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Future investments in knowledge management should focus less on enhancing systems that track down information and more on helping employees use what they've found.

The nationality of global companies has become less ambiguous and more strategically important in recent decades.

The editor of the "Annals of Improbable Research" observes that leeches have a thing or two to teach us about so-called best practices.

According to the Gallup Organization, consumerism is becoming a way of life in India.

Consumers these days prefer authenticity to purity, so brands should capitalize on their flaws, or "shadow" attributes.

Consistent corporate communications depend less on specific organizational structures than on carefully designed strategy.

E-commerce is shifting--from making purchases online to going shopping online, a social experience in which people interact in a 3-D Web space.

Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart discusses the challenges of filling big shoes and managing a team whose members all aspire to be number one.

Predictions of global economic integration are at odds with the facts: Most types of economic activity that might cross borders are still largely focused at home.

Companies today glorify the executive who logs 100-hour workweeks, the road warrior who lives out of a suitcase in multiple time zones, and the negotiator who takes a red-eye to make an 8 a.m. meeting. But to Dr. Charles A. Czeisler, the Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, this kind of corporate behavior is the antithesis of high performance. In fact, he says, it endangers employees and puts their companies at risk. In this interview, Czeisler describes four neurobiological functions that affect sleep duration and quality as well as individual performance. When these functions fall out of alignment because of sleep deprivation, people operate at a far lower level of performance than they would if they were well rested. Czeisler goes on to observe that corporations have all kinds of policies designed to protect employees--rules against smoking, sexual harassment, and so on--but they push people to the brink of self-destruction by expecting them to work too hard, too long, and with too little sleep. The negative effects on cognitive performance, Czeisler says, can be similar to those that occur after drinking too much alcohol: "We now know that 24 hours without sleep or a week of sleeping four or five hours a night induces an impairment equivalent to a blood alcohol level of .1%. We would never say, 'This person is a great worker! He's drunk all the time!' yet we continue to celebrate people who sacrifice sleep for work." Czeisler recommends that companies institute corporate sleep policies that discourage scheduled work beyond 16 consecutive hours as well as working or driving immediately after late-night or overnight flights. A sidebar to this article summarizes the latest developments in sleep research.

Over the past 20 years, waves of liberalization have all but washed away protectionist barriers in developing countries. As multinational corporations from North America, Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea stormed into the emerging markets, many local companies lost market share or sold off businesses--but some fought back. India's Mahindra & Mahindra, China's Haier Group, and many other corporations in developing countries have held their own against the onslaught, restructured their businesses, exploited new opportunities, and built world-class companies that are today giving their global rivals a run for their money. In this article, the authors, citing the results of their six-year study of "emerging giants," describe the three strategies these businesses used to become effective global competitors--despite facing financial and bureaucratic disadvantages in their home markets. Some capitalized on their knowledge of local product markets. The Philippines' Jollibee Foods, for instance, has profitably battled McDonald's because it realizes that Filipinos like their burgers to have a particular soy and garlic taste. Some have exploited their knowledge of local talent and capital markets, thereby serving customers both at home and abroad in a cost-effective manner. India's software companies, for instance, recognized the possibility of providing services to overseas customers at least a decade before Western companies even considered hiring Indian software professionals. And some emerging giants have exploited institutional voids to create profitable businesses. China's Emerge Logistics, for instance, helps foreign companies navigate the country's disjointed transportation system and baffling bureaucracy, guiding them all the way from ports to retail outlets. The authors' research indicates there's more than one way to skin the proverbial cat: Some emerging-market companies compete in several countries, but others sell only at home.

Employers can choose from lots of tools when they want to encourage employees to work together toward a new corporate goal. One of the rarest managerial skills is the ability to understand which tools will work in a given situation and which will misfire. Cooperation tools fall into four major categories: power, management, leadership, and culture. Choosing the right tool, say the authors, requires assessing the organization along two critical dimensions: the extent to which people agree on what they want and the extent to which they agree on cause and effect, or how to get what they want. The authors plot on a matrix where various organizations fall along these two dimensions. Employees represented in the lower-left quadrant of the model, for example, disagree strongly both about what they want and on what actions will produce which results. Those in the upper-right quadrant agree on both dimensions. Different quadrants call for different tools. When employees share little consensus on either dimension, for instance, the only methods that will elicit cooperation are "power tools" such as fiat, force, and threats. Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito wielded such devices effectively. So did Jamie Dimon, current CEO of JPMorgan Chase, during the bank's integration with Bank One. For employees who agree on what they want but not on how to get it--think of Microsoft in 1995--leadership tools, such as vision statements, are more appropriate. Some leaders are blessed with an instinct for choosing the right tools--Continental Airlines' Gordon Bethune, General Electric's Jack Welch, and IBM's Lou Gerstner are all examples. Others can use this framework to help select the most appropriate tools for their circumstances.

Three years ago, consultants Laurence Prusak and Thomas H. Davenport asked prominent management thinkers to name their gurus and reported the results in HBR. James G. March appeared on more lists than any other person except Peter Drucker. A professor emeritus in management, sociology, political science, and education at Stanford University, March has taught courses in subjects as diverse as organizational psychology, behavioral economics, leadership, rules for killing people, friendship, computer simulation, and statistics. He is perhaps best known for his pioneering contributions to organization and management theory. March's accomplishments in that field, and in many others, have conferred on him an almost unprecedented reputation as a rigorous scholar and a deep source of wisdom. As University of Chicago professor John Padgett wrote in the journal Contemporary Sociology, "March's influence, unlike that of any of his peers, is not limited to any possible subset of the social science disciplines; it is pervasive." March approaches thought aesthetically; he cares that ideas have "some form of elegance or grace or surprise." His poetic sensibility can be felt in the metaphors he has created over the years--the "garbage can theory" of organizational choice, for instance, and the "hot-stove effect" in learning. In this edited interview with HBR senior editor Diane Coutu, March shares his thinking on aesthetics, leadership, the role of folly, and the irrelevance of relevance when it comes to the pursuit of ideas. He also comments on the fundamental differences between academic and experiential knowledge, underscoring the need for both.

Two-sided networks, or platforms, often enjoy significantly greater returns at scale than traditional value chains. Despite these advantages, many companies struggle to develop these platforms in a sustainable way. This largely stems from an assumption that products with network effects will operate in the same way as traditional products, leading managers to make highly flawed decisions. In this article, the authors draw on recent theoretical work to guide executives negotiating the challenges of two-sided networks, touching on how to develop a pricing scheme, how to manage "winner take all" dynamics, and how to address the threat of envelopment by an adjacent platform. There are no easy answers, but thinking through the challenges presented in this piece will give you the tools you need to move forward with confidence.

To be competitive, companies must grow innovative new businesses. Corporate entrepreneurship, however, isn't easy. New ventures face innumerable barriers and seldom mesh smoothly with well-established systems, processes, and cultures. Nonetheless, success requires a balance of old and new organizational traits--and unless companies keep those opposing forces in equilibrium, their new businesses will flounder. The authors describe the challenges companies face when they pursue new businesses, as well as the usual problematic responses to those challenges. Such companies, they say, must perform three balancing acts: 1) Develop strategy by trial and error, which includes narrowing potential choices, learning from small samples, using prototypes to test business models, tracking progress through nonfinancial measures, and knowing how and when to pull the plug on a new venture; 2) Find the best combination of old and new operational processes by staffing new ventures with "mature turks," changing veterans' thinking, knowing which capabilities to develop and which to acquire, and having old and new businesses share responsibility for operating decisions; 3. Strike the right balance of integration and autonomy by assigning both corporate and operating sponsors to new ventures, establishing criteria for handoffs to existing divisions, and using creative organizational structures. The authors provide a detailed look at IBM's Emerging Business Opportunity system, which manages all these balancing acts simultaneously.

In 1976, Genentech, the first biotechnology company, was founded by a young venture capitalist and a university professor to exploit recombinant DNA technology. Thirty years and more than $300 billion in investments later, only a handful of biotech firms have matched Genentech's success or even shown a profit. No avalanche of new drugs has hit the market, and the long-awaited breakthrough in R&D productivity has yet to materialize. This disappointing performance raises a question: Can organizations motivated by the need to make profits and please shareholders successfully conduct basic scientific research as a core activity? The question has largely been ignored, despite intense debate over whether business's invasion of basic science--long the domain of universities and nonprofit research institutions--is limiting access to discoveries, thereby slowing advances in science. Biotech has not lived up to its promise, says the author, because its anatomy, which has worked well in other high-tech sectors, can't handle the fundamental challenges facing drug R&D: profound, persistent uncertainty and high risks rooted in the limited knowledge of human biology; the need for the diverse disciplines involved in drug discovery to work together in an integrated fashion; and barriers to learning, including tacit knowledge and murky intellectual property rights, which can slow the pace of scientific advance. A more suitable anatomy would include increased vertical integration; a smaller number of closer, longer collaborations; an emphasis by universities on sharing rather than patenting scientific discoveries; more cross-disciplinary academic research; and more federal and private funding for translational research, which bridges basic and applied science. With such modifications, science can be a business.

For all the talk about management as a science, experienced executives know that strategic decisions and tactics depend heavily on context. No one understood this better than Theodore Levitt (1925-2006). A Harvard Business School professor renowned as a founder of modern marketing, he sought above all to use his knowledge to serve the needs of businesspeople. In a series of powerfully insightful--and delightfully written--essays in Harvard Business Review, he provoked readers to reexamine their settled thinking about vital issues so that they could better meet the needs of customers. Levitt had the gifts of provocation and generalization, offering ideas that startled readers but compelled them to think creatively and intelligently about their companies. Writing in a period when business was held in far less esteem than it is today, he rejected the easy contempt that many intellectuals had for managers and consumers. Levitt carried that practical approach to his tenure at Harvard Business Review from 1985 to 1989. As one of HBR's most intellectual and most populist chief editors, he understood that the magazine's main purpose was to serve as a kind of sophisticated translation, clarifying authors' raw--and sometimes rough -- ideas for impatient, time-pressed readers. This tribute, a look into one of business's great minds, offers excerpts from six of Levitt's most influential HBR articles: "Marketing Myopia" (July-August 1960), "After the Sale Is Over..." (September-October 1983), "Marketing Success Through Differentiation--of Anything" (January-February 1980), "Production-Line Approach to Service" (September-October 1972), "The Globalization of Markets" (May-June 1983), and "Creativity Is Not Enough" (May-June 1963).

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Most large-scale change efforts fail to meet their expectations. A major problem is that even the most advanced change models will stumble when they face organizational designs and management practices that are inherently anti-change. The truth is that the effectiveness of change efforts is largely determined by organizational design, or how a company's structure, processes, reward systems, and other features are orchestrated over time to support one another as well as the company's strategic intent, identity, and capabilities. In a world that is perpetually changing, an organization's design must support the idea that the implementation and reimplementation of a strategy is a continuous process. However, a number of traditional organizational design features tend to discourage change. Thus, to transform themselves into organizations that are "built to change," companies need to rethink a number of these basic design assumptions with respect to managing talent (forget about job descriptions and redefine the relationship between company and worker), reward systems (implement a "person-based" pay system), structure (redesign the organization to maximize its "surface area"), information and decision processes (scrap the annual-budget process and move decision making closer to the front lines), and leaders (replace hierarchical command-and-control with shared leadership).

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. According to conventional wisdom, companies resemble organisms destined to pass through the stages of start-up, scaling, maturity, and decline. In reality, business opportunities--and not firms--pass through these stages, and most organizations consist of multiple opportunities arrayed across the different stages of the life cycle. Executives who understand this crucial distinction can view their organization as a portfolio of opportunities that requires constant re-jiggering to balance the demands of the present with the promise of the future. The authors suggest that, when assessing any opportunity portfolio, executives should remain on the lookout for the following common pathologies: waiting too long to exit a declining business, failing to salvage usable pieces of a business that is shut down, shunning promising new markets because of an overly conservative fiscal approach, trying to scale too many business opportunities so that none of them receives the necessary resources, applying the same management style to business opportunities at different life cycle stages, and erring on the side of loss aversion.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Early research in e-commerce projected that online retailing would spiral into a never-ending price war. But recent research has shown that customers are more likely to pay higher prices to online retailers of high quality that they trust. But how do customers evaluate quality in online retailing? What are the specific aspects of an online transaction that customers value and use to distinguish one site from another? The authors explored these issues by surveying customers who had recently engaged in an online retail transaction to determine how they evaluate the quality of their experiences with online retailers. The results demonstrated that customers' perceptions of quality and satisfaction with online purchases depend on three things: interaction with the Web site, delivery of the product, and how prepared retailers are to address problems when they occur. Of the three, product delivery has the strongest influence on customer satisfaction and future purchase intentions. The authors further break down each of the three aspects of quality to create a complete picture of what it takes to build a trusting relationship with customers in an e-commerce environment.