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Marketers have never been more challenged to find the right mix of channels. Seeing the choices clearly will make that challenge less daunting. This author has sound advice for developing clear channel vision.

Managed properly, knowledge can become an organization's competitive advantage. Effective knowledge management, however, can occur only after an organization has established a knowing culture. Creating that culture, and promoting the organizational learning to sustain it, must become priorities for today's business leaders. These authors describe how leaders can create and sustain that knowing culture.

Almost all discussions of corporate governance focus on boards of directors. But what about managers? Faults in the way a company is governed can be found in certain limits imposed on managers and in the relationship between managers and directors, a relationship that managers themselves can make more productive. One of the world's leading management thinkers offers some ideas for doing so.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) initiatives have been disappointing There are five major reasons why CRM's failure rates are abysmally high. This article describes these five reasons and what was learnt from them. First, CRM is not properly understood, leading to unrealistic and inappropriate expectations. CRM is an attitude rather than a technique or software and implies comprehensive relationship marketing rather than mass marketing for most of the clients. Furthermore, any understanding of what CRM is must be accompanied by an understanding of what it is not. CRM does not replace, but rather complements, other marketing and customer service initiatives. Second, CRM initiatives should add value to the relationship for the customer, not just the company. Too many CRM initiatives are designed to help the company rather than the customer. Third, it is difficult to choose the appropriate CRM solution as the technology is constantly evolving. Recently, many CRM vendors are launching industry-specific suites (referred to as vertical tools) that enable companies to deploy the software faster than generic packages, and without the costly customization. Fourth, Implementing a CRM system is complex and difficult. While resistance may come from salespeople who do not wish to give up ownership of customer information or from IT people who do not wish to change legacy systems, experience has shown that for a CRM program to be successful, above all else it must have the full support and ongoing commitment of top management. They must view CRM as a strategic initiative, not as a technological tool or tactical program. Lastly, it is easier to demonstrate the costs of CRM relative to the benefits. While measuring the costs are fairly straightforward, measuring the payoff of a CRM system, especially in its early stages, can be difficult and contentious, which can lead to poor judgments by management. Measurement criteria should be based on the objectives of the CRM program and used to manage and continuously improve strategic CRM performance.

The Big Three no longer have the automobile market to themselves, but almost every market, including the one for cars, is ruled by three dominant firms. That reality does not prevent other firms from being successful. However, all firms, regardless of their market share, must still understand The Rule of Three and how it will affect their strategy and attempt to operate efficiently.

Organizations need a leadership pipeline where leaders use and develop their judgment to a point where it becomes wisdom. This author uses 25 years of teaching experience to conclude that leaders can be developed within a company. The challenge for human resource development is to accelerate the development of high-quality leadership in organizations, increase the yield of mature leaders from a pool of high potentials, and create a pipeline of management talent that delivers leaders where and when they are needed. Organizations should involve the expertise of senior executives in the recruitment process and hire talented individuals. These individuals should be channeled into the right experiences that encourage individual development. Learning should be combined with doing so practical skills are gained and development must be integrated with personal career management and organizational development. People in development programs must be monitored for dedication levels and high-potentials should be given frequent performance reviews and constant reassurance that they are high-potentials. The article also examines the extensive role of human resource development in development. The best organizations centralize ownership of high-potential leaders rather than delegating responsibility to individual departments. Human Recourses should ensure that leadership development is connected to broader organizational strategy, integrate critical HR systems around the leadership development challenge, manage the leadership development process, advice and consult on individual career plans , brief management on developments in leadership thinking, seek and evaluate outside leadership development resources and benchmark leadership development practices against high-performing organizations.

In this interview, the author of Emotional Intelligence, one of the most influential books on organizational behaviour, discusses what he calls primal leadership, the emotional dimension of leadership. A leader's primal task is an emotional one, to articulate a message that resonates with their followers' emotional reality and so moves people in a positive direction.

Heroic leaders are always conspicuous and sometimes successful. However, more often successful but always inconspicuous are quiet leaders. In this article, the author profiles the quiet leader and the leadership style that he embodies. Based on his recently published book, Leading Quietly, this article discusses and defines a leadership style that is deliberate and circumspect, ethical and considerate - and successful, particularly in today's complex business environment. The author also has very sound advice for managers who must make tough choices under intense pressure.

When it comes to communicating effectively, leaders must not only be mindful that less is more but that strategy trumps tactics. These co-authors, professors and communications consultants, argue that leaders are more than willing to communicate, but that they too often approach the task on a tactical rather than strategic level. Moreover, these same leaders may use every medium and format available, but they rarely co-ordinate their use and deploy them selectively. Four steps taken - assessing the context, crafting the strategy, implementing the strategy and provoking the dialogue - will enable leaders to deliver messages that are clear, effective and achieve their goals.

Knowledge sharing allows teams and individuals to more quickly develop solutions to difficult problems, reduce costly duplication of effort, and create new, innovative solutions through collaboration. But, as this former George Washington University professor turned academic points out, most knowledge sharing practices neglect the group or individual who will receive and hopes to leverage the knowledge. Written to help the reader empathize with and understand the particular needs of the knowledge sharer, this article suggests what organizations and managers can do to support the particular needs of the other, important component of the knowledge equation, the knowledge receiver. (NOTE: Ms. Dixon's book, Common Knowledge, was chosen as The Globe and Mail's Report on Business's Best Business Book of 2000.)

In turbulent times, some leaders make tough choices with courage and conviction. Others, however, remain indecisive. But most executives find ways to cope with uncertainty, ways that enable them to make sense of a confusing situation. In this article, the author describes seven strategies that leaders can use to cope with ambiguity and complexity when making decisions. He also points out their drawbacks, underlining the need to take great care when deploying these strategies.

The CEO of a rapid-growth firm has a particular set of challenges, and as these authors point out, how a CEO manages each challenge will have an impact on a critical component of their firm's growth, information technology. The authors identify 12 challenges, from managing cash flow and choosing partners for alliances to fostering an open work environment and obtaining employee buy in. They also recommend tactics that will help managers meet each of the challenges.

Almost every call center strives to process inquiries and complaints quickly. But by stressing speed over service, centers usually end up annoying customers instead of helping them. Here's how to change that.

Although CEOs are cast as the bad guys when they lay off staff or move operations overseas, they are simply serving their masters--the shareholders. This article contends that giving primary concern to the interests of shareholders has become a form of entitlement.

In the 2000-2001 season, the men's basketball team at Boston College rebounded from last place to first--with essentially the same five starters. Coach Al Skinner discusses the two principles he used to turn his team around.

To thrive in a connected world, businesses need common standards. But industry consortia require collaboration from competitors, making these consortia difficult to set up and keep on track. Learn five practices that will help cross-industry groups succeed.

When Renault and Nissan entered into a strategic alliance in March 1999, Nissan was in trouble. The Japanese automaker had struggled for 8 years to turn a profit. Its margins were notoriously low, and purchasing costs were 15% to 25% higher at Nissan than at Renault. Adding to the cost burden was a plant capacity far in excess of the company's needs. And the company's debts, even after the Renault investment, amounted to more than $11 billion. Either Nissan would turn the business around, or it would cease to exist. A veteran of turnarounds at Renault and Michelin, Carlos Ghosn was asked by Renault's CEO to go to Tokyo to save Nissan. He faced an uphill battle as a non-Japanese, non-Nissan outsider--and he knew it. In this first-person account, Ghosn tells the story of Nissan's turnaround. He explains how he relied on cross-functional teams. Ghosn also contends that success is not simply a matter of making fundamental changes to a company's organization and operations; the company's identity and the self-esteem of its people must also be protected. But making changes and safeguarding identity is sometimes a precarious balancing act. The key, he says, is to nurture a strong corporate culture that taps into the productive aspects of a country's culture.

In 1993, Quaker Oats paid $1.7 billion for the rapidly growing Snapple brand. In 1997, it sold the brand to Triarc for a mere $300 million. In 2000, Triarc sold it to Cadbury Schweppes for an estimated $1 billion. How could so much value be lost and regained so quickly? John Deighton's answer to these questions is one that many marketing professionals are likely to resist: There is a vital interplay, he says, between the challenges that a brand faces and the culture of the corporation that owns it. Quaker's textbook marketing approach backfired, whereas Triarc's revival of Snapple's original anything-goes attitude worked. Success in brand management stems from the quality of strategy execution, and successful execution is a matter of temperament. Some strategies are best entrusted to managers with cautious, prudent temperaments; others flourish in the hands of risk takers. So before you commit to a deal, don't just consider a brand's sales. Also give some thought to its soul and how it fits with yours.

An employee is diagnosed with cancer or loses a family member unexpectedly. An earthquake destroys an entire section of a city, leaving hundreds dead, injured, or homeless. At times like these, managerial handbooks fail us. After all, leaders can't eliminate personal suffering, nor can they ask employees who are dealing with these crises to check their emotions at the door. But compassionate leadership can facilitate personal as well as organizational healing. Based on research the authors conducted at the University of Michigan and the University of British Columbia's CompassionLab, this article describes what leaders can do to foster organizational compassion in times of trauma. They recount real-world examples, including a story of personal tragedy at Newsweek, natural disasters that affected Macy's and Malden Mills, and the events of September 11, 2001. The authors say compassionate leaders uniformly provide two things: a "context for meaning"--creating an environment in which people can freely express and discuss how they feel--and a "context for action"--creating an environment in which those who experience or witness pain can find ways to alleviate their own and others' suffering.

Once a business performs a complex activity well, the parent organization often wants to replicate that success. But doing that is surprisingly difficult, and businesses nearly always fail when they try to reproduce a best practice. The reason? People approaching best-practice replication are overly optimistic and overconfident. Getting it right the second time (and all the times after that) involves adjusting for overconfidence in your own abilities and imposing strict discipline on the process and the organization. The authors studied numerous business settings to find out how organizational routines were successfully reproduced, and they identified five steps for successful replication. First, make sure you've got something that can be copied and that's worth copying. Second, work from a single template. It provides proof of success, performance measurements, a tactical approach, and a reference for when problems arise. Third, copy the example exactly, and fourth, make changes only after you achieve acceptable results. Fifth, don't throw away the template. If your copy doesn't work, you can use the template to identify and solve problems. Best-practice replication, while less glamorous than pure innovation, contributes enormously to the bottom line of most companies. The article's examples--Banc One, Rank Xerox, Intel, Starbucks, and Re/Max Israel--prove that exact copying is a nontrivial, challenging accomplishment.