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A strong services brand is built and sustained primarily by customers' interactions with the provider. A services branding model depicts the dynamics of brand creation. From the interrelationships among the presented brand, external communications, and customers' experiences emerge brand awareness, meaning, and ultimately, equity. Illustrates the services branding model by showing how one organization has created, extended, and protected a powerful brand through an unwavering commitment to the well being of its customers. Managers outside of healthcare can benefit from three branding lessons embedded in the Mayo Clinic story: (1) attend to organizational values; (2) play defense, not just offense; and (3) turn customers into marketers.

Search engines are key to the operation of the World Wide Web. This centrality, however, presents challenges: search engine providers face the problem of revenue generation when users expect free content, whilst advertisers need to attract the interest of searchers. The innovation that effectively addresses these challenges is the use of text advertisements based upon search topic, known as paid search. The method entails advertisers competing for top listing position through bidding in ongoing auctions and then paying when users click on their advertisements, making paid search a flexible and accountable form of advertising. Since its introduction in 1998, paid search has become the dominant form of online advertising and led to Google's $140 billion market capitalization in 2006. Analyzes the emergence of paid search and the mechanics of its operation, and offers managers guidance on its effective usage.

Saving the rain forest from yet another palm oil plantation would certainly garner a company favorable attention from environmentalists, but how would its shareholders react? Shows that by strategically practicing corporate social responsibility (CSR), a company can 'do well by doing good'; in other words, it can make a profit and make the world a better place at the same time. CSR is regarded as voluntary corporate commitment to exceed the explicit and implicit obligations imposed on a company by society's expectations of conventional corporate behavior. Hence, CSR is a way of promoting beneficial social trends in order to enhance society's basic order, which we define as consisting of obligations that cover both the legal framework and social conventions. Due to globalization, companies are now less constrained by society's basic order than they have been in the past. Because different countries have different laws and standards, there are more ways to get away with less than ideal behavior in the quest for greater profits. Nearly everyone agrees that this is not a good thing, but what can be done? Offers an understanding of CSR that could be the answer and contends that practicing CSR is not altruistic do-gooding, but rather a way for both companies and society to prosper. This is especially true when CSR is conceived as a long-range plan of action.

Based on a combination of exploratory field research and executive experience, proposes that defining the "Minimum Winning Game" (MWG) is a difficult yet critical responsibility of top management. It is essential to keep a high-technology venture focused and to enable managers to learn from their ongoing efforts in the face of rapidly evolving technological and market uncertainties. Achieving the MWG requires the intelligent balancing of three "key drivers of strategic action": technology, product, and strategy development. Finally, instilling the discipline necessary to define the MWG and balance the drivers of strategic action is facilitated by the use of a strategy-making process informed by key data gathering and analysis tools such as the Market Requirement Document and the Product Requirement Document.

Despite the boom in IT-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO), clients and vendors alike are struggling to grasp the impact of their relationship and the significance of the transfer of organizational assets between them. The limited attention to BPO risks is not surprising, since over 90% of the outsourcing projects handle IT infrastructure or business processes for what most companies regard as non-core activities, such as payroll, transaction processing, and billing. Provides an overview of the different types of risks that a BPO client is faced with, including the damaging impact to client companies in areas such as customer services, overall operations costs, information security, business continuity, and other short-term market performance metrics. In an attempt to address this issue, introduces a mechanism by which BPO clients and vendors can work together to solve outsourcing project management problems and manage the organizational and market performance risks.

Most firms struggle to adapt to discontinuous changes in their environment--witness Lego's very slow adaptation to the world of digital devices and online games. One key reason for this is that they get locked into established networks of relationships and struggle to break out of these relationships and establish new ones. Examines the approaches firms can use to build relationships with new prospective partners that are more suited to the opportunities and threats they face in new competitive environments. Identifies the key barriers that prevent firms from accessing these "networks for discontinuous innovation" and presents specific strategies that firms can adopt to overcome them. The challenge involves three steps: finding the right partners to engage with, forming relationships with them, and then building high-performing networks. By following the guidelines proposed, firms will be more likely to create high-performing networks for discontinuous innovation.

Executives today must implement large-scale organizational change initiatives in ever-tighter time frames with fewer resources. Yet, anticipated performance outcomes often do not materialize as internal resistance slows or derails their change initiatives. A combined assessment of culture and informal structure can help identify barriers to change and facilitate change initiatives. Based on work with 10 organizations, demonstrates how this approach can help drive change through people and values in certain network positions; diagnose cultural drivers of network fragmentation; identify dominant beliefs or paradigms impeding cultural change; and intervene with a balanced emphasis on instrumental and expressive relationships.

By combining viral-marketing tools with mass marketing, you can extend your reach at minimal cost.

In a word--self-preservation. And they're just as afraid to share innovative ideas as to blow the whistle.

New research confirms that the bigger the employees' smiles, the happier the customers.

The sophisticated technologies used to understand costs don't illuminate revenue sources well. For that you need a whole new breed of accountant.

Not all that much, empirical data from two medical researchers suggest.

David Whyte talks about how poetry begets courageous conversation and, in turn, better leadership.

When it comes to judging the success of innovations, the important measure to track isn't sales; it's net prices.

Your problem solvers could not only be out in the wider world, but also in the wide reaches of your own organization.

Canadian firms are profoundly influenced by the Canadian capital markets' narrow definition of what constitutes 'risky behavior,' and the unfortunate result, says the author, is a dearth of globally-competitive Canadian companies. It is exceedingly unhelpful to Canadian firms for the capital markets to fixate on the risks of globalizing while largely ignoring the risks of staying at home, he says. In doing so, they avoid the consequences of failed efforts to globalize, while at the same time eliminating much of the upside that they could also enjoy through the successful globalization of Canadian firms. In discouraging such globalization, the capital markets are inadvertently threatening Canada's long-term prosperity in an increasingly-interconnected world.

In this interview, the director of Wharton's Center for Risk and Decision Sciences explains why the private sector must take a leadership role in assuring a safer environment, and how our increasing interconnectedness breeds risk. The interview touches on 'extreme-event preparedness' and how security will soon become a marketing argument. The time has come to get creative, says Kerjan, and a first step is to acknowledge that the challenges of large-scale risks have become vital strategy and policy issues for major stakeholders - firms, governments, non-governmental organizations and the media. The key, he says, might lie in the ability to imagine and act more collaboratively, as the 9/11 Commission report made very clear.

When it comes time to generating business growth by bringing new products and services into the world, the stakes are high, and risk is everywhere. Risk, in the traditional business sense, is an assessment of the downside that might result from taking a particular action. If the perceived level of risk is too high, people working within a business-as-usual paradigm look for a less-risky alternative, or even forego action altogether. This negative definition of risk simply doesn't exist in the lexicon of most designers. The authors, from leading design firm IDEO, show that for designers, risk isn't a measure of 'the downside', but instead, it is a measure of upside and opportunity. If the risk isn't great enough, they might well ask themselves, "why bother?" The authors provide seven initial steps that managers can take to embrace the designer's approach to risk.

Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon introduced the concept of 'bounded rationality' as "a behavioral model in which human rationality is very much bounded by the situation and by human computational powers. In this article, the authors propose that awareness can also be bounded, and that this occurs when people fail to see, seek, use or share highly relevant and readily-perceivable information during the decision-making process. They describe three types of bounded awareness: inattentional blindness, change blindness and focalism. As the authors show, the failure to recognize these psychological limitations poses an even greater danger than the limitations themselves.

The vast majority of today's business decisions are made with incomplete information and in the face of an uncertain future. While risk can never be completely avoided, there are ways for managers to take uncertainty into account in their strategic planning. Indeed, effective decision making depends on managers clearly understanding what their firm can control and what factors are beyond its control. The systematic identification and assessment of risk, a frank discussion of risk tolerance, and the use of a variety of the techniques described here can go a long way to achieving effective strategic planning in the face of risk. The author outlines seven techniques that can be used to mitigate risk and uncertainty, including risk assessment, risk transfer and scenario analysis.