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Most managers consider global expansion to be an imperative, and cross-border expansion commands wider support than cross-business expansion. This article not only counteracts such a bias, but provides a framework for valuing cross-border moves, called the ADDING Value Scorecard. There are two broad approaches to evaluating strategies: in terms of principles and in terms of analyzing their implications for value. While principles may help guide routine decisions, they should be seen in the context of important decisions as ways of complementing analysis of value rather than substituting for it. The ADDING Value Scorecard’s first component is Adding volume, and is followed by three levers for improving margins: Decreasing costs, Differentiating, and Improving industry attractiveness. The last two components, Normalizing risks and Generating knowledge (and other resources), are add-ons that reflect large discontinuities that can arise at national borders. As an example, the scorecard is applied to a cross-border move that clearly failed the ADDING Value test — the merger, recently dissolved, of Daimler-Benz and Chrysler.

Entrepreneurs are, by definition, pioneers in that they innovate new products/services, create new processes, open new markets, or organize new industries. Dramatic changes in the global environment suggest that successful entrepreneurs must master three key strategies: (1) develop a clear vision; (2) manage cash creatively, or learn to "bootstrap"; and (3) be able to persuade others to commit to the venture using social skills. This article discusses pioneering strategies and offers guidance on how to implement these.

Companies commonly adopt "the customer is always right" maxim as a basic premise for delivering quality service. A close examination of customer behavior, however, reveals that customers can be not only wrong but also blatantly unjust. Unfair customers take advantage of being "always right" by demanding unwarranted privileges and compensation, adversely affecting companies and, in some cases, employees and other customers. Companies can actually strengthen their ability to deliver quality service by dealing effectively with unfair customers.

Services dominate the world's established economies (such as those of the US, Germany, and Finland) and are becoming increasingly important in developing economies, including those of China and India. Yet most companies, national governments, and universities do not put much energy into service research, innovation, or education. This ironic juxtaposition of facts has led us, along with others, to promote a focus on service research and service innovation across companies and institutions. We call this the "service imperative." In this article, we present our view of the service imperative as a burning platform that is giving birth to many hopeful directions for the future of the global economy. We believe that companies and nations which embrace the service imperative will prosper and benefit, as will individuals who do the same. We also contend that widespread embracing of the service imperative can lead to improved quality of life for people worldwide.

Globalization leads to increased business opportunities and changing rules of the game. Different institutional settings and different organizational players continuously shape business opportunities through different public policy processes operating in various locales. Herein, we develop a framework, based on the work of Nobel laureate Douglas North, which enables managers to determine essential considerations of public policy arenas where they may operate or consider operating.

In this article, we examine the evolution of corporate governance reforms in the emerging economies of China and India. We first describe the two major driving forces behind governance reforms in these countries: privatization and globalization. After summarizing the evolution of governance reforms in each context, we identify four major obstacles that impede their implementation in both countries, namely: (1) lack of incentives, (2) power of the dominant shareholder, (3) underdeveloped external monitoring systems, and (4) shortage of qualified independent directors. Next, we highlight practical implications of these governance challenges for foreign firms contemplating, or already involved in, major investments in these emerging economies. We emphasize that foreign firms that are sensitive to context-specific challenges are more likely to put in place appropriate contractual or other safeguards, as well as identify more practical and meaningful forms of participation in the governance of their ventures. Finally, we conclude with some implications for future research.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. An industry platform involves not only one company's technology or service but also an ecosystem of complements to it that are usually produced by a variety of businesses. As a result, becoming a platform leader requires different business and technology strategies than those needed to launch a successful stand-alone product. Companies should decide early on whether they want to pursue a platform or a product strategy. The authors describe two fundamental approaches to building platform leadership, which they call "coring" and "tipping." "Coring" is using a set of techniques to create a platform by making a technology "core" to a particular technological system and market. When pursuing a coring strategy, would-be platform leaders should think about issues such as how to make it easy for third parties to provide add-ons to the technology and how to encourage third-party companies to create complementary innovations. Examples of successful coring include Google Inc. in Internet search and Qualcomm Inc. in wireless technology. However, the authors note, Qualcomm faces opposition from some companies in its business ecosystem. The authors cite EMC Corp.'s WideSky initiative in the early 2000s as an attempt at coring that did not succeed. EMC's competitors were not eager to adopt WideSky as a platform and instead supported an open-standards one managed through an industry group. "Tipping" is the set of activities that helps a company "tip" a market toward its platform rather than some other potential one. Examples of tipping include Linux's growth in the market for Web server operating systems; the Linux case study, the authors point out, demonstrates the power of a coalition of service providers and users to tip a market by supporting a particular platform. Another tipping strategy is for a company to bundle features from an adjacent market into its existing platform; the authors call this "tipping across markets."

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Just a few decades ago, organizations could stay the course with one strategy for a period of years. The idea that a new vision would be needed, perhaps with some frequency, would have been treated with mild amusement, if not outright derision. But competitive realities have forced executives to rethink what their companies are doing, and how they are doing it, over time. Automakers see profitability and market share evaporating. Media companies face the hostile world of disruptive technology. Financial institutions discover that a one-country focus is a path to extinction. In such conditions, bold visions are called for -- and will be called for again, probably sooner than any executive would like. The problem is the gap between inspiration and implementation. CEOs often get off to a rousing start, energizing top managers by presenting a bold new vision at a lavish off-site meeting. The excitement, however, often dies down within a few months, and the vision blurs into an indistinct image. Eventually, it fades from sight completely, and the organization returns to its previous ways. To find out why this gap between inspiration and implementation is so common, the authors conducted research on about 40 global companies. In this article, they explain several common reasons for the derailment of bold visions such as failure to focus, failure to engage the workforce and neglecting the skills and talents of the organization. They go on to offer a five-stage framework that executives can use to ensure that their visions become more than just pipe dreams. Examples of companies that have successfully followed this path -- including Deutsche Bank, the BBC, Nissan, Mattel and Starbucks -- are drawn on both to illustrate the challenges and to provide guidance to those who want to turn bold visions into reality.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. As the war for talent intensifies, there is growing evidence that a company's corporate social responsibility activities comprise a legitimate and compelling way to attract and retain good employees. To burnish their social responsibility credentials and thereby attract and retain talent, CEOs of companies such as Home Depot, Delta Air Lines and SAP recently pledged to deploy millions of employee volunteers on various community projects. Indeed, many companies big and small, including Cisco Systems, General Electric and IBM, view employee engagement in CSR as a "strategic imperative." But few organizations have figured out how to use CSR properly as part of their employee engagement efforts. They fall short of communicating their CSR intentions and initiatives to their employees and tend to keep CSR decisions in the hands of senior managers. At the same time, they fail to understand which CSR initiatives work best to excite which groups of employees. All in all, they fail to capture CSR's considerable potential to help them fight the war for talent. When used properly, CSR can strengthen employees' engagement by creating the feeling that they are part of a larger corporate mission and that the company shares their values, and by helping them enhance their own social connections. This article draws on recent studies to confirm that CSR can yield substantial returns for both employees and the company. The research demonstrates that CSR initiatives can fulfill employees' needs and motivate them to identify strongly with their employers, as is very much the case at The Timberland Co. Using frequent verbatims from study participants, the article portrays the challenges that companies face in making the most of their CSR strategies internally. The authors then recommend five practical steps that can help business leaders increase CSR's effectiveness as a lever for talent management, acquisition, and retention.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

The western world bought the wrong thinking system from Aristotle, says the author, and this ranks as one of the worst investment decisions we ever made. The thinking system we invested in was Aristotle's 'analytics', which monopolizes what most people characterize as 'thinking.' As a result, our thinking processes remain dominated by the culture of the sciences, and traditional approaches to strategy sit squarely at the table of logic and Science. But Aristotle actually conceived of two thinking systems, not one: he also conceived an entirely different thinking pathway that combined invention, judgment and decision wrapped up in a social process of debate. He called this process 'rhetoric', which the author calls 'design thinking' -- the Second Road to truth. The critical difference between the two roads is best understood by the different domains they address: analytics is the road by which we diagnose what already exists; rhetoric is the road by which we design alternative futures.

Despite the differences between their fields, ecologists have produced many insights that are potentially useful to strategic management. The authors show that Ecology and Strategy have much to learn from one another, and that an exchange between the fields can lead to the development of a richer and more compelling understanding of organizational strategy. They identify and describe three particular areas for cross-pollination between the disciplines: demography and competition; positional advantages; and inertia and change.

In a highly-connected world, signals from the periphery of our environment are initially difficult to capture, but they can be vital early warning signs of both threats and opportunities. Unfortunately, most of us are 'passive scanners' of our environment, say the authors: we wait for information to reach us, and deal with it as it arrives. The danger in this practice is that it is all-too easy to miss unexpected and unfamiliar weak signals on the periphery - that blurry zone at the edge of our vision, where not many people or firms focus their attention. The authors provide four guidelines for addressing the periphery of your organization.

Can we change our brains to sharpen perception and memory, increase speed of thought, and heal learning problems? According to the author, we can, and he describes how in this excerpt from his book The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (Viking Penguin, 2007). The author shows how leading-edge scientists are challenging the view that we are stuck with the brain we have at birth. For instance, the 'Merzenich brain', featured in the article, is structured by its constant collaboration with the world. The evidence Doidge assembles provides hope for life-long learning that defies aging: "Everything that you can see happen in a young brain can happen in an older brain."

Business strategists tend to be well-versed in the identification and analysis of constraints, says the author, but what of possibilities? If the ability to see new possibilities is fundamental to creating innovative designs - whether of products, cities or business strategies - what do we know about state-of-the-art possibility thinking? Not much, she says. Business strategy has historically been a largely analytic endeavor, with relatively little attention paid to the creative aspects of strategy formulation. She describes eight ways to illuminate new possibilities taken from Engineering success stories. Engineers have long viewed design as a core activity, says the author, and managers would be wise to turn to them for creative inspiration.

In an age where the digital machine can outperform the human mind at any task that can be represented as an algorithm, Integrative Thinking is the best revenge. The author argues that this particular kind of thinking still matters to success in business, and that figuring out how to do more of it requires a new conceptualization of thinking in terms of its integrative functions - the functions that produce successful integration across knowledge and interactional domains and confer agency upon decision makers. He describes three types of integrative thinking and why they stand out for the value they create: substantive integration; interactional integration and agency (the integration of seeing, feeling, thinking and action.)