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What do exhilaration, stereotyping and poor table manners have in common? What do embarrassment, the advantage younger siblings enjoy over older ones in understanding others' mental states, and the complexity of Supreme Court justices' decisions have in common? The answer is simple: power. Power is a basic force in social relationships and the dynamics and structure of personality. But as central as it is to social life and to theoretical inquiries in the Social Sciences, it has received only sporadic attention from psychologists. The authors show that we are beginning to understand how power influences cognitive processes such as stereotyping, complex social reasoning, moral judgment, and inferences about non-verbal behavior. They also look at how power influences social behavior, including emotional display, behavioral confirmation, familial aggression, hate crimes, sexual aggression, and teasing. Our understanding of how power shapes situations, groups, and cultures, they argue, ultimately rests on a formulation of how power - and powerlessness - shape the psychology of the individual.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In an attempt to increase both efficiency and service quality, more and more companies are outsourcing to third-party suppliers some key business processes, such as human resources, information technology, and procurement. The universe of potential suppliers is diverse and growing, made up of locally based specialists, offshore providers with comparatively low labor costs, and global suppliers who are able to apply sophisticated management techniques and technology. The challenge for clients is to understand their own requirements and to identify providers whose capabilities and objectives are best aligned with their particular needs. Draws on extensive research to identify three potentially critical areas of supplier competency: delivery competency, transformation competency, and relationship competency. By benchmarking supplier capabilities against its strategic and operational intent, a company can work to establish relationships that support its business objectives.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Information technology is undergoing an inexorable shift from being an asset that companies own to being a service that they purchase from utility providers. Three technological advances are enabling this change: virtualization, grid computing, and Web services. Virtualization erases the differences between proprietary computing platforms, enabling applications designed to run on one operating system to be deployed elsewhere. Grid computing allows large numbers of hardware components, such as servers or disk drives, to effectively act as a single device, pooling their capacity and allocating it automatically to different jobs. Web services standardize the interfaces between applications, turning them into modules that can be assembled and disassembled easily. The resulting industry will likely have three major components. At the center will be the IT utilities themselves--big companies that will maintain core computing resources in central plants and distribute them to end users. Serving the utilities will be a diverse array of component suppliers--the makers of computers, storage units, networking gear, operating and utility software, and applications. And finally, large network operators will maintain the ultra-high-capacity data communication lines needed for the system to work. IT's shift from an in-house capital asset to a centralized utility service will overturn strategic and operating assumptions, alter industrial economics, upset markets, and pose daunting challenges to every user and vendor.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Forming close relationships with suppliers or customers is a popular business strategy, but such partnerships can be problematic. Many close business relationships--whether joint ventures or loose alliances--fail. Describes a phenomenon called the "dark side" of close relationships and maintains that close relationships that seem quite stable can, in fact, be vulnerable to decline and destruction. Draws on surveys of business relationships and other examples. The same factors that strengthen a partnership can also open the door to relationship problems. For example, when an automaker and a supplier built up personal relationships between employees at the two firms to facilitate their alliance and just-in-time manufacturing process, the trust and personal relationships also enabled the supplier more easily to cut corners in the production process. Discusses strategies to prevent the dark side from taking over a business relationship--for example, to ensure that both parties in the relationship make investments in it, in effect swapping "mutual hostages." In cases where damage to the relationship already exists, possible strategies include rotating in new personnel, reconfiguring the relationship, or terminating it.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. A number of factors, both external and internal, are increasingly demanding a strategic approach to corporate communications. Yet, despite regulatory imperatives, organizational complexities, and a growing need for companies to increase their credibility with their constituencies, many companies still take a tactical, short-term approach to communication that is not only nonstrategic but may, in fact, be inconsistent with their corporate strategy or even impede it. The authors conducted more than 50 interviews with CEOs, CFOs, and heads of corporate communications and investor relations at companies that represent the state of the art in corporate communications, companies that have faced and survived major crises, and some that are great corporate communicators but not usually recognized for their efforts. Offers best practice lessons and a framework to enable executives to think carefully about their organization's objectives for each specific communication, determine which constituencies are critical to meeting that objective, and understand what kinds of messages to deliver through which channel.

Companies face much uncertainty about the competitive effects of the recently adopted Kyoto Protocol on global climate change and the current and future regulations that may emerge from it. Companies have considerable discretion to explore different market strategies to address global warming and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Examines these strategic options by reviewing the market-oriented actions that 136 large companies that are part of the Global 500 are currently taking. Companies use six different market strategies to address climate change, consisting of different combinations of the market components available to managers. Managers can choose between a greater emphasis on improvements in their business activities through innovation or employing compensatory approaches such as emissions trading. They can either act by themselves or work with other companies, NGOs, or (local) governments.

To date, the United States has declined to ratify the Kyoto Treaty to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, many companies are taking advantage of the lack of a mandatory U.S. GHG emission reduction program to set targets at their own pace and in ways that complement their own strategic objectives. Currently, as many as 60 corporations, with net revenues of roughly $1.5 trillion, have set voluntary reduction targets. Many of these companies are agnostic about the science of climate change or the social responsibility of protecting the global climate. The reasons are decidedly strategic. So why are they doing this? They are searching for ways to be prepared for the long term should GHG emission reductions become mandatory, while at the same time attempting to reap near-term economic and strategic benefits should new regulations not emerge.

Organizations struggle when trying to manage a mature business and a related new venture simultaneously. The endeavor is fraught with contradiction and paradox. To succeed, the organization's leaders must deal with two conflicting pressures. The new venture must forget much of what has made the mature business successful, which argues for isolating the new venture from the mature business. However, the new venture also must borrow resources from the mature business, which argues for integrating the two units. Based on in-depth field research at 10 organizations, this article shows how to identify what to forget and what to borrow and describes an organizational design that facilitates both.

The market universe is composed of two types of oceans: red oceans and blue oceans. Red oceans are all the industries in existence today; they are increasingly characterized by intense competition. Blue oceans are all the industries not in existence today; they are untouched and uncontested. To prosper in the future, companies need to go beyond competing; they need to create blue oceans. The issue is how to do so. Presents a set of analytical tools and frameworks that can enable firms to develop blue ocean strategies.

The adoption of information technology has had a major impact on firm and industry structure. The personal computer industry has evolved from a value chain with well-defined roles for firms in different industry segments to a flexible global value network through which PC firms outsource many of their activities to increasingly capable suppliers. The industry's value network is organized mostly through market mechanisms, particularly for routine activities. A smaller number of complex activities involve closer trust-based relationships, but market discipline is used to reduce the risk of opportunism. IT has played a major role in this transformation. For routine activities, IT enables standardization and automation of processes, allowing effective coordination via market transactions. For more complex activities, IT supports the close integration of activities through internal IT systems or customized interorganizational systems.

Advances in information technology, together with increasing economic globalization, are creating dilemmas regarding the levels of definition of property rights that exist with respect to knowledge-based resources. The issues at stake include enforcing property rights of companies without alienating consumers and making knowledge-based resources affordable. Proposes a framework to help resolve these dilemmas and predict the costs vs. benefits of defining the property rights over resources. The costs vs. benefits are mainly determined by: capture costs and rent dissipation created by nonexclusivity of the resource; exchange and policing costs related to the resource; costs of reduced investment created by nonexclusivity of the resource; exchange value of the resource; and the social costs of exclusivity of the resource.

It's hard to find a better exemplar for competition than chess. Even people who have scant knowledge of the game instinctively recognize that chess is unusual in terms of its intellectual complexity and the strategic demands it places on players. Can strategists learn anything from chess players about what it takes to win? To find out, HBR senior editor Diane L. Coutu talked with Garry Kasparov, the world's No.1 player since 1984. Kasparov believes that success in both chess and business is very much a question of psychological advantage; the complexity of the game demands that players rely heavily on their instincts and on gamesmanship. In this wide-ranging interview, Kasparov explores the power of chess as a model for business competition; the balance that chess players strike between intuition and analysis; the significance of his loss to IBM's chess-playing computer, Deep Blue; and how his legendary rivalry with Anatoly Karpov, Kasparov's predecessor as World Chess Champion, affected his own success. Kasparov also shares his solution to what he calls the champion's dilemma, a question for all world masters, whether they are in business, sports, or chess: Where does a virtuoso go after he has accomplished everything he's ever wanted to, even beyond his wildest imagination?

Leaders tend to be so immersed in the specifics of strategy that they rarely stop to think how much of their reasoning is done by analogy. As a result, they miss useful insights that psychologists and other scientists have generated about analogies' pitfalls. Managers who pay attention to their own analogical thinking will make better strategic decisions and fewer mistakes. Charles Lazarus was inspired by the supermarket when he founded Toys R Us; Intel promoted its low-end chips to avoid becoming like U.S. Steel; and Circuit City created CarMax because it saw the used-car market as analogous to the consumer electronics market. Each example displays the core elements of analogical reasoning: a novel problem or a new opportunity, a specific prior context that managers deem to be similar in its essentials, and a solution that managers can transfer from its original setting to the new one. Analogical reasoning is a powerful tool for sparking breakthrough ideas. But dangers arise when analogies are built on surface similarities. Psychologists have discovered that it's all too easy to overlook the superficiality of analogies. The situation is further complicated by people's tendency to hang on to beliefs even after contrary evidence comes along and to seek only the data that confirm their beliefs. Four straightforward steps can improve a management team's odds of using an analogy well: Recognize the analogy and identify its purpose; thoroughly understand its source; determine whether the resemblance is more than superficial; and decide whether the original strategy, properly translated, will work in the target industry.

Most developmental psychologists agree that what differentiates one leader from another is not so much philosophy of leadership, personality, or style of management. Rather, it's internal "action logic"--how a leader interprets the surroundings and reacts when his or her power or safety is challenged. Relatively few leaders, however, try to understand their action logic, and fewer still have explored the possibility of changing it. They should, because leaders who undertake this voyage of personal understanding and development can transform not only their own capabilities but also those of their companies. The authors draw on 25 years of consulting experience and collaboration with psychologist Susanne Cook-Greuter to present a typology of leadership based on the way managers personally make sense of the world around them. David Rooke and William Torbert classify leaders into seven distinct action-logic categories: Opportunists, Diplomats, Experts, Achievers, Individualists, Strategists, and Alchemists--the first three associated with below-average performance, the latter four with medium to high performance. These leadership styles are not fixed, the authors say, and executives who are willing to work at developing themselves and becoming more self-aware can almost certainly move toward one of the more effective action logics. A Diplomat, for instance, can succeed through hard work and self-reflection at transforming himself into a Strategist. Corporations that help their executives and leadership teams to examine their action logics can reap rich rewards.

Corporate treasurers and chief financial officers have become adept at quantifying and managing a wide variety of risks: financial, hazard, and operational. To defend themselves, they use tried-and-true tools such as hedging, insurance, and backup systems. Some companies have even adopted the concept of enterprise risk management, integrating available risk management techniques in a comprehensive, organizationwide approach. But most managers have not addressed in a systematic way the greatest threat of all: strategic risks--the array of external events and trends that can devastate a company's growth trajectory and shareholder value. For example, a new technology may overtake your product. Gradual shifts in the market may slowly erode one of your brands beyond the point of viability. The key to surviving these strategic risks, the authors say, is knowing how to assess and respond to them. In this article, they lay out a method for identifying and responding to strategic threats. They categorize the risks into seven major classes and describe a particularly dangerous example within each category. The authors also offer countermeasures to take against these risks and describe how individual companies have deployed them to neutralize a threat and, in many cases, capitalize on it. Besides limiting the downside of risk, strategic risk management forces executives to think more systematically about the future, thus helping them identify opportunities for growth.

Companies have poured enormous amounts of money into customer relationship management, but in many cases the investment hasn't really paid off. That's because getting closer to customers isn't about building an information technology system. It's a learning journey that begins with the creation of a companywide repository containing every customer interaction with the company, organized by customer. Communal coordination is what's called for at this stage, as each group contributes its information to the data pool separately from the others and then taps into it as needed. In the second stage, one-way serial coordination from centralized IT through analytical units and out to the operating units allows companies to go beyond just assembling data to drawing inferences. In stage three, companies shift their focus from past relationships to future behavior. Through symbiotic coordination, information flows back and forth between central analytic units and various organizational units like marketing, sales, and operations, as together they seek answers to questions like "How can we prevent customers from switching to a competitor?" and "Who would be most likely to buy a new product in the future?" In stage four, firms begin to move past discrete, formal initiatives and, through integral coordination, bring an increasingly sophisticated understanding of their customers to bear in all day-to-day operations.

Most executives would say that adding a point of growth and gaining a point of operating-profit margin contribute about equally to shareholder value. Margin improvements hit the bottom line immediately, whereas growth compounds value over time. But the reality is that the two are rarely equivalent. Growth often is far more valuable than managers think. This article presents a new strategic metric, called the relative value of growth (RVG), which gives managers a clear picture of how growth projects and margin improvement initiatives affect shareholder value. Using basic balance sheet and income sheet data, managers can determine their companies' RVGs, as well as those of their competitors. Calculating RVGs gives managers insights into which corporate strategies are working to deliver value and whether their companies are pulling the most powerful value-creation levers. The author examines a number of well-known companies and explains what their RVG numbers say about their strategies. He reviews the unspoken assumption that growth and profits are incompatible over the long term and shows that a fair number of companies are effective at delivering both. Finally, he explains how managers can use the RVG framework to help them define strategies that balance growth and profitability at both the corporate and business unit levels.

To find the secrets of business success, what could be more natural than studying successful businesses? In fact, nothing could be more dangerous, warns this Stanford professor. To generalize from the examples of successful companies is to reach conclusions from an unrepresentative data sample, falling into the classic statistical trap of selection bias. Drawing on a wealth of case studies, for instance, one researcher concluded that great leaders share two key traits: They persist, often despite initial failures, and they are able to persuade others to join them. But those traits are also the hallmarks of spectacularly unsuccessful entrepreneurs. To discover what makes a business successful, then, managers should look at both successes and failures. Otherwise, they will overvalue risky business practices, seeing only those companies that won big and not the ones that lost dismally. They will not be able to tell whether their current good fortune stems from smart business practices or from coasting on past accomplishments or good luck. Fortunately, economists have developed relatively simple tools that can correct for selection bias even when data about failed companies are hard to come by.

Many executives take for granted that the first company in a new product category gets an unbeatable head start and reaps long-lasting benefits. But that doesn't always happen. The authors of this article discovered that much depends on the pace at which the category's technology is changing and the speed at which the market is evolving. By analyzing these two factors, companies can improve their odds of succeeding as first movers with the resources they possess. Gradual evolution in both the technology and the market provides a first mover with the best conditions for creating a dominant position that is long lasting (Hoover in the vacuum cleaner industry is a good example). In such calm waters, a company can defend its advantages even without exceptional skills or extensive financial resources. When the market is changing rapidly and the product isn't, a first entrant with extensive resources can obtain a long-lasting advantage (as Sony did with its Walkman); a company with only limited resources probably must settle for a short-term benefit. When the market is static but the product is changing constantly, first-mover advantages of either kind--durable or short-lived--are unlikely. Only companies with very deep pockets can survive (think of Sony and the digital cameras it pioneered). Rapid churn in both the technology and the market creates the worst conditions. But if companies have an acute sense of when to exit, then a worthwhile short-term gain is possible. Before venturing into a newly forming market, analyze the environment, assess your resources, then determine which type of first-mover advantage is most achievable.

Professional services firms were once great models for corporations--until they started to resemble them.