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This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Modern models of leadership generally acknowledge that effective leaders must possess a number of seemingly contradictory qualities and skill sets. However, say the authors, inadequate performance is usually defined as displaying a lack of those qualities and skills; the idea that performance problems can just as easily spring from taking a given behavior to an extreme has received far less attention. Therefore, those models miss the chance to identify imbalance, which in the authors' view is the most common impediment to developing effective leadership. The authors view versatility, the absence of imbalance, as the key to high performance levels. Versatile leaders are able to continually adjust their behavior, deftly applying the right approach or blend of approaches to the right degree for the circumstances at hand. The authors' research, comprising comprehensive assessments of scores of senior managers, indicates that most managers, when presented with two opposing approaches, such as forceful vs. enabling leadership, will lean strongly toward one and be biased against the other. Employing a 360-degree survey they designed to measure such imbalance, called the Leadership Versatility Index, the authors then demonstrate clearly that high performance levels are correlated with balance and versatility. The challenge for the versatile leader is, thus, to meet what F. Scott Fitzgerald called "the test of a first-rate intelligence": to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. The authors conclude with a discussion of how leaders can begin to improve themselves and those they manage. They identify a number of root causes of imbalance and suggest ways to moderate these factors.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. People in organizations commonly talk about the energy associated with a project, team, or individual. But is energy related to performance or learning in organizations? And how is it created and transferred in groups? To answer those questions, the authors assessed energy within seven large groups in different organizations. They collected data that allowed them to map social networks and, more specifically, determine who the "energizers" and "de-energizers" were in those groups. Their analyses, supplemented by interviews with network members, also reveal why energy is important for performance and learning and how it is created (or destroyed) in organizations. And they gave rise to a set of questions that can help managers and the people they oversee increase the energy they generate in their interactions with colleagues. By mapping relationships, managers can see where energy is being created and where it is being depleted. They can then take action, encouraging simple changes in behavior to increase energy in places where its absence hinders the progress of important organizational initiatives.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. People often talk about business competition as if it's a short race: Get to market first and you are bound to win. Indeed, the importance of first-mover advantage has been drummed into the heads of many business executives, and some have almost been brainwashed to think that speed is everything. But when a new technology like the Internet threatens to transform an industry, the companies that are quickest to respond aren't necessarily the ones that reap the greatest benefits. In fact, choosing a fast strategy can lock them into a set of decisions that actually hurt them in the long run. Instead, organizations that choose the right strategy for the entire race--both for the early and late stages--will come out ahead. The authors have found that companies that respond quickly by launching a spin-off usually have difficulty achieving true staying power in the market. For enduring success, incumbent companies are better off creating a group that is--or will eventually be--integrated within their organizations. Only then will they be able to tap fully into their numerous strengths and assets, leveraging their incumbent's advantage.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Having received a great deal of attention for decades now, customer satisfaction practices have become one of the core prescriptions for managers and organizations. Indeed, for many companies, customer satisfaction has become the guiding principle, as they increasingly initiate all manner of strategies and processes under its banner. But more and more, says Fredrik Dahlsten, these practices are losing their effectiveness for companies and their customers alike. Using qualitative research at Volvo Cars, the author illustrates how the interpretation of customer satisfaction can become skewed, employing rigorous and extensive customer satisfaction measurements, but measuring the wrong variables and using the information in mainly reactive ways. Many companies have only an intrinsic customer satisfaction focus--a product orientation based on attribute quality and a short-term internal perspective triggered by surveys and aimed at cost control. With an intrinsic focus, customer satisfaction is seen mostly as the absence of dissatisfaction. In contrast, an extrinsic customer satisfaction focus emphasizes finding new ways to increase the positive, emotional aspects of the customer experience over time. The author argues that managers who wish to climb out of their customer satisfaction rut must move beyond the mere measurement of quality, refocus their practices on the customer's actual experience, and formulate a comprehensive strategy for using that knowledge throughout the organization.

When executives need to persuade an audience, most try to build a case with facts, statistics, and some quotes from authorities. In other words, they resort to "companyspeak," the tools of rhetoric they have been trained to use. In this conversation with HBR, Robert McKee, the world's best-known screenwriting lecturer, argues that executives can engage people in a much deeper--and ultimately more convincing--way if they toss out their PowerPoint slides and memos and learn to tell good stories. As human beings, we make sense of our experiences through stories. But becoming a good storyteller is hard. It requires imagination and an understanding of what makes a story worth telling. All great stories deal with the conflict between subjective expectations and an uncooperative objective reality. They show a protagonist wrestling with antagonizing forces, not a rosy picture of results meeting expectations--which no one ends up believing. Consider the CEO of a biotech start-up that has discovered a chemical compound to prevent heart attacks. He could make a pitch to investors by offering up market projections, the business plan, and upbeat, hypothetical scenarios. Or he could captivate them by telling the story of his father, who died of a heart attack, and of the CEO's subsequent struggle against various antagonists--nature, the FDA, potential rivals--to bring to market the effective, low-cost test that might have prevented his father's death. Good storytellers are not necessarily good leaders, but they do share certain traits. Both are self-aware and both are skeptics who realize that all people--and institutions--wear masks. Compelling stories can be found behind those masks.

Turnaround champions--those leaders who manage to bring distressed organizations back from the brink of failure--are often acclaimed for their canny financial and strategic decision making. But having studied their work closely, Harvard Business School's Rosabeth Moss Kanter emphasizes another aspect of their achievement. These leaders reverse the cycle of corporate decline through deliberate interventions that increase the level of communication, collaboration, and respect among their managers. Ailing companies descend into what Kanter calls a "death spiral," which typically involves finger pointing and deriding colleagues in other parts of the business, rising tensions and declining collaboration, helplessness, passivity and, finally, denial. To counter these dynamics, Kanter says, and reverse the company's slide, the CEO needs to apply certain psychological interventions--specifically, replacing secrecy and denial with dialogue, blame and scorn with respect, avoidance and turf protection with collaboration, and passivity and helplessness with initiative. The author offers in-depth accounts of how the CEOs at Gillette, Invensys, and the BBC used these interventions to guide their employees out of corporate free fall and onto a more productive path.

Three out of four acquisitions fail; they destroy wealth for the buyer's shareholders, who end up worse off than they would have been had the deal not been done. But it doesn't have to be that way, argue the authors. In evaluating acquisitions, companies must look beyond the lure of profits the income statement promises and examine the balance sheet, where the company keeps track of capital. It's ignoring the balance sheet that causes so many acquisitions to destroy shareholders' wealth. Unfortunately, most executives focus only on sales and profits going up, never realizing that they've put in motion a plan to destroy their company's true profitability--its return on invested capital. M&A, like other aspects of running a company, works best when seen as a way to create shareholder value through customers. Most deals are about customers and should start with an analysis of customer profitability. Some customers are profitable; others are money losers. The better an acquirer understands the profitability of its own customers, the better positioned it will be to perform such analyses on other companies. In this article, the authors show that customer profitability varies far more dramatically than most managers suspect. They also describe how to measure the profitability of customers. By understanding the economics of customer profitability, companies can avoid making deals that hurt their shareholders, identify surprising deals that create wealth, and salvage deals that would otherwise be losers.

What makes a great manager great? Despite differences in their personal attributes, successful managers all excel in the making, honoring, and remaking of commitments. Managerial commitments take many forms, from capital investments to personnel decisions to public statements, but each exerts both immediate and enduring influence on a company. A leader's commitments shape a business's identity, define its strengths and weaknesses, establish its opportunities and limitations, and set its direction. Executives can all too easily forget that commitments are extraordinarily powerful. Caught up in the present, managers often take actions that, while beneficial in the near term, impose lasting constraints on their operations and organizations. Managers who understand the nature and power of their commitments can wield them more effectively throughout a company's life cycle. It doesn't mean you should try to anticipate all the long-run consequences of every commitment. But it does mean that before making important decisions about, say, operating processes or partnerships, you should always ask yourself: Is this a process or relationship that we can live with in the future? Am I locking us into a course that we'll come to regret?

In the much-heralded war for talent, it's hardly surprising that companies have invested a lot of time, money, and energy in hiring and retaining star performers. For most CEOs, recruiting stars is simply more fun; for one thing, the young A players they interview often remind them of themselves at the same age. For another, A players' brilliance and drive is infectious; you simply want to be in their company. Besides, in these troubled times, when businesses are so vulnerable, people who seem to have what it takes to turn around a company's performance are almost irresistible. But our understandable fascination with star performers can lure us into the dangerous trap of underestimating the vital importance of the supporting actors. It's true that A players can make enormous contributions to performance. Yet, as the authors have found, companies' long-term performance--even survival--depends far more on the unsung commitment and contributions of their B players. These capable, steady performers are the best supporting actors of the corporate world. They counterbalance the ambitions of the company's high-performing visionaries. Unfortunately, organizations rarely learn to value their B players in ways that are gratifying for either the company or these employees. This article will help you to rethink the role of your organization's B players.

In the 1990s, funding pension obligations by investing in stocks looked smart. By 1999, the bull market had poured a collective $260 billion surplus into the pension coffers of the S&P 500, permitting the companies to record the year-to-year increases as additional income. But just two years later, the bear market had obliterated those gains, replacing them with a cavernous $240 billion deficit--which had to be offset by the unlucky firms' ongoing cash flows, wreaking havoc on their earnings, debt levels, and stock prices. Corporate executives may be blamed for this debacle. But they were only following the rules. Current accounting guidelines keep companies from recording pension liabilities and assets on their balance sheets, instead relegating them to the footnotes. That makes it hard to see the risk to which market drops expose companies. Board members and top executives need to look beyond distorted accounting numbers to the economic realities of pension plans. Once they do, they may be surprised to find that they would gain far greater value and flexibility by passively investing their pension funds entirely in bonds. A bond portfolio can be designed to meet precisely, and with virtual certainty, a company's pension obligation, thus eliminating the chance of a funding gap. The predictability of bond investments also stabilizes earnings and cash flow. The expanded corporate debt capacity that results can then be used to fuel growth or reduce the firm's overall cost of capital.

If you run a midsize manufacturing business, you may be familiar with that anxious sense of being left behind. At every turn, someone is pushing you to jump onto the latest strategic bandwagon before it's too late. But no matter how great the hot, new strategy might be, it can't replace an approach that helps you get the most out of your existing businesses. Such an approach offers a tremendous potential payback--annual revenue and earnings growth as high as 15% to 20%. And it poses few of the risks associated with pursuing chancy acquisitions, untested ventures, or radical strategies. For this article, the authors largely draw on their experience at Fiberite, which made advanced composite materials for military and commercial airplanes, among other things. Fiberite was a healthy business, but its incumbent management--with its ambitious plans for introducing new products and tapping new markets--ignored the unrealized value remaining in what they already had. Like so many companies, Fiberite didn't really understand what had made it successful in the first place. The authors offer a method for setting strategic priorities--a strategic pathway--that focuses on a company's existing businesses. The pathway has four stages. First, protect your existing business. Next, penetrate further into existing market segments with existing products or upgrades. Then, extend the business by developing new products for existing segments or by entering new segments with existing products. Finally, diversify into new markets with new products. This sequence of priorities is not new, but formalizing it helps people resist the siren call of new products and markets, which can do as much damage as good.

Few senior executives pay much attention to computer security. They either hand off responsibility to their technical people or bring in consultants. But given the stakes involved, an arm's-length approach is extremely unwise. According to industry estimates, security breaches affect 90% of all businesses every year and cost some $17 billion. Fortunately, the authors say, senior executives don't need to learn about the more arcane aspects of their company's IT systems to take a hands-on approach. Instead, they should focus on the familiar task of managing risk. Their role should be to assess the business value of their information assets, determine the likelihood that those assets will be compromised, and then tailor a set of risk abatement processes to their company's particular vulnerabilities. This approach, which views computer security as an operational rather than a technical challenge, is akin to a classic quality assurance program in that it attempts to avoid problems rather than fix them and involves all employees, not just IT staffers. The goal is not to make computer systems completely secure--that's impossible--but to reduce the business risk to an acceptable level. This article looks at the types of threats a company is apt to face. It also examines the processes a general manager should spearhead to lessen the likelihood of a successful attack. The authors recommend eight processes in all.

In this HBR interview, business-etiquette consultant Barbara Pachter describes common executive gaffes, explains why managers still get etiquette wrong, and offers some rules of thumb about good business manners.

How do you market to marketing-savvy consumers? According to this professor, today's consumers, ironically enough, appreciate the authenticity of the old-fashioned, up-front sales pitch.

The research firm Catalyst presents new findings on the barriers that keep women from advancing through the corporate ranks. Its recent survey of Fortune 500 executive women and CEOs shows wide agreement: Lack of line experience bars women from the most senior jobs.

Consumer-product consultants have analyzed the revenue growth of more than 500 major national brands and conclude that any brand, regardless of its competitive position, can outperform the average for its category through aggressive innovation and promotion.

Three decades of research, capped off by two new studies, suggest that managers often hold grossly distorted perceptions of their businesses and markets. The authors conclude that accurate perceptions may be less important to a company's success than managers' willingness to seek feedback and learn from it.

The brutal, puzzle-based job interview has spread from the computer industry to the Fortune 500 and beyond. But grilling candidates in this way can backfire.

For the sixth year in a row, sporting-gear cooperative REI made Fortune's list of the 100 best companies for which to work. CEO Dennis Madsen shares his thoughts about the things the retailer seems to be doing right--among them, aligning corporate culture with employees' values and not getting too far ahead of customers.

In the early 1990s, grocery suppliers and retailers joined forces to streamline operations--an initiative called "efficient consumer response." Today, suppliers feel like they're not getting their fair share of the profits from ECR. But they stand to lose more if they give up on it, the authors say.