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Consumers are now generating, rather than merely consuming advertising. The consequences for brands, marketers, and senior executives are significant. Advertising was traditionally generated by, or on behalf of, the firm and broadcast to relatively passive consumers. With the rise of digital media, the Internet, and inexpensive media software, considerable creative and distributive power has been handed to the consumer. Liberated from the exclusive control of the firm, ads now express a myriad of different voices. Some ads are subversive, others laudatory, but the fact remains that the firm is no longer in exclusive control of the message. Using a number of high profile cases, this article explores the motivations that drive consumers to create their own ads and develops a typology of the ads created. It develops a model for the various strategic stances that a firm can adopt in response to this phenomenon so that managers can anticipate and thus deal more effectively with some of the extreme consequences of liberated advertising.

In a platform-mediated network, users rely on a common platform (provided by one or more intermediaries) that encompasses infrastructure and rules required by users to transact with each other. A fundamental design decision for firms that aspire to develop platform-mediated networks is whether to preserve proprietary control or share their platform with rivals. A proprietary platform has a single provider that solely controls its technology (for example, Federal Express, Apple Macintosh, or Google). With a shared platform such as Visa, DVD, or Linux, multiple firms collaborate in developing the platform's technology and then compete in offering users different but compatible versions of the platform. This article examines factors that favor proprietary versus shared models when designing platforms and then explains how management challenges differ for proprietary and shared platform providers when mobilizing

Whether selling products or services, making strategic decisions, delivering solutions, or driving innovation, most work of any substance today is accomplished by teams. However, since the early 1990s, teams have evolved from more stable groups-where members were co-located, dedicated to a common mission, and directed by a single leader-to more matrixed entities with colleagues located around the world, juggling time between several projects, and accountable to multiple leaders. As teams have become more fluid, substantial challenges have been posed to traditional advice on team formation, leadership, roles, and process. This article describes how leaders at all levels within an organization can obtain innovation and performance benefits by shifting focus from forming teams to developing networks at key points of execution.

This article examines how IKEA handles a complex network of business relationships with its suppliers and partners. This industrial network is fundamental to IKEA's strategy in terms of efficiency and development goals. From the analysis of IKEA's experiences in dealing with its industrial network, the article discusses a set of structural components and dynamic interactions of a network strategy. The three structural components are: defining the content of relationships; forming the network structure; and evaluating goal matching with the network. The two dynamic interactions are: interacting via inter-organizational routines for efficiency goals; and interacting via joint projects for development goals. Network strategies cannot be used as shortcuts to compensate for severe weaknesses, but instead can only be pursued by firms that possess adequate competences, external organizational interfaces, and network-oriented cultures.

As the outsourcing market has matured over the past 20 years, clients and suppliers have begun to examine how these complex relationships can not only achieve cost savings, but also enable innovation in today's dynamic business environment. This article presents four case studies of large-scale information technology outsourcing relationships that take equal measure of the clients and suppliers. It develops a model of innovation within outsourcing relationships consisting of nine key enablers for achieving innovation. The article then links the key enablers to three levels of innovation that were identified within the case studies. The model provides insight into how executives within outsourcing relationships can move from a cost management focus to a focus on innovation and (ultimately) business value for the client and supplier.

This article highlights several important dimensions of planning for exit from strategic alliances and also offers several examples of the disastrous consequences of inadequate exit-planning. While many companies fall into the trap of having no exit plan, other companies take too simple a planning approach, wondering if the exit will be unconditionally easy or hard. A more effective approach involves questions such as "When should the exit be easy and when should it be hard? And for which partner?" The article develops a framework that stipulates contingency-specific exit provisions for each partner in the alliance-specifically, situations in which exit should be symmetric and easy for both partners, symmetric and hard for both partners, or asymmetric, hard for one partner and easy for the other. Furthermore, many alliances today reflect complex deals that cover several distinct developmental stages, each of which contains a distinct set of contingencies. Such alliances require a dynamic application of the exit framework, wherein each stage of the alliance development entails a different set of exit provisions, and exit from one stage would signify the beginning of the next.

The emergence, proliferation, and ubiquity of the Internet have not only transformed businesses, but also altered the relationship between the business and the customer. Recent advances in technology have helped to migrate this relationship to an interactive level where technology contributes to brand building by creating and sustaining a long-term relationship with the customer. Media fragmentation and customer indifference to traditional marketing tools are forcing marketers to seek new opportunities so the marketing message not only captures customers' attention, but also tries to engage them with the company. This paper discusses blogs within the context of creating this new, more enduring relationship with the customer. Blogs are discussed within the framework of Web 2.0, the next generation of the Internet, which is comprised of user-generated content and social computing. The use of blogs by several companies as tools to better engage the customer in the creation, delivery, and dissemination of marketing messages is also demonstrated.

The habitual mode of poor strategy implementation shaping the next round of strategy formulation weakens the subsequent planning cycle. Unfortunately, decades of company interactions consisting of research, teaching, and consulting suggest that strategy implementation has become a catchall of phrases and recommendations, with little clarity as to what comprises this necessary cornerstone of a capable organization. Strategists tend to use powerful terminology when referring to implementation efforts. Descriptors such as killers, confrontation, and engagement are linked with actions like conquering, blocking, tackling, and honing when discussing strategy implementation. Our contention is that implementation is a critical cornerstone or ally in the building of a capable organization, and the use of the appropriate levers of implementation is the pivotal hinge in the development of the organization. Ultimately, strategy implementation helps create the future, not inhibit it.

A view of the new competitive landscape shows globalization, rapid technological change, and hypercompetition as conduits leading to either organizational decline or organizational growth. In this article we explain how managers can use four mindsets to convert potential threats posed by these environmental challenges into pathways of prosperity instead of pathways of decline. A global mindset, or the ability to view the world using a broad perspective, converts globalization threats into growth opportunities by thinking beyond geographic boundaries, valuing integration across borders, and appreciating regional and cultural diversity. An innovation mindset, meaning a mental framework that fosters development and implementation of new ideas, transforms rapid technological change threats into opportunities by valuing constant generation of new ideas and business models, realizing sources of new ideas, and stressing next practices rather than best practices. A virtual mindset, or the ability of managers to hand over their firms' activities to external providers, turns hypercompetition into prospects for growth by facilitating flexibility and responsiveness. Finally, a collaboration mindset, meaning a willingness to engage in business partnerships, converts all three challenges into opportunities by allowing firms to form successful partnerships that can lead to synergy by combining business complementarities.

Over the past sixty years Net Present Value (NPV) and the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) have emerged from obscurity to become the overwhelming choices for the quantitative measurement of investment attractiveness in modern corporations. Despite their current popularity, neither NPV nor IRR was designed to deal effectively with the vast majority of investment problems, meaning those where periodic free cash flows are generated between the time of asset purchase and the time of sale. NPV assumes that periodic cash flows can and will be reinvested at the NPV discount rate, either at the cost of capital or another risk adjusted discount rate; IRR assumes reinvestment at the IRR. Neither assumption is usually realistic. In addition, when evaluating projects in terms of their financial attractiveness, the two measures may rank projects differently. This becomes important when capital budgets are limited. Finally, a project may have several IRRs if cash flows go from negative to positive more than once. The Modified Internal Rate of Return (MIRR), discovered in the 18th century, does account for these cash flows. This article explains the problems with NPV and IRR, describes how MIRR works, and demonstrates how MIRR deals with weaknesses in NPV and IRR.

Both popular and social science literature are replete with recommendations for enhancing communication effectiveness, typically defined as improving the clarity and impact of the spoken and written word. However, managing internal organizational processes and external market competitiveness often requires a different communication strategy, specifically silence and non-disclosure, while adhering to statutory regulations. This paper summarizes the rationale for communication prohibitions, highlights counter forces mitigating their intended effects, and offers recommendations for successful implementation. The three major counter forces are employee motivation and perception, changing socio-cultural norms, and organizational structures reflecting virtual teams and project teams. The eight recommendations for combating these forces are subsumed under one of two categories: creating an organizational culture supporting prohibitions, and executing the prohibitions with a minimum of employee resistance. In summary, employees charged with maintaining secrecy and adhering to non-disclosure prohibitions must view those restrictions as reasonable, warranted, equitable, and legal.

This paper examines 30 entrepreneurs who created profitable companies, and who were also exemplary in their efforts towards social responsibility. It examines their management practices to understand how these socially responsible entrepreneurs created and built their companies. The study reveals that these socially responsible entrepreneurs founded their companies, at least in part, to achieve idealistic objectives, and pursued financial and non-financial objectives simultaneously. Most avoided financing from institutional sources, hired employees for their shared values, and shrewdly leveraged their social identities to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. Many of these entrepreneurs made unusual efforts to create a strong organizational culture and implement sustainable operational processes to meet their self-imposed ethical standards. These socially responsible entrepreneurs gave a substantial amount of their profits to causes of their choosing, and volunteered themselves as role models for other businesses and entrepreneurs to follow.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The world in which marketing operates has fundamentally changed. Has marketing research and practice kept up? The answer, says the author, is no. At the heart of the current trouble is a severance of academic rigor from managerial relevance. Through its maturation as a discipline over the past half century, marketing science in academia has emerged as a rigorous field. Conjoint analysis, econometric modeling, techniques derived from mathematical psychology, and many other tools and approaches have revolutionized its practice. But many of the most rigorous tools were developed years ago, in response to old problems. And managers and organizations increasingly find those tools irrelevant to the new challenges they face. So business practitioners adopt approaches that appear to address their real and current marketing problems but that lack the rigor of the academically established methods. Now, argues the author, we need to rethink and transform the field of marketing so it balances rigor and relevance. He details seven strategies that would help achieve that aim: Bridge the disciplinary silos. Shift from traditional management to network orchestration. Change the focus from customer relationship management (CRM) to customer managed relationships (CMR). Shift from company-branded products to customer-branded solutions. Use analytics and metrics as the glue. Adopt the adaptive experimentation philosophy for all your activities and strive for empirical generalizations. And, challenge (and change) your mental models. And how to pursue those strategies? In a collaboration between both practitioners and academic researchers, says the author. (Editor's Note: This article is excerpted from a paper the author presented when he accepted MIT's 2007 Buck Weaver Award, which recognizes individuals who have made important contributions to the advancement of theory and practice in marketing science.)

An implicit assumption of the "war for talent" perspective is that departing workers are lost to competitors. Managers should consider two criteria -- the destination and knowledge of departing employees -- when determining how best to handle worker turnover. There are four different scenarios. In the first, employees with knowledge that is generic or of low strategic importance leave to join competitors. This hampers the productive capacity of an organization, while increasing that of its competitors. Defensive maneuvers (such as improving employee benefits) are recommended. In the second scenario, employees possessing knowledge that has low strategic importance depart to join cooperators. Administrative and human-capital costs are incurred that must be weighed against possible social-capital benefits -- the new business opportunities that can be generated by ex-employees in their new jobs. Companies are advised to adopt relational actions to maintain positive relationships with these former employees. The third scenario -- employees with strategically important, company-specific knowledge resign to take jobs with competitors -- is potentially the most damaging form of turnover. Companies might emphasize retaliatory actions (such as the threat of lawsuits to enforce non-compete clauses in contracts) in addition to defensive maneuvers to retain crucial employees. In the fourth scenario, employees with strategically important, company-specific knowledge leave to work for cooperators. Because this loss incurs high administrative and human-capital costs, companies have a strong incentive to adopt defensive strategies to reduce such turnover. But this can also lead to opportunities for businesses to expand their social capital with important clients and suppliers. Therefore, when defensive maneuvers fail, a company should consider adopting a relational approach, maintaining positive relationships with departing employees as they transition into their new jobs.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. For many teenagers and young adults, cell phones, personal digital assistants and other handheld devices have become a necessity of everyday life. That fact has not escaped the attention of companies that have had great difficulty reaching young consumers through traditional marketing approaches. In theory, the mobile platform provides the perfect mechanism for reaching young consumers. A large retailer might, for example, send a group of teenagers who are at a shopping mall various electronic coupons on their phones to promote special discounts. Many global corporations, including Burger King, MTV, Procter & Gamble and Ford, have initiated programs that enable consumers to search for the nearest restaurant location using their cell phones, receive electronic coupons or participate in other mobile marketing activities. Such campaigns have generated click-through rates up to 10 times those of traditional Internet banner ads, and recent forecasts for global mobile marketing spending range from $9 billion to $19 billion by 2011. That said, several brands, including Budweiser, ESPN, Sprite and adidas, have launched mobile marketing efforts only to see some successes amidst an equal number of disappointments. To investigate what truly influences whether young consumers will participate in mobile marketing activities, the authors recently conducted a survey in the United States and Pakistan. The study looked at the relative importance of a number of factors, including consumers' personal attachment to their cell phones, their concerns for privacy and their willingness to "opt in" and accept permission-based marketing. An analysis of the results uncovered important insights in consumer behavior. Such results hold a number of important implications for companies developing mobile advertising campaigns across global markets.

Initiatives to build and maintain trust with various stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers and investors, are at the top of the executive agenda at many organizations. But most companies don't really understand how to manage stakeholder trust effectively. In fact, the authors' research suggests that many trust-building initiatives and approaches that organizations invest in may be of questionable value. Others might actually be counterproductive. Managing stakeholder trust is difficult because there are many different stakeholder groups, each with its own particular needs and perspective. That is, trust is multidimensional, and it's not obvious which dimension executives need to focus on when dealing with any particular constituency. To answer such questions, the authors conducted a study of stakeholder trust in four different organizations. They analyzed the relevance (if any) of various factors: benevolence, integrity, managerial competence, technical competence, transparency and value congruence. In essence, the study asked what matters -- and to whom. Some of the results were unexpected, and a few were even counterintuitive, leading to the following key insights: Transparency is overrated; integrity is not enough; the right kind of competence matters; building trust with one group can destroy it with another; and value congruence matters across the board. The new framework challenges some existing beliefs and sheds light on areas that companies would be wise not to ignore. Indeed, as the authors illustrate, fundamental misunderstandings about stakeholder trust have tripped up corporations such as Coca-Cola, Google, Apple, Delta Air Lines, Mattel and Sprint. A deeper knowledge of stakeholder trust will help businesses reap numerous benefits, including improved cooperation with suppliers, increased motivation and productivity among employees, enhanced loyalty from customers and higher levels of support from investors.

In recent years, researchers and consultants have advanced a number of customer metrics to explain the connections between customer behavior and growth. But these efforts have generated more smoke than heat. Despite claims to the contrary, the authors argue that the most popular metrics have shown only modest correlations to growth. None of them appear to be universally effective across all competitive environments. Early customer metrics tried to explain why people buy. To many companies, it came down to marketing. Yet, as the authors explain, the issues that affect customer loyalty are complex and go beyond standard marketing. This gave rise to a new category of metrics aimed at understanding customer experience. Although managers have learned a lot about the components of service quality (including reliability, responsiveness and empathy), the approach doesn't point managers to specific actions t. Beginning in the 1990s, many managers began paying closer attention to customer retention -- in particular, understanding dissatisfaction and satisfaction. But as the authors note, the linkages among satisfaction, customer behavior and positive financial outcomes have been modest. Today's most popular metric, the Net Promoter Score, focuses on how customer word of mouth -- both negative and positive -- can advance growth. Developed by Bain & Company Inc. consultant Fred Reichheld, it claims the ability to predict future growth from customer replies to one question: "How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" The authors found that the linkage between the NPS and subsequent customer behavior was modest at best; models based on multiple variables consistently outperformed models based on NPS. The authors are skeptical that there can be a single metric that reduces complex, multifaceted constructs to one or two dimensions; if there is, they write, "there's a good chance it will ignore one or more important aspects of the equation."

Many Western managers were introduced to lean production in 1990, with publication of "The Machine That Changed the World," based on a five-year study of Toyota by MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program. Since then, thousands of managers have used the principles of lean management to achieve faster cycle times, reduced defect rates and sharp gains in on-time deliveries. Lean management permits a marked reduction in inventory levels across the supply chain, which should result in better financial performance -- especially because companies achieve simultaneous declines in manufacturing and service costs. But, as the authors point out, the transition takes time and is full of obstacles. One predictable hurdle is the crisis in confidence that occurs when management isn't able to improve financial performance quickly. Lean transformations generally have short-term adverse impacts on the company's bottom line (that is, things get worse before better). Management needs to anticipate these challenges and explain them clearly. To help managers overcome the financial hurdles on the path to lean, the authors offer new tools for anticipating the deterioration in financial performance that occurs as a mass producer goes lean and for understanding the real performance improvements that take place during this period. Their approach, called "value-stream accounting," helps managers plan for the short-term financial impact, monitor progress, understand the operational improvements and develop strategies to maximize the longer-term benefit. Managers need to understand that the "bad" news isn't really bad -- it's part of the necessary process of establishing a stronger, more productive organization. The authors' approach replaces the traditional cost-accounting system with a transparent accounting system that tracks the company's value streams, which incorporate all of the value-adding and non-value-adding activities required to bring a product or service from start to finish.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In global supply chains, managers have consistently struggled with sharing valuable knowledge with buyers and suppliers across borders. Increasingly, talk of the "dark side" of collaborative relationships has left managers wondering who benefits most from knowledge-sharing activities: their companies or their partners. In order to find the answers to these questions, the authors conducted an in-depth study of more than 100 cross-national supply chain partnerships in the industrial chemicals, consumer durables, industrial packaging, toy and apparel industries in multiple locations in 19 countries. The authors found three types of knowledge sharing within the supply chain, each offering distinct benefits to buyers and suppliers: information sharing, joint sense making and knowledge integration. They also found that no matter how "diverse" the home cultures of the buyer and supplier companies, these differences had no impact on the propensity to share knowledge. Drawing on examples from the auto (Toyota), aerospace (Boeing, Lockheed Martin and United Technologies) and toy industries, they examine how different types of knowledge sharing can benefit buyers or sellers individually, but more importantly, how it can enhance the performance of the partnership as a whole. They conclude that, while suppliers generally benefit more from knowledge-sharing activities, both buyers and suppliers profit; understanding the benefits of absolute versus relative gains is critical when building world-class global supply chains. Sharing knowledge effectively means understanding that a disparity in benefits is part of what it takes to build partnerships that last.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Much lip service is given today to "values-based decision making," with the implication that the underlying values are "good" values, occupying high moral ground. But the fact is that all decisions--whether highly ethical, grossly unethical or anywhere in between--are values-based. That is, a decision necessarily involves an implicit or explicit trade-off of values. The values represented in a particular decision are not always easy to identify and evaluate, however, and the shortcuts that people often take in decision making can make deeper analysis of values all the more difficult. This article presents a framework designed to explore the values implicit in decisions. Moving systematically from concrete consequences to higher-ordered values, the framework, embodied in a decision-mapping technique, helps the decision maker think through what is gained and what is given up as a result of a decision. It also encourages an expansion of choice options, motivates a more balanced view of positive and negative consequences, and provides insight into the dynamics of decision making. When good people at times say yes to bad--unethical or illegal--actions, there are four possible reasons: (a) the organization's values are fuzzy to them, leading them to resort to undeveloped intuition and expedient criteria, (b) they may not be clear on their own values, (c) their interpretation of probability conveniently favors their a priori preferred option, or (d) they see no other options (they believe their hands are tied). Each of these possibilities reflects issues that senior managers need to account for directly in addressing ethical decision making in their organizations. Illustrating the framework through a case study based on actual events, the article aims to help managers build a culture that better integrates the organization's values into staff members' decisions.