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Once upon a time, the Walt Disney Company was famous for a quaint little mouse, a collection of vintage animated films for children, and two enjoyable--but aging--theme parks. It was, in other words, a great American company in eclipse. Today, Disney may be going through some tough times, but it's tough times for a vast $23 billion empire. Along with animation blockbusters like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, Disney now owns three motion picture studios, as well as the ABC and ESPN television networks. The company is now poised to build new theme parks in Japan and China to go along with its EuroDisney attractions. Two Disney cruise ships sail the Bahamas. A Disney symphony to mark the millennium opened at the New York Philharmonic last fall. And an integrated network of Web sites--Disney.com, ABC.com, ABCNews.com, Go.com, and Family.com--stretches out over the Internet. The driving force behind all that growth was undoubtedly Michael Eisner, who became chairman and CEO in 1984. In this interview with senior editor Suzy Wetlaufer, Eisner vividly and colorfully describes the challenges he confronted as he built Disney. In a series of revealing anecdotes, he illustrates the workings of a culture that fosters creativity--an environment fraught with both carefully institutionalized conflict and good old-fashioned common sense. Eisner describes in detail the four pillars of his particular brand of leadership, which he maintains are the same in good times and bad: being an example; being there; being a nudge; and being, as he puts it, "an idea generator--all the time, all day, all night."

As we enter the twenty-first century, the business world is consumed by questions about e-commerce. In this article, four close observers of e-commerce speculate about the future of commerce. Adrian Slywotzky believes the Internet will overturn the inefficient push model of supplier-customer interaction. He predicts that in all sorts of markets, customers will use choiceboards--interactive, on-line systems that let people design their own products by choosing from a menu of attributes, prices, and delivery options. And he explores how the shifting role of the customer--from passive recipient to active designer--will change the way companies compete. Clayton Christensen and Richard Tedlow agree that e-commerce, on a broad level, will change the basis of competitive advantage in retailing. The essential mission of retailers--getting the right product in the right place at the right price at the right time--is a constant. But over the years retailers have fulfilled that mission differently thanks to a series of disruptive technologies. The authors identify patterns in the way that previous retailing transformations have unfolded to shed light on how retailing may evolve in the Internet era. Nicholas Carr takes issue with the widespread notion that the Internet will usher in an era of "disintermediation," in which producers of goods and services bypass wholesalers and retailers to connect directly with their customers. Business is undergoing precisely the opposite phenomenon--what he calls hypermediation. Transactions over the Web routinely involve all sorts of intermediaries. It is these middlemen that are positioned to capture most of the profits.

An effort to reduce malnutrition in Vietnam provides a surprising business lesson: companies that want to change their employees' behavior may find the solution within their organization.

A good environmental-reporting process can make a firm more environmentally responsible and more competitive--in the marketplace and in the war for talent.

It's tempting to save time and money by negotiating through e-mail, rather than in person or by phone. But new research finds that people can be contentious--even dishonest--when negotiating solely by e-mail.

Despite the rapid growth of Asian businesses, the center of the world economy in the next century will continue to be North America and Europe.

Some of the best ideas about performance appraisal are coming from the public sector. Government agencies are setting up systems that really can tell the weak from the strong.

Most U.S. companies spend as much on advertising as they earn from their brand, and what do they get for it? Not nearly enough. Ineffective tests and overdelegation to lower-level staff guarantees mediocrity.

Most leaders of new product teams are aware of the complexity of the problem they confront and the changes that must occur before cross-functional teamwork can accelerate new product development processes. Most know, for instance, that promoting cross-functional thinking, collaborative decision making, and concurrent organization of new product workflow are advantageous. Only a select few, however, consistently act on these insights and effect meaningful changes. The differences between more and less effective leaders lies less in what they espouse or profess and more in the process by which they learn and form new visions and develop new ways of defining their behaviors.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. When queried, senior executives concurred that conventional theories and business practices do not provide the necessary guidance and support for decision making in a world of change, complexity, and uncertainty. The authors' research on more than 100 companies is the basis of their Delta model, which defines strategic positions that reflect fundamentally new sources of profitability, aligns these strategic options with a firm's activities and provides congruency between strategic direction and execution, and introduces adaptive processes capable of continually responding to an uncertain environment. Describes three strategic options having three distinct economic perspectives: best product, customer solutions, and system lock-in. These strategic options provide a mechanism for defining the vision of a business. The Delta model links strategy with execution by selecting a distinctive strategic position and then integrating it with a company's collective processes. The authors identify three fundamental processes that are always present and are the repository of key strategic tasks: operational effectiveness, customer targeting, and innovation. Strategy must adapt continuously, and implementation must respond to market changes and to greater understanding of the market that becomes apparent only during implementation. A firm's actions must be aligned with its strategic position, and the results must give feedback for adapting the strategy.

Too often, promising strategic plans never come to fruition. A common cause of such failures is a breakdown in implementation--the internal processes and events needed to bring a strategy to life. Results from a large-scale research project, surveying 500 middle managers in five large firms in different industries, led to a framework for strategy implementation. The framework analyzes the pitfalls and requisite managerial responses in four chronological stages of implementation: Pre-Implementation, Organizing the Implementation Effort, Managing the Implementation Process, and Maximizing Cross-functional Performance. Managerial levers for coping with the requirements of these different phases include goal-setting and modifications of structure, leadership, communications, and incentive systems. A thread that runs through the entire sequence is the need not to overlook middle managers when the focus is on customers, competitors, and senior management decision making.

As more and more companies begin to see the world as their market, brand builders look with envy upon those businesses that appear to have created global brands--brands whose positioning, advertising strategy, personality, look, and feel are in most respects the same from one country to another. Attracted by such high-profile examples of success, these companies want to globalize their own brands. But that's a risky path to follow, according to David Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler. Why? Because creating strong global brands takes global brand leadership. It can't be done simply by edict from on high. Specifically, companies must use organizational structures, processes, and cultures to allocate brand-building resources globally, to create global synergies, and to develop a global brand strategy that coordinates and leverages country brand strategies. Aaker and Joachimsthaler offer four prescriptions for companies seeking to achieve global brand leadership. First, companies must stimulate the sharing of insights and best practices across countries--a system in which "it won't work here" attitudes can be overcome. Second, companies should support a common global brand-planning process, one that is consistent across markets and products. Third, they should assign global managerial responsibility for brands in order to create cross-country synergies and to fight local bias. And fourth, they need to execute brilliant brand-building strategies. Before stampeding blindly toward global branding, companies need to think through the systems they have in place. Otherwise, any success they achieve is likely to be random--and that's a fail-safe recipe for mediocrity.

In Black and White on Wall Street, Joseph Jett, the trader blamed for Kidder Peabody's controversial demise in 1994, tells his side of the story. But his account is more than just a tale of racism and greed. Reviewer Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr., finds that Jett's experiences, when taken in the larger context of work life, are a cautionary tale about the serious challenges to personal integrity faced by knowledge workers in the new economy. Jett believed that a career on Wall Street offered valuable solutions to some age-old problems. He would be a free agent, choosing where and how he worked; his pay and promotions would depend on his performance, not on connections, company politics, or skin color. In short, Jett thought he would be his own man. Instead, he discovered that the old realities of organizational life and interpersonal relationships still shape the new workplace. According to Badaracco, it would be naive to expect the new economy to be radically different from the old one. Even if economic relationships have changed, human nature has not: self-interested managers, backroom politics, prejudice, and the seductions of power and money still shape behavior. People may now get to "eat what they kill," but bosses usually determine who gets the best hunting grounds. Thus Machiavelli's fundamental question--Can men and women in positions of responsibility lead lives of integrity in the face of uncertainty and relentless competition?--remains acutely relevant. Using Jett's experiences as a starting point, Badaracco draws several lessons about maintaining integrity in the free-agent workplace.

Susan Bishop started Bishop Partners with the aim of making it the best boutique executive-search firm in the business. Specializing in television, radio, and publishing industries, her plan was to beat out her larger, established competitors through superb execution. Great service would lead to happy clients, which would lead to more business, which would keep clients happy, which would lead to even more business. A virtuous circle, right? Wrong. Before long, she and her staff grew weary of jumping through every hoop their clients could think of--trying to find candidates for lower-level positions in remote locations at below-market rates, for instance. But what could they do? How could they afford to disappoint any customer when they didn't have that many to begin with? In this vivid first-person account, Bishop describes how she and her staff came to an answer that was highly counterintuitive: stop trying to make everyone happy. Focus instead on making the right customers happy. Raise their prices. Limit their searches to high-level positions in their field of expertise. Stick to companies big enough to give them repeat business. As hard as it was to define the right clients, it was even harder to say no to the wrong clients. One member of the staff had to turn down work worth $120,000; Bishop herself had to turn down $250,000 from her largest client, Coca-Cola. But in the end, those clients came back with higher-quality work, and her company was on its way from chaotic little start-up to successful, professional enterprise. Bishop tells the classic entrepreneur's story, one with important lessons about strategy making, courage, and discipline for all business people.

Botched leadership transitions occur with alarming frequency--a fact that's laid bare regularly in the business pages of the nation's newspapers. The headlines trumpet the premature departures of designated successors--leaders such as Merrill Lynch's Herb M. Allison and AT&T's John Walter, who left their respective companies before they could claim the CEO's seat. Dan Ciampa and Michael Watkins, who have counseled senior executives and successors through more than 100 leadership transitions in the past 25 years, point to the successor's dilemma as the dominant cause of failed leadership transitions. The dilemma is an emotionally charged power struggle played out between the CEO and his would-be heir. Ciampa and Watkins describe the way the problem builds on both sides of the desk--the CEO's fear of giving up control versus the designated successor's need to enact the changes expected of him and prove himself to the board. They cite anecdotal evidence and their own research to suggest that this complex psychological dynamic leads CEO-successor relations astray and can block the successor's path to the top spot. But the authors also offer four ways for the would-be heir to overcome the successor's dilemma. These include gauging the CEO's readiness to leave before accepting the number two spot, maintaining regular communication with the CEO despite ever-present obstacles such as travel and business schedules, and developing and using a balanced personal advice network to help navigate the shift in power. The authors stress that defusing the problem is the responsibility of the successor, not the CEO. The reason is simple: the successor has the most to lose.

In its first generation, electronic commerce has been a landgrab. Space on the Internet was claimed by whoever got there first with enough resources to create a credible business. It took speed, a willingness to experiment, and a lot of cybersavvy. Companies that had performed brilliantly in traditional settings seemed hopelessly flat-footed on the Web. And despite their astronomical valuations, the new e-commerce stars have appeared to be just as confused. Many have yet to make a profit, and no one has any idea when they will. Now, the authors contend, we are entering the second generation of e-commerce, and it will be shaped more by strategy than by experimentation. The key players--branded-goods suppliers, physical retailers, electronic retailers, and pure navigators--will shift their attention from claiming territory to defending or capturing it. They will be forced to focus on strategies to achieve competitive advantage. Success will go to the businesses that get closest to consumers, the ones that help customers navigate their way through the Web. Indeed, the authors argue, navigation is the battlefield on which competitive advantage will be won or lost. There are three dimensions of navigation: Reach is about access and connection. Affiliation is about whose interests the business represents. And richness is the depth of the information that a business gives to or collects about its customers. Navigators and e-retailers have the natural advantage in reach and affiliation, while traditional product suppliers and retailers have the edge in richness. The authors offer practical advice to each player on competing in the second generation of e-commerce.

Contrary to popular perception, business people can be benevolent. For instance, one recent study notes that four-fifths of all Harvard Business School graduates are involved with nonprofits, with more than half of those serving on boards. Most business professionals will spend some time on a nonprofit board. That's the good news, the author says. The bad news is that the involvement of business people can easily backfire. That's because they often try to take what they have learned from business school and the corporate world and apply it to their duties in the nonprofit sector. On the surface, there are similarities between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Both have boards of directors, trustees and chairpeople, regular meetings, and so forth. But the governance of nonprofit organizations is very different from the governance of for-profit businesses in several critical areas, including missions, measurements, and board composition. For instance, the CEO in the nonprofit world must manage a relationship with a nonexecutive board chair. In the for-profit world, the CEO is the chair. Such significant differences make it difficult to transfer ideas and practices between the for-profit and nonprofit worlds. In this article, F. Warren McFarlan describes the main differences between serving on a for-profit board and serving on a nonprofit board. As he points out, understanding the differences will make it easier for business people to move smoothly from one environment to the other and will therefore make their commitments more effective. Nonprofits need business people, but only on the right terms.

During the past two decades, the number of charitable foundations in the United States has doubled while the value of their assets has increased more than 1,100%. As new wealth continues to pour into foundations, the authors take a timely look at the field and conclude that radical change is needed. First, they explain why. Compared with direct giving, foundations are strongly favored through tax preferences whose value increases in rising stock markets. As a nation, then, we make a substantial investment in foundation philanthropy that goes well beyond the original gifts of private donors. We should therefore expect foundations to achieve a social impact disproportionate to their spending. If foundations serve merely as passive conduits for giving, then they not only fall far short of their potential but also fail to meet an important societal obligation. Drawing on Porter's work on competition and strategy, the authors then present a framework for thinking systematically about how foundations create value and how the various approaches to value creation can be deployed within the context of an overarching strategy. Although many foundations talk about "strategic" giving, much current practice is at odds with strategy. Among the common problems, foundations scatter their funding too broadly, they overlook the value-creating potential of longer and closer working relationships with grantees, and they pay insufficient attention to the ultimate results of the work they fund. This article lays out a blueprint for change, challenging foundation leaders to spearhead the evolution of philanthropy from private acts of conscience into a professional field.

In 1988, less than 2% of large deals were paid for entirely in stock; by 1998, that number had risen to 50%. The shift has profound ramifications for shareholders of both the acquiring and acquired companies. In this article, the authors provide a framework and two simple tools to guide boards of both companies through the issues they need to consider when making decisions about how to pay for--and whether to accept--a deal. First an acquirer has to decide whether to finance the deal using stock or pay cash. Second, if the acquirer decides to issue stock, it then must decide whether to offer a fixed value of shares or a fixed number of them. Offering cash places all the potential risks and rewards with the acquirer--and sends a strong signal to the markets that it has confidence in the value not only of the deal but in its own stock. By issuing shares, however, an acquirer in essence offers to share the newly merged company with the stockholders of the acquired company--a signal the market often interprets as a lack of confidence in the value of the acquirer's stock. Offering a fixed number of shares reinforces that impression because it requires the selling stockholders to share the risk that the value of the acquirer's stock will decline before the deal goes through. Offering a fixed value of shares sends a more confident signal to the markets, as the acquirer assumes all of that risk. The choice between cash and stock should never be made without full and careful consideration of the potential consequences. The all-too-frequent disappointing returns from stock transactions underscore how important the method of payment truly is.

Many policy makers at the Fed contend that the new economy is a fragile bubble--and that with the "irrational exuberance" of the capital markets, the sky is going to fall on the U.S. economy. That couldn't be further from the truth, according to William Sahlman. As long as the government doesn't interfere, he argues, the economy is sturdy, resilient, and raring to grow. The new economy is strong for several reasons. First, it is based on a business model that works. Any business system that relentlessly drives out inefficiency, forces intelligent business-process reengineering, and gives customers more of what they want will be sustainable. Second, it is built on America's admiration for entrepreneurs and its tolerance for failure, not to mention its easy access to capital. Third, the new economy is attracting the best and brightest minds in the country. And finally, says Sahlman, the new economy is strong because it is spreading. It may be primarily an American phenomenon now, but in a few short years it will start to show its effects everywhere, making the whole world a more productive place. Still, Sahlman believes, the road ahead is not without potholes and sharp curves. But that is what the new economy is all about, he maintains--companies attacking the status quo and entrenched players, companies experimenting to find new technologies that improve or replace earlier ones. Such activity presents no cause for alarm. The economic, social, and cultural factors undergirding the new economy are rock solid. It's simply a matter of letting them stand.