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When you head up a big construction project for your organization, coming in on time and on budget isn't enough. If you want to avoid squandering what is probably your company's largest capital investment, it's important to create a building that reflects your company's mission and produces a truly energizing work environment, says David Thurm, CIO of the New York Times Co. and head of the team responsible for designing and building the Times' new corporate headquarters in Manhattan. The only way to get this kind of package--great design and innovative features that together further your business goals--is to take an active role. Assemble the right team, and then stay involved, asking hard questions about things that are generally taken as givens. Articulate a vision of your future work space, and drive the search for ways to realize this vision. In short, be a builder, not merely an owner. It's easy to understand why this approach is the exception rather than the rule. To most companies, design and construction seem foreign and forbidding, rife with pitfalls. Because of the murkiness of the field and a lack of experience and confidence, most companies play a relatively minor role in their construction projects. But it's a giant mistake to be a passive consumer when it comes to one of your most important assets. At best, you'll get well-intentioned guesses by others as to what you want; at worst, you'll end up with a building that's at odds with your identity. The author shares a series of lessons learned. Implicit in all of them: You have to push yourself as hard as you push your contractors.

Most industrial manufacturers realize that the real money isn't in products but in services. Companies such as General Electric and IBM have famously made the transition: A large proportion of their revenues and margins come from providing value-added services to customers. But other companies attempting to do the same might miss the boat. It is not enough, the authors say, just to provide services. Businesses must now provide "smart services"--building intelligence (awareness and connectivity) into the products themselves. Citing examples such as Heidelberger Druckmaschinen's Internet-connected printing presses and Eaton Electrical's home-monitoring service, the authors demonstrate how a product that can report its status back to its maker represents an opportunity for the manufacturer to cultivate richer, longer term relationships with customers. Four business models will emerge in this new, networked world. If you go it alone, it may be as an embedded innovator--that is, your networked product sends back information that can help you optimize service delivery, eliminate waste and inefficiency, and raise service margins. Or, you may pursue a more aggressive solutionist business model--that is, you position your networked product as a "complete solution provider," able to deliver a broader scope of high-value services than those provided by the embedded innovator's product. In the case of a system that aggregates and processes data from multiple products in a building or home, you may be either an aggregator or a synergist, partnering with others to pursue a smart-services opportunity. An aggregator's product is the hub, collecting and processing usage information--and creating a high-value body of data. A synergist's product is the spoke, contributing valuable data or functionality. Woe to the company that takes none of these paths; it'll soon find its former customers locked in--and happily--to other smart service providers.

Underneath every economic model involving math lies a substrate of great simplification and imagination, says Columbia University's Emanuel Derman.

The tension between bureaucracy and innovation dates back to the reign of Louis XIV, says University of Oregon's William H. Starbuck.

To exploit your product's platform potential, say consultants John Sviokla and Anthony J. Paoni, you need creativity--and good intellectual property protection.

Chief diversity officers, in new roles, foster innovation and generate revenues, writes author Frans Johansson.

Companies that retain their CEO founders when preparing for IPOs often come out ahead in the long run, says Martin L. Martens at Concordia University.

Customers who buy your product because they want to--not because you make them--are the most loyal, says Rice University's Paul M. Dholakia.

Robert Morris, an Amazon Top 10 reviewer, helps you decide which business books are worth your time and attention.

Across the S&P 500, companies' sustainable growth rates exceed analyst growth forecasts, which means companies are not optimizing shareholder value, say consultants Rekha Sampath and Ajit Kambil.

Communicating your brand strategy to the financial community can boost share price, say Columbia Business School's Natalie Mizik and University of Washington Business School's Robert Jacobson.

If your new COO will eventually succeed your CEO, says consultant Anne Lim O'Brien, be clear about which role you're seeking to fill.

What should you do when your brand becomes "hot" overnight among influential endorsers? Do you exploit this sudden rise in popularity and mainstream the brand, or do you attempt to slow the diffusion process and seek to understand how to market to these consumers? Drawing on the case of Dunlop Volley in Australia, the authors argue that mainstreaming the brand by targeting later adopters results in a short-term fashion cycle rather than creating long-term brand value. Because these brands are "discovered" by consumers, marketers must first understand the value system underlying this adoption and then fit the marketing program to these values. In the case of Dunlop Volley, slowing diffusion rates was achieved through four tactics: rejecting hard-sell marketing, appearing authentic, targeting alternative distribution channels, and delaying launch to the mainstream audience. These activities ensured the ongoing credibility of the brand with endorsers and helped revitalize a brand long thought dead.

Organization design is becoming more and more a cornerstone of competitive advantage in today's increasingly complex companies. The authors' research on firms that have achieved significant advantage suggests that many did so by creating powerful synergies among their capabilities, among market opportunities, and between the two. But the way they recognized and realized these synergies was through their multidimensional organizational designs. Such designs not only reify and empower the dimensions within or across which synergies can occur (function, product, market segment, customer, etc.), they also define and manage the collaborative interfaces needed to discover, exploit, and renew those synergies.

Since its conception, the marketing mix has been the marketer's toolkit for success. A firm's marketing plan is basically comprised of the "four Ps" of the marketing mix toolkit, with practitioners and academicians segregating a marketer's tasks into product, place, price, and promotion. A decade of company-based research suggests, however, that it is time to rebuild the marketing machine by focusing on the key strategic issues that companies, and marketers, face in today's rapidly evolving, digitized marketplace. If marketing is to become a way of doing business rather than merely one of several organizational functions, marketers must recognize that the marketing mix toolkit is truly an implement for success. Only after we, as marketers, recognize and conceptualize marketing as a bigger machine than just the four Ps will we be able to bring a market orientation to the forefront of strategic thought.

In a bid to combine the two major perspectives (strategic communications and strategic brand management) of integrated marketing communications (IMC), this article proposes a holistic consumer experience management framework. According to the framework, the key mission of IMC is to manage effectively the mediated impression of and direct encounter with the brand so that synergism ensues among all the interrelated elements of IMC, including research and development, manufacturing, price formulation, channel arrangement, consumer service management, marketing message construction, and communication program execution. As such, IMC is capable of enhancing the holistic consumer experience and creating a holistic brand value structure, which can unite the consumer's sensory, emotional, social, and intellectual experiences in a new and positive way.

Starbucks, Target, and Nike are just a few of the businesses partnering today with not-for-profit organizations in cause-related marketing campaigns. On the one hand, these campaigns raise awareness, support, and donations for social causes such as global hunger relief. On the other hand, they enhance corporate reputations, customer loyalty, and financial gains for companies. An example of cause-related marketing is an effort organized by Macy's, Pfizer, and other businesses on behalf of the American Heart Association. The program has raised over $32 million in donations for the charity, while generating over 1 billion media impressions for corporate sponsors. Discusses the concept and practice of cause-related marketing, as well as some of its social-ethical complexities. Suggests ways to increase the effectiveness of this popular marketing tool and form of corporate philanthropy.

The Granholm v. Heald decision suggests that the Supreme Court is prepared to protect e-commerce initiatives.

Delivered-cost analytics can tell you how much those supply chain services you're offering are really costing you.

To get frontline employees to work as a team, solicit performance rankings from customers and employees, not bosses.