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Few companies are thinking about hiring right now, but that's a mistake. If history is any guide, staffing will become a front-burner issue once the economic upheaval eases. Even now, companies are running into staffing problems in emerging markets, and many will have to find talented replacements for baby-boom retirees. Will they be able to meet their needs? Not likely, say Fernandez-Araoz of Egon Zehnder and Harvard Business School professors Groysberg and Nohria. Their research, conducted with scores of CEOs, HR executives, and recruiters, found current hiring practices to be haphazard at best and inept at worst. And no wonder. Ignorant of their staffing needs, most companies treat hiring top-level executives as an emergency. That leaves them little choice. One study found that nearly a quarter of the time, the executive selected was the only candidate considered. Far too few companies conduct reference checks; far too many rely on gut reactions when judging qualifications and cultural fit. Hardly anyone considers whether candidates will be good team players. And, shockingly, only half of the top managers recruited by the companies studied were interviewed by anyone in the C-suite. The result: About a third of promising new hires depart within three years of being recruited. As a remedy, the authors offer their best thinking about state-of-the-art hiring practices for the top levels of the organization. Their recommendations cover the entire hiring cycle in seven steps: anticipating the need for new hires, specifying the job, developing a pool of candidates, assessing the candidates, closing the deal, integrating the newcomer, and reviewing hire-process effectiveness. Whatever the future brings, firms that follow these practices successfully will have a distinct advantage over their shortsighted competitors.

Despite an abundance of raw data, few organizations have figured out how to parse and analyze all that information to reveal the best opportunities for growth. Even fewer have attempted to structure and manage themselves to match the texture of the markets in which they play. But a fine-grained understanding of company performance and markets is critical, especially during an economic downturn, which calls for a nuanced approach to cutting costs and making long-term investments. Baghai, Smit, and Viguerie urge firms to target narrower market slices and to measure sources of growth - market momentum, mergers and acquisitions, and market share gains - in a more detailed way. When they reviewed growth patterns of global firms from 1999 to 2006, they found that companies can get a much more accurate picture of growth prospects by digging deeply into micromarkets (typically ranging from $50 million to $200 million in value) than by looking at the division-level performance numbers commonly used for measuring, organizing, and managing. The authors examine several companies - including Amazon and Ping An - that have benefitted from greater granularity. For instance, one large European manufacturer of personal-care products went beyond an aggregated view of performance and discovered that some of its higher-growth segments were lurking in the unit with the lowest overall growth rate. Another company, an integrated telecommunications service provider, retooled its marketing mix - making fewer roughly calculated media trade-offs (television versus direct mail versus radio) and instead selecting the right media within narrowly defined regions for specific lines of business. As a result, it boosted sales between 10% and 15% in several regions and increased average lifetime customer value by 15%.

The belief that teams make us more creative and productive - and are the best way to get things done - is deeply entrenched. But Hackman, a professor of organizational psychology at Harvard and a leading expert on teams, is having none of it. Research, he says, consistently shows that teams underperform despite all their extra resources. In an interview with senior editor Diane Coutu, Hackman explains where teams go wrong. Shockingly, most of the time members don't agree on what the team is supposed to be doing or even on who is on the team. The belief that bigger is better also compounds problems; as a team grows, the effort needed to manage links between members increases almost exponentially. Leaders need to be ruthless about defining teams and keeping them small (fewer than 10 members), and some individuals (like team destroyers) should simply be forced off. The leader also must set a compelling direction for the team - but in so doing, may encounter intense resistance that puts him or her at great risk. Hackman explores other fallacies about teams - for instance, that teams whose members have been together a long time become stale. In fact, research reveals that new teams make 50% more mistakes than established teams. To avoid complacency, though, every team needs a deviant - someone who is willing to make waves and open up the group to more ideas. Unfortunately, such individuals often get thrown off the team, robbing it of its chance to be magical. Leaders can't make a team do well. However, by being disciplined about how a team is set up and managed, instituting the right support systems, and providing coaching in group processes, they can increase the likelihood that a team will be great.

Though they have feel-good stories and data on milestones, most ventures that serve the world's poor don't have a systematic way to gauge how well they're achieving their goals. To address that need, London, the director of the University of Michigan's Base of the Pyramid Initiative, has devised a new tool. London's Base of the Pyramid Impact Assessment Framework explores how ventures influence the well-being of local buyers, sellers, and communities. It guides managers through a detailed look at an organization's effects on those constituencies in three areas: economics, capabilities, and relationships. The framework examines negative as well as positive effects - for instance, whether activities that increase the income of the poor also prompt them to mistreat arable land. It helps managers focus success measures on the most likely high-magnitude outcomes. VisionSpring, which trains rural women to provide affordable eye care in India, knew it had improved the economic fortunes of its microentrepreneurs. After applying the framework, however, the venture had an appreciation of its impact on some of its buyers: artisans whose eyesight had deteriorated with age. The nonprofit's glasses boosted the artisans' productivity, income, and dignity. VisionSpring also uncovered negative effects - strife and jealousy in families that weren't used to women's working outside the home. The organization helped ease those tensions by encouraging the women's spouses to become involved in product distribution, thus improving their relationships and reducing the risk that sellers might quit. The more holistic, fact-based view provided by London's framework has helped VisionSpring make better decisions about how to enhance positive effects, mitigate negative ones, and demonstrate clear value to potential funders and partners.

While Western companies struggle with mergers and acquisitions, emerging giants like Indian aluminum producer Hindalco are using M&A as their main globalization strategy. That's partly because developing economies grew at near double-digit rates in the past 15 years, enabling many enterprises to make acquisitions. It's also because, according to the author's research, those corporations create more value from takeovers. To compete, Western multinationals should change their mind-set and shift the locus of their M&A efforts to regional headquarters in developing countries. U.S. and European companies, inhibited by slow-growing home markets, acquire rivals primarily to become bigger and thus create economies of scale. By contrast, emerging giants buy companies - often Western ones - to gain competencies that will help them become global leaders. They acquire only to meet strategic goals; they don't completely assimilate acquisitions; and their CEOs focus on the long term. Using this approach, Hindalco boosted revenues in seven years from $500 million to $15 billion. It acquired companies to expand its aluminum business, manufacture more value-added products, and extend its global reach. Rather than immediately seek targets overseas, the company patiently executed small takeovers, first in India and later abroad, before making a big global play. With each move, Hindalco climbed what the author calls an M&A competency stairway, gaining the skills it needed to pursue other targets. When it was ready, Hindalco bought Novelis, a North American corporation more than twice its size. Because of the global downturn, Hindalco will not realize the benefits of that acquisition as quickly as it had expected. But the fact that the company developed and adhered to a long-term M&A strategy will help it ride out the storm.

Two professors who have studied how leaders regain momentum in uncertain times suggest four ways to get your employees to face their fear, outrun hesitant competitors, and seize advantage.

Is an institution that instills fear in many people a good spot to set up shop? Yes, say the authors, whose research shows that hospital lobbies are places where businesses can connect with consumers.

It's well known that stock markets react more favorably if a company is bought with cash rather than with stock. But the opposite holds true for just a business unit. Here's why.

In Chile, as in much of Latin America, business is identified with right-wing politics. Two Spanish multinationals found a simple but effective way to overcome this historical prejudice so that they could establish a productive relationship with the present left-wing government.

By learning how to turn field reports into compelling stories, the World Bank's International Finance Corporation has made them fulfill their true purpose: to become effective tools that actually transfer knowledge among employees.

The CEO of Better Place talks about what went through his mind the night he decided to start a venture to end the world's dependence on oil as a transportation fuel.

Contracts exist to foster trust, but they can actually do the opposite. Overly detailed contracts leave no room for spontaneous acts of kindness to create goodwill between parties; too-rigid contracts leave parties unable to respond to the unanticipated; and, strangely enough, incentives can end up being just plain insulting.

IT systems increasingly hold the potential to launch cascading disasters, triggered by the most trivial of incidents. A new type of risk-management culture is needed, warn these Carnegie Mellon professors, to guard against such extreme, but no longer unthinkable, events.

Studies that examine high-performing companies to unearth the secrets of their success have a critical flaw: Very few of those companies are truly remarkable. Data analysis reveals that most owe their success to luck, not smart practices. That puts the prescriptions of success studies in a whole new light.

A new study busts the myth that happy workers create happy customers.

Many are counting on the adoption of electronic health records to help the health care system save billions of dollars. But to realize IT's promise, hospitals and medical practices need to empower employees.

Often, the greater a firm's experience in forming alliances, the worse the performance of those alliances. That's most likely because those firms have become overconfident of their skills and drawn faulty conclusions about which practices lead to success. A focus on experimentation and adaptation can help break that pattern.

Prairie grasses, forestry and mill residues, nongrain parts of food crops, and urban wood wastes all could become a huge source of renewable energy.

The CEO of CARE reveals what it was like to incite change at a sprawling nonprofit and how she built support for her plan to increase its global clout.

A customer-research technique that requires respondents to make a sequence of explicit trade-offs when choosing their preferred product attributes can help companies get a far more accurate read on what customers desire.