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Like the best-laid schemes of mice and men, the best-rehearsed speeches go oft astray. No amount of preparation can counter an audience's perception that the speaker is calculating or insincere. Why do so many managers have trouble communicating authenticity to their listeners? Morgan, a communications coach for more than two decades, offers advice for overcoming this difficulty. Recent brain research shows that natural, unstudied gestures - what Morgan calls the "second conversation" - express emotions or impulses a split second before our thought processes have turned them into words. So the timing of practiced gestures will always be subtly off - just enough to be picked up by listeners' unconscious ability to read body language. If you can't practice the unspoken part of your delivery, what can you do? Tap into four basic impulses underlying your speech - to be open to the audience, to connect with it, to be passionate, and to "listen" to how the audience is responding - and then rehearse your presentation with each in mind. You can become more open, for instance, by imagining that you're speaking to your spouse or a close friend. To more readily connect, focus on needing to engage your listeners and then to keep their attention, as if you were speaking to a child who isn't heeding your words. To convey your passion, identify the feelings behind your speech and let them come through. To listen, think about what the audience is probably feeling when you step up to the podium and be alert to the nonverbal messages of its members. Internalizing these four impulses as you practice will help you come across as relaxed and authentic - and your body language will take care of itself.

Leadership teams that can't reach consensus wait for the CEO to make the final call - and often are disappointed by the outcome. Frisch calls this phenomenon the dictator-by-default syndrome. Many companies turn to team-building and communication exercises to try to fix the situation. But that won't work, the author argues, because the trouble is not with the people, it's with the decision-making process. Attempting to arrive at a collective preference on the basis of individual opinions is inherently problematic. Once leadership teams realize that voting-system mathematics are the culprit, they can stop wasting time on irrelevant psychological exercises and instead adopt practical measures designed to break the impasse. They must begin by acknowledging the problem and understanding what causes it. When more than two options are on the table, the scene is set for the CEO to become a dictator by default. Even yes-or-no choices present difficulties, because they always include a third, implied alternative: "Neither of the above." When the CEO and the team understand why they have trouble making decisions, they can adopt the following tactics to minimize dysfunction: Clearly articulate the desired outcome, generate a range of options for achieving it, test "fences" (which can be moved) and "walls" (which cannot), surface preferences early, state each option's pros and cons, and devise new options that preserve the best features of existing ones. Teams using such tactics need to adhere to two ground rules. First, they must deliberate confidentially, because a secure climate for conversation allows members to float trial balloons and cut deals. And second, members must be given enough time to study their options and assess the counterarguments. Only then can they achieve genuine alignment.

A new study of private equity buyouts shows that, on average, U.S. acquisitions made in "red" (Republican) states deliver significantly higher returns than acquisitions made in "blue" (Democratic) ones.

The shareholders, who provide capital, have the most at stake in a company and the biggest incentive to ensure its success - so they should call the shots and reap the biggest returns, right? Wrong, says a professor at IMD. He argues that in today's firms, labor bears the most risk and provides the competitive advantage. Labor, therefore, should make the decisions and get the residuals.

A shortage of H-1B visas is preventing U.S. companies from hiring the foreign technical employees they need to fill their talent gap. Some firms are getting around the problem by seeking alternatives to basing employees stateside in the first place - and, in the process, are reaping other benefits.

The CEO of Chanel recalls her days as a young merchant, when she was taken to task by a powerful executive for not listening. Twenty years later, his words still profoundly affect the way she thinks about her company's products and interacts with customers, employees, and other stakeholders.

Short-term, virtual, and cross-cultural teams have become the new norm, but building trust among team members is particularly challenging. That has implications for how managers should motivate and reward them.

The CEO of the X Prize Foundation explains how offering cash jackpots for breakthrough innovations can help solve problems big and small in fields like space exploration, energy, and education.

Simple, inexpensive programs that teach managers to be more supportive of their direct reports' work/life issues can generate big returns in employee health and satisfaction, according to a multiyear study of hundreds of frontline workers and dozens of supervisors.

Digital advertising is growing nearly four times as fast as advertising overall; alternative channels cost less than traditional ones; and management increasingly insists on proof of ROI. These converging forces spell the end for television advertising.

Forward-looking companies are using virtual venues to mimic reality, helping employees and business partners collaborate and learn. Their increasingly user-friendly and graphically sophisticated platforms may become the next-generation means of communication.

Every year in the United States billions of philanthropic dollars go to more than 1.5 million nonprofits--some of which use the money inefficiently. But the tools exist to create prediction markets that could guide donors toward the highest social return on investment.

The president and CEO of Travelocity remembers how her father built his environmental-engineering start-up into a business with 300 employees, in part through a striking degree of care for and interest in them as individuals. Peluso has 5,000 employees - and a global organization - but she's learned to scale up her father's techniques.

China's recent transformation is characterized by gradual institutionalization, and Russia's by what looks like rapid deinstitutionalization. The Chinese tend to think concretely, whereas the Russians lean toward abstractions. Understanding differences like these can help Westerners gain entry into each country's networks.

The founder and CEO of BzzAgent, a word-of mouth media company, believes strongly in radical corporate transparency. In practice that can mean frank self-examination in his blogs, publicly posting his company's sales presentations, and rotating an executive office space among employees at every level.

"Trade dress" is the legal term for a nonfunctional design feature, such as the cowhide pattern on Gateway's computer boxes. Many companies don't know its value or assume that they could sue imitators. Here's a simple experiment to acquire the data needed for protection.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The IBM Innovation Jam was the largest-ever event to promote networked idea generation. More than 150,000 IBM employees, stakeholders and vendors participated in two three-day online events to foster innovation and help IBM bring products to market faster. Using Web sites, wikis, forums and other online tools, Jam participants generated literally hundreds of thousands of new business ideas. From those ideas, IBM focused on several major topics for the second part of the Jam and invited its employees to build on the ideas within those topics. As a result of this process, 10 distinct businesses were funded. However, it wasn't these successes that make the Jam interesting, argue the authors; it was the difficulties that IBM faced in implementing the Jam. Given unique access to the Jam, the authors discuss the complications inherent in collaborating with so many people. In particular, it was hard to sustain individual "conversations" in the collaborative process. Rather than building on each other's ideas, many participants -- because of excitement about their own ideas -- would "hijack" a thread or take it in an unintended direction. Some great ideas were left to wither on the vine. The authors discuss other attempts at large-scale collaboration, including some by Dell and Starbucks. These include the use of promotion tools to ensure that "good" ideas are seen and captured by as many eyes as possible. The pros and cons of these methods are discussed as well, and the authors provide a framework for thinking about how an organization can collaborate with its stakeholders.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Past research is clear on the benefits of high-performing, or "star," workers. Star computer programmers, for example, are more productive than average ones by a ratio of eight to one. But reaping the benefits of such talent is not so simple. Say you hire a number of stars. How can you guarantee that they will be able to replicate their success in a new environment -- in short, how portable are they? In the past, portability has been viewed as an attribute of a person, team or organization, but it can also be looked at as an attribute of a position. Specifically, certain jobs do require different levels of company-specific human capital, thus making some workers less portable than others. Consequently, organizations should not think of talent management as a simple "build versus buy" dichotomy. Rather, there are some positions for which they can buy, and others for which they must build. Within investment banks, for example, the retail brokers (who handle individual clients) work primarily on their own. In contrast, institutional salespeople (who sell to major institutional investors such as Putnam, Vanguard and Fidelity) are more likely to perform their jobs in teams. Thus, retail brokers are more portable and can easily be hired from the outside. Institutional salespeople, however, should be developed from within, and efforts should be made to retain them. Understanding such differences is crucial for companies attempting to attain sustainable competitive advantages that derive from human capital. The authors' research, which has probed the application of human capital theory to talent portability, should help companies recognize that an entire class of factors -- specific roles within an organization -- greatly determines the portability of performance. With that knowledge, executives can gain a deeper understanding of the pros and cons of hiring certain star employees.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Abstract not available.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The way we think about strategy is woefully incomplete, the authors contend. The traditional idea of focusing on the positioning of products (or services) underplays much of what most would agree makes a company truly competitive. Not only does it give short shrift to what a company knows, it ignores completely the fact that in today's dynamic economy, organizations have to continually reinvent who they are and what they do in large and small ways. And one important means of doing so is through innovation. An effective strategy, then, is comprised of three key components: product/market, knowledge and innovation positions. But even if a company masters the three strategic positions of product/market, knowledge and innovation independently, it is still at risk. Only when all three positions are aligned and mutually reinforcing can a strategy succeed. In adopting the notion of alignment, organizations need to view each position -- product/market, knowledge and innovation -- as aspects of an organization's overall strategy. Creating an integrated strategy thus requires focusing not on each position separately, but rather on all three positions simultaneously. The authors introduce the notion of competing based not only on what an organization makes or the service it provides, but on what it knows and how it innovates. Each aspect represents a competitive position that must be evaluated relative to the capabilities of the organization and to others in the marketplace battling for the same space. And each component must not only be aligned with the other two, but it needs to be adjusted as circumstances warrant. When done correctly, organizations -- such as Buckman Laboratories, which is profiled here -- thrive. When done badly, the company can suffer, and perhaps fatally so, as the history of Polaroid points out.