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The managing director and CEO of PIMCO fondly remembers a boss who helped him find solace in failure. Bolstering your high performers when they fall short, he says, is the key to maximizing their potential.

When high-tech businesses lose a valued inventor, they often gain access to her new employer's intellectual capital. To take full advantage of the networking possibilities, technology companies should consider adopting alumni programs like those at consulting and law firms.

The founder of Wikipedia analyzes why wikis are becoming popular tools for sharing knowledge in the workplace. He encourages managers to provide institutional support for these highly practical forums but to be judicious about direct participation.

Advertising on the internet increases sales in brick-and-mortar stores even more than it does online. Individually, search ads and display ads have the power to drive purchases, but they get the best results when used together in a single campaign.

Most people believe that creative genius is a predetermined personality trait reserved for only a gifted few. Tharp - an award-winning choreographer who has revolutionized dance in our time - firmly rejects that notion. "Everyone can be creative," she says, "but you have to prepare for it with routine." The winner of a MacArthur fellowship, a Tony award, and two Emmys, Tharp has been the artistic force behind her own dance company, Broadway shows, and TV productions, and has created choreography for movies (including Hair and Amadeus) and leading ballet companies around the world. In this conversation with senior editor Diane Coutu, Tharp shares her thoughts about what it takes to achieve creative breakthroughs: hardheaded practicality, discipline, and ruthlessness about the work. She is unsentimental in her advice to aspiring innovators who worry that they don't have the right stuff: Get over yourself. Get angry, throw a tantrum - just do whatever it takes to get moving, and stop wasting time. Creativity is the result of habit, hard work, and constantly pursuing new challenges. Don't get hung up on originality or on failure; if you never fail, you'll stagnate. Mentors may help guide you to your goals, but don't choose people who will hold your hand. Choose mentors who can teach you, and invent them if you have to. In her no-nonsense way, Tharp also talks about her commitment to being uncompromising in her work, even when it exacted a price (such as forgone vacations and personal relationships) or was otherwise painful (when it involved firing extraordinary people). "It's a terrible analogy, but when it comes to your work, you have a war to win," she says. "Men are going to die."

Even among internet companies, Google stands out as an enterprise designed with the explicit goal of succeeding at rapid, profuse innovation. Much of what the company does is rooted in its legendary IT infrastructure, but technology and strategy at Google are inseparable and mutually permeable - making it hard to say whether technology is the DNA of its strategy or the other way around. Whichever it is, Iyer and Davenport, of Babson College, believe Google may well be the internet-era heir to such companies as General Electric and IBM as an exemplar of management practice. Google has spent billions of dollars creating its internet-based operating platform and developing proprietary technology that allows the company to rapidly develop and roll out new services of its own or its partners' devising. As owner and operator of its innovation "ecosystem," Google can control the platform's evolution and claim a disproportionate percentage of the value created within it. Because every transaction is performed through the platform, the company has perfect, continuous awareness of, and access to, the by-product information and is the hub of all germinal revenue streams. In addition to technology explicitly designed and built for innovation, Google has a well-considered organizational and cultural strategy that helps the company attract the most talented people in the land - and keep them working hard. For instance, Google budgets innovation into job descriptions, eliminates friction from development processes, and cultivates a taste for failure and chaos. While some elements of Google's success as an innovator would be very hard and very costly to emulate, others can be profitably adopted by almost any business.

Many of the management tools and techniques used in service businesses were designed to tackle the challenges of product companies. Although they are valuable to service managers, they aren't sufficient for success. In this article, Harvard Business School's Frei explains why and urges companies to add some new ones to the mix. After years of extensive research and analysis, she offers an approach for crafting a profitable service business based on four critical elements: the design of the offering, the funding mechanism, employee management, and customer management. Just like a product that's going to market, a service needs to be compellingly designed, and management must field a workforce capable of producing it at an attractive price. In addition, however, service firms must manage their customers, who do not simply use the service but who can also be integral to its production: Because customers' involvement as producers can wreak havoc on costs, companies must also develop creative ways to fund their distinctive offerings, by providing a self-service alternative, for example, or by offsetting expenses with operational savings. A close look at successful service businesses-Walmart, Commerce Bank, the Cleveland Clinic, and others-reveals that effective integration of the four elements is key. There is no "right" way to combine them; the appropriate design of one depends upon the other three. If managers don't get all four pulling together, they risk pulling the enterprise apart. Incumbents can fend off attacks from highly focused upstarts by becoming multifocused-that is, by pursuing multiple niches through optimized service models rather than trying to cover the entire waterfront with one model. Shared services within a firm (functions such as HR and finance) can help, since they will enable it to generate economies of scale and experience across models.

Can you summarize your company's strategy in 35 words or less? Would your colleagues express it the same way? Very few executives can honestly say yes to these simple questions. The thing is, companies with a clear, concise strategy statement - one that employees can easily internalize and use as a guiding light - often turn out to be industry stars. In this article, Harvard Business School's Collis and Rukstad provide a practical guide for crafting an effective strategy statement and include an in-depth example of how the St. Louis-based brokerage firm Edward Jones developed one that has generated success. Any strategy statement must begin with a definition of the objective, or the goal that the strategy is designed to achieve. Since most firms compete in a more or less unbounded landscape, it is also crucial to define the scope, or domain, of the business. Perhaps most important, companies need to have a clear sense of advantage - that is, the means by which the business will achieve its stated objective. Defining the objective, scope, and advantage requires trade-offs. If a firm pursues growth or size, profitability will take a backseat. If it chooses to serve institutional clients, it might ignore retail customers. If it derives its competitive advantage from scale economies, it will not be able to accommodate idiosyncratic customer needs. Before developing your strategy and crafting your statement, you'll want to carefully evaluate the industry landscape. This includes segmenting customers and identifying unique ways of delivering value to the ones the firm targets. It also calls for an analysis of competitors' current strategies and a prediction of how they might change. The key is to find the sweet spot where the firm's capabilities and customers' needs align in a way that competitors cannot match.

Problem customers can cost your business lots of money, but quickly ejecting them may not be the best way to relieve the burden. Mittal, of Rice University, Sarkees, of Penn State, and Murshed, of Towson University, explore the ins and outs of customer divestment. Using real-world examples, the authors show how deciding to end a relationship with a customer segment or individual can increase profitability, improve employee morale, address capacity constraints, and bolster a business strategy. However, divestment also comes with potential downsides for various constituencies, including employees and remaining customers, both of whom may wonder whether they're next. In addition, ethical and legal consequences - and the risk of bad publicity - always loom. Before you rush to action, say the authors, walk through their five-part customer divestment framework. First, reassess the context of present customer relationships, looking beyond simple profitability. You may find that the most productive option is to educate customers rather than drop them. In some cases, if you renegotiate the value proposition with them, both of you will win. In other instances, you'll want to migrate customers to other subsidiaries or providers, as long as the move is undertaken - and perceived to be conducted - in good faith. If it becomes necessary to terminate a customer relationship, use a direct, interpersonal approach. No business can afford to squander its customer base, so divestment should not be boiled down to determining merely who is profitable and who is not - the strategic consequences are too weighty. In the end, the decision about whether to divest might prove to be the toughest customer of all.

These days, boards are working overtime to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and other governance requirements meant to protect shareholders from executive wrongdoing. But as directors have become more hands-on with compliance, they've become more hands-off with long-range planning. That exposes corporations and their shareholders to another - perhaps even greater - risk, say professors Lorsch, of Harvard Business School, and Clark, of Harvard Law School. Boards are giving the long term short shrift for a number of reasons. Despite much heavier workloads, directors haven't rethought their patterns of operating - their meetings, committees, and other interactions. Compliance has changed their relationship with executives, however, turning directors into micromanagers who closely probe executives' actions instead of providing high-level guidance. Meanwhile, the pressure to meet quarterly expectations intensifies. Directors need to do a better job of balancing compliance with forward thinking. Boardroom effectiveness hinges most on the quality of directors and their interactions, the authors' research shows. Directors must apply their wisdom broadly, handling compliance work more efficiently and staying out of the weeds on strategic issues. Using their power with management to evangelize for long-term planning, they must take the lead on discussions about financial infrastructure, talent development, and strategy. Reserving sacrosanct time for such discussions, as Philips Electronics' board does at annual retreats, is an effective practice: After one recent retreat, Philips decided to exit the semiconductor business, where it was losing ground. Individual directors also must not shy away from asking tough questions and acting as catalysts on critical issues, such as grooming a successor to the CEO. In short, directors must learn to lead from the boardroom.

Work fills most executives' lives to the brim, leaving insufficient time for their families, their communities, and themselves. But Wharton professor Friedman suggests that, rather than view the problem as a set of trade-offs, executives use their leadership talents to benefit all four domains at once. The idea is to design experiments - small, short-term adjustments to their daily routines - that incorporate and mutually benefit the various aspects of their lives. If an experiment works out, everyone wins - employer, employee, family, and community; if it doesn't, it simply becomes a low-cost learning opportunity. Over time, the combination of small gains and lessons learned can lead to larger-scale transformation. The "Total Leadership" process involves identifying what's important to you, identifying what's important to everyone in your life, using those insights to creatively explore possibilities for experiments, and then selecting and implementing a few at a time. Drawing on decades of experience, Friedman has distilled nine categories of experiments that offer a manageable, systematic approach to the daunting task of conceiving projects with four-way benefits. In one such experiment, an executive might raise money for a charity her company sponsors by running a marathon with her son, thus simultaneously gaining greater visibility at work, spending more time with her family, giving back to the community, and improving her health. To move toward the goal of becoming a CEO, another executive might join the board of a nonprofit agency in his neighborhood together with his wife. Friedman suspects that there are far more opportunities for simultaneous benefits than people realize. They are there for the taking. You just have to know how to look for them and then find the support and courage to pursue them.

When a market or an industry goes into hypergrowth - that steep part of the S-curve where market share is usually determined - established companies may be at a disadvantage. Often they labor under organizational legacies that hamper their ability to respond to lightning-quick opportunities to increase their share. Izosimov, the CEO of VimpelCom, rode the hypergrowth wave in Russia's cell phone market and came out ahead. He offers five rules to help other companies survive a similar ride. Sell first and ask questions later. This is the time to capture as many new customers as possible - while making sure that you can actually deliver the promised products and services. Your business model doesn't have to be perfect at the outset, though; you can refine it as you go along. Don't try too hard to innovate. Of course you must understand the technological trends in your business, but your focus should be on the systems and solutions critical to your growing customer base, not on the strategic implications of future killer apps. Organize like McDonald's. Standardized organizational structures, technologies, and business processes allow your people to hit the ground running in new markets. In VimpelCom's case it would have been cheaper to start by piggybacking on local systems - but customer satisfaction would have suffered. Push decisions out to the front line. You simply can't afford decision paralysis during hypergrowth. Ceding operational decisions to those who have to deliver the performance saves time, triggers entrepreneurial behavior, and may even raise the quality of job candidates. Foster a can-do culture. Action-oriented companies - where people move on quickly from solutions that aren't working, communicate freely, and don't fear failure - will do best during hypergrowth. To foster such a culture, reward people for their successes and for implementing new ideas.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Thanks to a variety of online social applications -- including blogs, social networking sites like MySpace, user-generated content sites like YouTube and countless communities across the Web -- people are increasingly connecting with and drawing power from one other. In fact, customers are now beginning to define their own perspective on companies and brands, a view that's often at odds with the image a business wants to project. But organizations need not be on the defensive. Indeed, some savvy executives have already been turning this groundswell of customer power to their advantage. To investigate how, the authors interviewed managers and employees at over 100 companies that were rolling out social applications. From this research, they developed a strategic framework that businesses can use to implement social applications in a number of departments, including research and development, marketing, sales, customer support and operations.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Vigilant leaders are those who make a practice of being abundantly alert and deeply curious so that they can detect, and act on, the earliest signs of threat or opportunity. They seek to nurture equally vigilant employees by modeling such behavior and by providing incentives for managers to look for -- and interpret -- weak signals. While such icons as Andy Grove and Jack Welch exemplify vigilant CEOs, the trait remains in short supply. That is a conclusion the coauthors reached after surveying 119 global companies about their overall capacity for diligence. Among their findings: Just 23% of the businesses were run by CEOs who tried to pick up weak signals from the periphery. Most leaders, they theorize, rise to the top by demonstrating superior operational skills. To help leaders recognize and develop the habit of vigilance, the researchers examine in detail the three traits that characterize vigilant executives: focusing externally, applying strategic foresight and encouraging exploration by others. They also capture such leaders in action and provide examples in which a distinct lack of vigilance has led companies such as The Coca-Cola Co. to "miss the boat" by overlooking big opportunities. Companies like General Electric Co. and Johnson & Johnson have instituted systematic programs to instill employees with the qualities of vigilant leaders. The CEO of Denmark-based Novozymes A/S is curious, fast and enterprising, an attitude he nurtures in his workers. Organizations may encourage vigilant leadership by hiring specifically for it or by openly rewarding displays of it. Whatever strategy CEOs choose, the authors find that it is critical for them to set an example. After all, it is only through vigilance that companies can avoid hidden dangers -- and discover opportunities ripe for innovation.

Many companies have established technology-based platforms or virtual customer environments to partner with their customers in innovation and value creation. In pursuing such initiatives, most companies seem to focus primarily on customers' innovative contributions, paying less attention to customers' interaction experiences in the VCE. But the VCE experience has more profound implications--particularly for customer relationship management. In this article, the authors offer a framework to help companies understand and evaluate customers' VCE experience profile. The authors describe five customer roles in innovation and value co-creation: product conceptualizer, product designer, product tester, product support specialist and product marketer. Each role has something to offer. However, depending on the customer innovation role, the nature of the customer interactions and the technologies used in the VCE will vary. The VCE customer experience has four components: the pragmatic experience (its ability to provide information), the sociability experience (how it promotes group discussion), the usability experience (defined by the quality of the human-computer interactions) and the hedonic experience (relating to mental stimulation and entertainment). Drawing on examples from Microsoft, SAP, Samsung, BMW, Volvo and Ducati, the authors suggest strategies and practices to enhance customer experiences in VCEs and ensure favorable outcomes in terms of innovation management and CRM. Designing and implementing the right system can help companies improve innovation and CRM. Therefore, managers should view their VCE initiatives as an integral part of their overall innovation and customer strategies. What's more, the costs of implementation can vary widely. Therefore, companies need to be careful about selecting and implementing a portfolio of strategies and practices that meets the needs of the types of customer they want to engage in value co-creation.

Eager to grow through innovation, companies are looking to customers to guide them toward unmet needs. But these entities often end up with vague, unusable -- or even misleading -- customer input. Why? The authors studied 10,000 customer need statements from many industries and discovered that companies have not even established a definition of what a customer need is or how user input should be standardized in terms of structure and format. Too often, companies ask customers to react to potential solutions, rather than zeroing in on their expertise: the "job" they need to accomplish with the product or service, and at which steps that experience could use improvement. By deconstructing the job, companies can identify opportunities that are universal and long-standing. In addition, the authors say, companies can collect data that fits their innovation strategy. What the authors propose is a disciplined process for gathering customer requirements that will then be addressed by innovative ideas. They outline the six characteristics that a useful customer statement must possess, including measuring value strictly from a user's perspective -- and not from the factors the company believes should form the basis for the customer's evaluation. The most helpful statements also prompt a clear course of action, specifying what dimensions of the "job" need improvement, such as its sluggish pace or inconsistent quality. The authors set forth six rules for eliciting feedback that will yield the right raw data to craft customer statements that resonate across company functions, so that departments can unite around a single growth strategy. Finally, they define the two broad categories of customer requirements -- job statements and desired-outcome statements -- and link which type works best for different innovation strategies. For CEOs, the authors' message is forthright: Successful innovation is about process, not just the result of brainstorming good ideas.

The world isn't just flat. Alongside the dispersing centrifugal forces of globalization there are equally powerful centripetal forces that trigger economic concentration in a few dozen megaregions--areas like the Boston-New York-Washington corridor and the Shanghai-Nanjing-Hangzhou triangle--which account for the bulk of the globe's economic activity and innovation.

Most managers believe that filling their websites with a broad array of information diverts attention from their company's core offerings. A new global study, however, has revealed just the opposite: that such information increases customer engagement. The research also shows that exploiting consumers' desire for engagement is the strongest predictor of superior shareholder value for e-commerce companies.

The true power in the collective wisdom of crowds isn't in people's expressed opinions--it's buried deep inside your company's database. New tools are allowing organizations to mine their data for the "unconscious wisdom" that the crowd itself may never have thought to share.

The mere thought of being on the receiving end of verbal abuse hurts people's ability to perform complex tasks requiring creativity, flexibility, and memory recall, new research reveals.