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In this follow-up piece to his article "Hardball: Five Killer Strategies for Trouncing the Competition" (HBR, April 2004), George Stalk Jr. of the Boston Consulting Group offers another approach for prevailing over rivals. Strategic hardball is about playing rough and tough with competitors; strategic curveball is about outfoxing them. It involves getting rivals to do something dumb that they otherwise wouldn't (that is, swing at a pitch that appears to be in the strike zone but isn't) or not do something smart that they otherwise would (that is, fail to swing at a pitch that's in the strike zone but appears not to be). Stalk describes four types of curveball: First, draw your rival out of the profit zone. Lure competitors into disadvantageous areas--for example, by competing for, but intentionally failing to win, the business of less profitable customers. Second, borrow techniques from unexpected places. Using the hardball tactic of plagiarizing good ideas, put rivals off balance by importing techniques from other industries--for example, employing the retailer's hard sell in the stodgy world of retail financial services. Third, disguise how you attain your success. Veil your methods by achieving an advantage through unlikely means--for example, generating product sales through your service operations. Finally, let rivals misinterpret the reasons for your success. Allow them to act on conventional but incomplete explanations for your success--for example, squeezing costs rather than aggressively utilizing assets. The author provides extended examples of these curveball strategies in action at companies such as the industrial-cleaning chemical supplier Ecolab and the Australian airline Jetstar.

For years, sales managers at many companies have relied on top performers and sheer numbers of sales reps to stay competitive. But while they may have squeaked by on this wing-and-a-prayer technique, their sales teams haven't thrived the way they once did. Today's most successful sales leaders are taking a more scientific approach. Savvy managers are reshaping their tactics in response to changing markets. They are reaching out to new customers in innovative ways. And they are increasing productivity by helping the reps they already have make the most of their skills and resources. Leaders who take a scientific approach to sales force effectiveness have learned to use four levers to boost their reps' productivity in a predictable and manageable way. First, they systematically target their firms' offerings, matching the right products with the right customers. Second, they optimize the automation, tools, and procedures at their disposal, providing reps with the support they need to boost sales. Third, they analyze and manage their reps' performance, measuring both internal processes and results to determine their teams' strengths and weaknesses. Fourth, they pay close attention to sales force deployment--how well sales, support, marketing, and delivery resources are matched to customers. These four levers can help sales leaders increase productivity across the board, the authors say, though they have the greatest impact on lower ranked performers. The overall effect of increasing the average sales per employee can be exponential; it means a company won't have to rely on just a few talented individuals to stay competitive. This is especially important because finding and keeping star salespeople is more difficult than ever. What's more, managers who optimize the sales forces they already have can see returns they never thought possible.

PC maker Lenovo started out as a distributor of equipment made by IBM and other companies; now it has formed a joint venture with IBM and will eventually affix its own logo to its computers. Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. (SAIC) started out manufacturing vehicles for Volkswagen and GM; now it's preparing to sell its own cars in China, Europe, and North America. Lenovo and SAIC represent a host of formerly anonymous makers of brand-name products that are breaking out of their defined roles and pushing the brands themselves aside. In this article, the authors explore the double-edged relationships original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) forge with their contract manufacturers (CMs). On the one hand, an OEM can reduce its labor costs, free up capital, and improve worker productivity by outsourcing all the manufacturing of a product. The company can then concentrate on value-adding activities--research and development, product design, and marketing, for instance. On the other hand, an OEM that retains a CM may find itself immersed in a melodrama replete with promiscuity (the ambitious CM pursues liaisons with other OEMs), infidelity (the OEM's retailers and distributors shift their business to the upstart CM), and betrayal (the brazen CM transmits the OEM's intellectual property to the OEM's rivals or keeps it for itself when the contract is up). OEMs cannot simply terminate their outsourcing arrangements--they need CMs to keep specializing, adding value, and staying competitive. But OEMs can manage these relationships so that they don't become weak or the CMs too strong. Doing so requires modesty about revealing trade secrets; caution about whom one consorts with; and a judicious degree of intimacy, loyalty, and generosity toward partners and customers.

Predictions made by large groups often turn out to be right, but sometimes they're dead wrong. Here's when not to trust the majority.

By approaching HIV infection among Russian and Botswanan miners as a financial problem, a Deloitte consultant and a mine executive created programs that improved employees' health and reduced the costs to the mines.

Dan Williams, known for his work on mobile phones when he was at Motorola, talks about evolution in design.

Procurement has increasingly become central to companies' strategies--and even drives innovation.

Companies are buying millions of dollars' worth of renewable energy credits (RECs) to offset the carbon produced by the electricity they use. But RECs have little effect on the environment, the author says.

According to surveys conducted in 1965, 1985, and 2005, attitudes about executive women have improved, but not as much as men think.

Predicting entertainment mega-hits is a risky proposition. Instead, marketers can adopt five strategies to exploit consumers' social influence as it emerges.

HR departments should be held responsible for their companies' performance, not just for programs that provide services and support to staff.

Greater job mobility among engineers and scientists has caused the extended social networks of inventors to become increasingly connected. As a result, invention increasingly occurs within small worlds (or social networks) that straddle firm boundaries. Small worlds provide both strategic opportunity and potential threat; while they can increase creativity within a firm, they also aid in the diffusion of creative knowledge to other firms through personnel and knowledge transfer. Firms that operate within small worlds, such as Silicon Valley, long ago learned to manage invention in an environment of rampant knowledge spillovers across firm boundaries. Now, however, all firms need to learn how to manage innovation in a small world environment. offers advice about how to do so.

Explores the challenge of merging brands successfully following corporate mergers. It develops a framework for corporate and product branding strategies, as well as for creating the appropriate brand identity among the merged firm's target consumers. A critical key to successful brand mergers is to align the architecture of the merged brand portfolio to brand strategy and identity.

The advent of superior connectivity and integration technologies is paving the way for flexible electronic partnering options. Such flexibility is essential if a company wants to attract a large number of partners (with varying connectivity needs and preferences) to its supply chain network. This article conceptualizes 12 electronic partnering options. It then discusses the various types of sensemaking and conversion challenges that companies encounter in developing this critical electronic business (e-business) capability and proposes a multi-pronged approach to effectively deal with them. This approach involves four distinct but synergistic campaigns of digitization--strategic congruency, organizational design, technology infrastructure, and relational campaigns. The utility of this approach is illustrated by examples of successful business-to-business (B2B) digitization initiatives.

Logistics services and their providers are helping intermediaries add value to Internet supply chains in ways that are not always immediately obvious. Thus, it is not surprising that there is confusion among academics and practitioners about how best to extract value from such services and providers. Reports the results of a study of the role and value of logistics services and their providers. Reveals that Internet sellers establish relationships with logistics service providers in order to extract value from the providers' network of logistical resources and better fill their customers' orders. Internet sellers establish these relationships to lower the costs they would incur if they attempted to carry out the logistics services internally. They also seek such providers in order to access strong networks that bundle many complementary logistics services among Internet sellers, their customers, and their vendors.

Customers have proven to be a precious source of new solutions in various product categories and, by becoming directly involved in the innovation process, they can help companies better anticipate market changes. The Web can greatly simplify these activities by making it easier to manage systematic interactions with a select group of customers at a low cost. However, empirical evidence regarding the actual diffusion of Web-based tools supporting collaborative innovation remains weak. After reviewing the past findings on Web-based tools for customer integration, this article presents an exploratory analysis of over 200 brand and corporate sites. It highlights the tools that firms mainly use and identifies some relevant industrial and firm specificities.

In December 2004, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) adopted a new standard of accounting for employee stock options (ESOs). This standard, entitled Statement of Financial Accounting Standards 123R, requires that ESOs be valued at the date of grant and expensed over the vesting period of the options. The signatories to this position paper strongly oppose this revision to GAAP because they believe that the expensing of ESOs is improper accounting that will result in the serious impairment of the financial statements of companies that are users of broad-based option plans. The case against expensing ESOs can be summed up in six simple statements: an ESO is a "gain-sharing instrument" in which shareholders agree to share their gains (stock appreciation), if any, with employees; a gain-sharing instrument, by its nature, has no accounting cost unless and until there is a gain to be shared; the cost of a gain-sharing instrument must be located on the books of the party that reaps the gain--in the case of an ESO the gain is reaped by shareholders and not by the enterprise; the cost of the ESO, therefore, is borne by the shareholders; this cost to shareholders (which, not coincidentally, exactly equals the employee's post-tax profit) is already properly accounted for under the treasury stock method of accounting (described in FAS 128, entitled "Earnings per Share") as a transfer of value from shareholders to employee option holders; and neither the grant nor the vesting of an ESO meets the standard accounting definition of an expense. These six statements lead to the conclusion that an ESO, while it may have an economic cost to shareholders, is not an expense of the entity that grants it.

Practitioners and academics continue to note that there is no shortage of inventory in many, if not most, supply chains. Rather, the historical notion holds true: the right product is not in the right place at the right time to meet demand. For positive supply chain performance, it is necessary to re-address inventory's role and relevance with respect to the development, maintenance, and control of product flows. Suggests that examining such flows from a three-fold perspective can provide a framework to assess efforts to achieve lowest total cost and meet customer service expectations.

Employees and corporate reputation are unique resources that generate positive financial performance and ultimately create sustainable competitive advantage. Corporate reputation is vital to an organization and employees are the key link to managing it. By recognizing the synergistic role that employees can play in the overall positioning of corporate reputation, management can help satisfy corporate strategic objectives. Examine initiatives essential to gain employee commitment to corporate reputation as well as the use of the Balanced Scorecard to integrate corporate reputation metrics into the incentive system.

This study of reports in the business news between January 1, 2000 and June 30, 2005 found that as of 1999, 40 corporations in the Fortune 100 had behaved in ways that can be considered unethical. The behavior included three types of fraud (accounting, securities, and consumer), discriminatory practices, undisclosed executive pay, antitrust activities, patent infringement, and other violations of the law. Based on the unacceptability of the misdeeds committed, this article ranks the 40 firms into three categories. Also uses research on business ethics and the behavior of executives, boards of directors, and even government officials to suggest why such unethical behavior was allowed to occur. Concludes with recommendations for improving business behavior and suggests important roles for future business leaders and the broader American public.