haas School of Business, and Garman, of New Venture Partners, identify five strategic moves that open the door to innovation by, ironically, letting it out of the house. Some inside-out moves permit outside firms to invest in and develop your projects; others call for spinning off projects as separate ventures that still allow you to retain some equity. Whatever the specific approach, you can meet the inherent cultural and organizational challenges of inside-out open innovation by approaching it holistically and placing it under the leadership of senior executives in strategic roles.

Large companies say they want to be innovative, but they fundamentally mismanage their talent. Expecting innovators to grow along with their projects - from discovery to incubation to acceleration - sets them up to fail. Most people excel at one of the phases, not all three. By allowing innovation employees to develop career paths suited to their strengths, companies will create a sustainable innovation function.

In this conversation with HBR senior editor Anand P. Raman, McAfee, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management's Center for Digital Business, explains why Enterprise 2.0 tools - wikis, tags, Twitter, Google searches, and the like - are transforming companies' innovation processes. Procter & Gamble, for instance, uses its Connect + Develop website not only to publicize what it knows and what it can do but to highlight what it needs. That's radical, says McAfee. And the communities that form around innovation challenges can help sift the ideas, so the best ones quickly rise to the top.

A full-blown scandal can cause a company great turmoil, even if the organization isn't at fault. Crises easily extend beyond the original perpetrators, spilling over to other businesses along the value chain - and to those apart from the chain that resemble the guilty parties in some central way. For instance, the dairy, pet food, and toy-manufacturing scandals in China over the past few years have in many consumers' minds rendered all Chinese products suspect. Drawing on more than 10 years of research, marketing professors Tybout and Roehm have developed a framework for crafting just-right, just-in-time responses to scandals. They outline four important steps: assess the incident, acknowledge the problem, formulate a strategic response, and implement the response. The most effective approaches are carefully calibrated to the characteristics of the brand, the nature of the event, and the company's degree of seeming culpability. They can minimize brand damage and even, on occasion, provide firms with opportunities to deepen connections with customers. Antivirus-software maker Trend Micro, for example, reacted effectively after a flawed software update immobilized customers' computers. Within an hour and a half, the company removed the problematic file from its website and update servers, expanded its customer support staff, and held a press conference to apologize to customers and describe how the problem was being addressed.

"Aldi" is a word that strikes fear in the hearts of brand managers across Europe. A chain of low-budget retail stores with sales of $73.5 billion in 2008, Aldi invented what is commonly referred to as the hard-discount store, a format that is destroying between a quarter and a half trillion dollars in brand sales annually. Brand executives at major consumer packaged goods companies have mostly been caught off guard by this success. The authors' research identified four key misconceptions that explain why: (1) Hard discounters can succeed only in Europe; (2) they attract only the poor; (3) they offer inferior quality; (4) their success is a recessionary phenomenon. Aldi, Lidl, and other hard discounters keep costs low in part by restricting as much as 90% of their stock to their own private labels. But, as they are beginning to realize, that practice can gain only so much market share. A judicious mix of store labels and manufacturers' brands will win new customers for both. And brand manufacturers that fear sales cannibalization can take several proactive steps: sell unfamiliar sizes at the discounters, offer brands with a small market share, carefully manage the price gap, make shipping boxes attractive, and keep their brands dynamic.

What's the best way to buy or sell an asset? Should you hold an auction and accept the most attractive offer? Or should you identify the most likely prospects and negotiate with them privately? Auctions became increasingly popular after the internet opened wide the universe of potential bidders. The wrinkle is, auctions often set up win-lose relationships between buyers and sellers, says Subramanian, a professor at Harvard's schools of business and law. In many situations, negotiations lead to better results. Before you decide on a process, carefully consider the nature of the buyers, the characteristics of the asset in question, and your own priorities. If you can get enough of the right buyers to participate, an auction generally makes sense - unless you expect a wide range of valuations. In that case, an auction could leave a lot of money on the table - as it did in the sale of Cable & Wireless America. CWA's assets were uniquely strategic to the winner, but because it had to beat the second-highest bidder by only a little bit, the company got them at a price far below the value the deal actually generated. Can you write exact specifications for an asset? Then you probably won't go wrong with an auction. But specification can discourage creative collaboration between buyer and seller. If that will add value to your deal, or if a relationship is important, pursue a negotiation. Finally, examine your priorities. When discretion is critical, a negotiation will work better, but when you need a transparent, speedy process, an auction is the more sensible choice.

A takeover usually signals the demise of one of the two corporations involved in the tussle - no prizes for guessing which one. Breaking with this practice, some companies from emerging markets are preserving the identity of companies they've taken over and giving them near-total autonomy. The acquirers (the AV Birla Group, the Mahindra group, and the Tata group in India; the Ulker Group in Turkey; and AmBev in Brazil, among others) have also retained the incumbent management teams, including the CEOs, of the corporations they bought. The new parents lay down new values and create a fresh sense of purpose, but they leave it to the acquisitions to carry them out. Some companies are better suited to adopt the partnering approach than others. Organizations with collaborative, inclusive cultures will have an easier time than companies with a hierarchical, command-and-control style. Senior executives in acquiring companies must be comfortable achieving goals through influence rather than control. They must also have a higher-than-average tolerance for ambiguity. Respect for new ideas is critical because executives must recognize the strengths of the acquired company and resist the urge to impose their way of doing things. These traits are encoded in some organizations' DNA, but others will have to develop them. These are early days yet, but the authors' research shows that the partnering approach to takeovers seems to work better than traditional postmerger integration practices, and it has created value for shareholders.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) represent a popular strategy used by firms for many years, but the success of this strategy has been limited. In fact, several reviews have shown that, on average, firms create little or no value by making acquisitions. While there has been a significant amount of research on mergers and acquisitions, there appears to be little consensus as to the reasons for outcomes achieved from them. Herein, we begin by reviewing some of the extant research on mergers and acquisitions, identifying the key variables on which the studies have focused. Thereafter, we summarize some of the major work on a primary reason for failure--paying too high a premium--and discuss why executives often delay too long the divestiture of poorly performing businesses that were acquired. Additionally, we examine research suggesting the importance of an acquisition capability based on organizational learning from the acquisitions and complementary science and technology for strategic renewal. Finally, we end with a discussion of the research on cross-border mergers and acquisitions which have become prominent in recent years.

Historically, companies have been required to produce financial statements based on country-specific financial reporting standards. As a result, individuals who invest in companies from different countries must contend with financial statements based on different financial "languages." This can be extremely confusing, especially if individuals do not realize these differences exist and account for them. In this article, we explore the different accounting methods used for financial statement reporting around the globe, and analyze the concept of all businesses adopting the same set of rules.

From outside a firm, strategy making usually appears to be a top-down process whereby the CEO and top management make decisions that the rest of the firm must then implement. Sometimes, though, the ideas underlying strategic moves originate with lower level employees. Can employees really shape strategy? That often depends on crafting the content of the sales pitch.

This article examines occurrences of corporate governance failures, and analyzes why such failures occur nationally and gloabally. Also considered is governance reform and suggestions toward that end.

A key decision for entrepreneurs in many retail and service firms is whether, and how much, to use franchising. If the decision is made to franchise, the actor may assume one of two "identities" or tactics: (1) the "chain builder," who uses a blend of company and franchised outlets, and (2) the "turnkey," who sells business opportunities but does not own any outlets. To benefit from their chosen strategy, franchisors must put resources in place to support it. We argue that franchisors use the chain building strategy to strike a balance between standardization and innovation by building resources that foster trust and encourage knowledge sharing with franchisees. In contrast, for turnkeys, a valuable set of operational routines is the critical strategic resource. To better appreciate how franchisors choose between the chain builder and turnkey strategies, we gathered survey information from 263 franchisors. Via this data, and as described herein, we learned that franchisors perform better when they invest in resources that best support their selected strategy.

The traditional department store was clearly the center of retail activity in cities and small towns in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. However, by the late 1970s and beyond, the department store industry began experiencing financial problems, and serious questions were being raised as to whether their demise was eminent. This article traces the evolution of the industry, and explores some of the underlying dynamics for the changes in the retail trade sector, including the emergence of new alternative retail formats, such as discount stores and category killers. This study further explores the major strategies used by the leading traditional stores with reference to new industry life cycle models and a strategic positioning framework. Of particular interest is the discussion regarding: Were the traditional department stores were "locked in" to a declining trajectory? How effective were their strategies to counter the decline of the industry? And what were and are the repositioning options available to the traditional department stores?

Negotiation is an essential skill for personal well-being and professional success, a skill that begins with identifying and acting on one's wants and needs. Many individuals, however, lack the confidence, motivation, or training to simply ask for what they want in certain situations; for example, when negotiating with an important client. Still others are reluctant to initiate requests in general. This article discusses the personal characteristics and situational factors that influence an individual's likelihood of engaging another party in a negotiation, making a request, and optimizing that request. Herein, specific suggestions are offered for managing this critical phase of the negotiation process via three steps: mental preparation prior to the engagement; positioning prior to, and at the point of, the engagement; and verbal craftsmanship during the delivery of one's request.