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Political demands for environmental improvement create obligations for managers that can conflict with shareholder value creation. While differentiating products along environmental lines is a conceptually straightforward way of reconciling these apparently conflicting demands, not all attempts to do so have succeeded. This article describes three requirements for successful environmental product differentiation: 1) firms must discover or create a willingness in consumers to pay for public goods; 2) they must overcome barriers to the dissemination of credible information about the environmental attributes of their products; and 3) they must defend themselves against imitation. More broadly, environmental strategy must be integrated with the overall strategy of the business. The appropriate environmental strategy depends, like the business's overall strategy, on the fundamental economics of the industry and the business's internal capabilities--basic constraints that have often been obscured in the academic debate about business and the environment.

This articles examines the core competencies of twelve leading multinational companies. It explores their competencies, how they were developed, and how they are shifting over time. Successful companies rely on three types of competencies: superior technological know-how, reliable processes, and close external relationships. Different approaches are needed to develop each type of competency. While these firms have historically relied on technological know-how and reliable processes, they are planning more close external relationships for the future. External relationships help these firms strengthen and extend their traditional competencies while responding to the demands of globalization, mass customization, enhanced quality, and rapid technological change.

This articles examines the main cultural differences and similarities between American managers and their Russian counterparts. It also explores the applicability of familiar American management concepts concerning leadership styles, motivation approaches, performance appraisal systems for strategic planning, and organizational configurations in the context of the Russian culture. Certain American management concepts--such as legitimate power-based leadership style, employee relations policies, gainsharing, appraisals based on work team performance, strategic improvising, and strategic alliances--can be successfully put into practice in Russia. Differences in managerial values between these two countries, however, require that the application of American management approaches in Russia be carried out patiently and systematically.

Is ethical negotiating not only "the right thing to do," but also effective in achieving desired outcomes? Various ethical criteria (the Golden Rule, Universalism, Utilitarianism, Distributive Justice) are used to evaluate ten commonly used negotiation tactics (lies, puffery, deception, weakening the opponent, strengthening one's own position, nondisclosure, information exploitation, change of mind, distraction, and maximization). Some negotiating ploys are unqualifiedly unethical; some are inherently ethical; some are contingently ethical. Unethical bargaining can reap onetime benefits, but in the long run it damages relationships, sullies reputations, and actually closes the door on many potentially fruitful transactions.

This article describes the benefits and challenges of alternative workplace programs. Today many organizations, including AT&T and IBM, are pioneering the alternative workplace--the combination of nontraditional work practices, settings, and locations that is beginning to supplement traditional offices. This is not a fad. Although estimates vary widely, it is safe to say that some 30-40 million people in the United States are now either telecommuters or home-based workers. What motivates managers to examine how people spend their time at the office and where else they might do their work? Among the potential benefits for companies are reduced costs, increased productivity, and an edge in vying for and keeping talented employees. They can also capture government incentives and avoid costly sanctions. But at the same time, alternative workplace programs are not for everyone. Indeed, such programs can be difficult to adopt, even for those organizations that seem to be most suited to them. Ingrained behaviors and practical hurdles are hard to overcome. And the challenges of managing both the cultural changes and systems improvements required by an alternative workplace initiative are substantial. How should senior managers think about alternative workplace programs? What are the criteria for determining whether the alternative workplace is right for a given organization? What are the most common pitfalls in implementing alternative workplace programs? The author provides the answers to these questions in his examination of this new frontier of where and how people work.

Everyone talks about empowerment, but it's not working. CEOs subtly undermine empowerment. Employees are often unprepared or unwilling to assume the new responsibilities it entails. Even change professionals stifle it. When empowerment is used as the ultimate criteria of success in organizations, it covers up many of the deeper problems that they must overcome. To understand this apparent contradiction, author Chris Argyris (Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus and Director at Monitor Co.) explores two kinds of commitment: external and internal. External commitment--or contractual compliance--is what employees display when they have little control over their destinies and are accustomed to working under the command-and-control model. Internal commitment occurs when employees are committed to a particular project, person, or program for their own individual reasons or motivations. Internal commitment is very closely allied with empowerment. The problem with change programs designed to encourage empowerment is that they actually end up creating more external than internal commitment. One reason is that these programs are rife with inner contradictions and send out mixed messages like "do your own thing--the way we tell you." The result is that employees feel little responsibility for the change program, and people throughout the organization feel less empowered. What can be done? Companies would do well to recognize potential inconsistencies in their change programs; to understand that empowerment has its limits; to establish working conditions that encourage employees' internal commitment; and to realize that morale and even empowerment are penultimate criteria in organizations. The ultimate goal is performance.

This article presents a comprehensive framework for value creation in the multibusiness company. It addresses the most fundamental questions of corporate strategy: What businesses should a company be in? How should it coordinate activities across businesses? What role should the corporate office play? How should the corporation measure and control performance? Through detailed case studies of Tyco International, Sharp, the Newell Company, and Saatchi and Saatchi, co-authors David Collis (Yale School of Management) and Cynthia Montgomery (Harvard Business School) demonstrate that the answers to all those questions are driven largely by the nature of a company's special resources--its assets, skills, and capabilities. These range along a continuum from the highly specialized at one end to the very general at the other. A corporation's location on the continuum constrains the set of businesses it should compete in and limits its choices about the design of its organization. Applying the framework, the authors point out the common mistakes that result from misaligned corporate strategies. The company examples demonstrate that one size does not fit all. One can find great corporate strategies all along the continuum.

This article defines and explains the four essential elements of persuasion. Business today is largely run by teams and populated by authority-averse baby boomers and Generation Xers. That makes persuasion more important than ever as a managerial tool. But contrary to popular belief, author Jay Conger (director of the University of Southern California's Marshall Business School's Leadership Institute) asserts, persuasion is not the same as selling an idea or convincing opponents to see things your way. It is instead a process of learning from others and negotiating a shared solution. To that end, persuasion consists of these essential elements: establishing credibility, framing to find common ground, providing vivid evidence, and connecting emotionally. Credibility grows, the author says, out of two sources: expertise and relationships. The former is a function of product or process knowledge and the latter a history of listening to and working in the best interest of others. But even if a persuader's credibility is high, his position must make sense--even more, it must appeal--to the audience. Therefore, a persuader must frame his position to illuminate its benefits to everyone who will feel its impact. Persuasion then becomes a matter of presenting evidence--but not just ordinary charts and spreadsheets. The author says the most effective persuaders use vivid--even over-the-top--stories, metaphors, and examples to make their positions come alive. Finally, good persuaders have the ability to accurately sense and respond to their audience's emotional state. Sometimes, that means they have to suppress their own emotions; at other times, they must intensify them. Persuasion can be a force for enormous good in an organization, but people must understand it for what it is: an often painstaking process that requires insight, planning, and compromise.

This article provides a fresh look at strategy, showing that what counts isn't just growth but profitable growth. In charting strategy, many managers focus on revenue growth, assuming that profits will follow. But that approach is dangerous: today's deep revenue pool may become tomorrow's dry hole. To create strategies that result in profitable growth, managers need to look beyond revenues to see the shape of their industry's profit pool. The authors, both consultants at Bain & Co., define an industry's profit pool as the total profits earned at all points along the industry's value chain. Although the concept is simple, the structure of a profit pool is usually quite complex. The pool will be deeper in some segments of the value chain than in others, and depths will vary within an individual segment as well. Segment profitability may, for example, vary widely by customer group, product category, geographic market, and distribution channel. Moreover, the pattern of profit concentration in an industry will often be very different from the pattern of revenue concentration. The authors describe how successful companies have gained competitive advantage by developing sophisticated profit-pool strategies. They explain how U-Haul identified new sources of profit in the consumer-truck-rental industry; how Merck reached beyond its traditional value-chain role to protect its profits in the pharmaceuticals industry; how Dell rebounded from a misguided channel decision by refocusing on its traditional source of profit; and how Anheuser-Busch made a series of astute product, pricing, and operating decisions to dominate the beer industry's profit pool. The companies with the best understanding of their industry's profit pool, the authors argue, will be in the best position to thrive over the long term.

This article provides invaluable advice on the complexities of value-chain analysis. Many managers chart strategy without a full understanding of the sources and distribution of profits in their industry. Sometimes they focus their sights on revenues instead of profits, mistakenly assuming that revenue growth will eventually translate into profit growth. In other cases, they simply lack the data or the analytical tools required to isolate and measure variations in profitability. In this Manager's Tool Kit, the authors (both consultants at Bain & Co.) present a way to think clearly about where the money's being made in any industry. They describe a framework for analyzing how profits are distributed among the activities that form an industry's value chain. Such an analysis can provide a company's managers with a rich understanding of their industry's profit structure--what the authors call its profit pool--enabling them to identify which activities are generating disproportionately large or small shares of profits. Even more important, a profit-pool map opens a window onto the underlying structure of the industry, helping managers see the various forces that are determining the distribution of profits. As such, a profit-pool map provides a solid basis for strategic thinking. Mapping a profit pool involves four steps: defining the boundaries of the pool, estimating the pool's overall size, estimating the size of each value-chain activity in the pool, and checking and reconciling the calculations. The authors briefly describe each step and then apply the process by providing a detailed example of a hypothetical retail bank. They conclude by looking at ways of organizing the data in chart form as a first step toward plotting a profit-pool strategy.

China is an alluring market for multinational companies, but those based in the United States have suffered from the foreign-policy demands that their government has imposed on relations with this emerging giant. The author, a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and now dean of the Yale School of Management, reviews two new books that help point the way to a consistent foreign policy in the interests of both government and business. Big Dragon, by Daniel Burstein and Arne de Keijzer, takes a broad look at China and persuasively argues for a cooperative foreign policy that respects the country's power without treating it as an adversary. Greg Mastel's Rise of the Chinese Economy, which focuses on trade issues, delivers an important warning that the developed countries need China to reduce government intervention in its economy before they can safely integrate it into the World Trade Organization. Such change, Mastel says, would require a total restructuring of China's totalitarian political system; he urges the West to push China forward now, using WTO admittance as a lever. Whether we push China forward or not, Garten adds, the sheer size of the country combined with its serious internal strains means that it is likely to disrupt the world economy in a number of ways, and he advises companies on ways to minimize their risk. He recommends that companies maintain a wide portfolio of investments in China, appoint sophisticated government-relations managers, and invest heavily in local communities and projects of broad interest to the country.

The influence of history on an organization is a powerful but often overlooked force. Managers, in their haste to build companies, frequently fail to ask such critical developmental questions as, Where has our organization been? Where is it now? and What do the answers to these questions mean for where it is going? Instead, when confronted with problems, managers fix their gaze outward on the environment and toward the future, as if more precise market projections will provide the organization with a new identity. In this HBR Classic, Larry Greiner (professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business) identifies a series of developmental phases that companies tend to pass through as they grow. He distinguishes the phases by their dominant themes: creativity, direction, delegation, coordination, and collaboration. Each phase begins with a period of evolution, steady growth, and stability, and ends with a revolutionary period of organizational turmoil and change. The critical task for management in each revolutionary period is to find a new set of organizational practices that will become the basis for managing the next period of evolutionary growth. Those new practices eventually outlast their usefulness and lead to another period of revolution. Managers therefore experience the irony of seeing a major solution in one period become a major problem in a later period. Originally published in 1972, the article's argument and insights remain relevant to managers today. Accompanying the original article is a commentary by the author updating his earlier observations.

In this article, Jeffrey Pfeffer (Thomas D. Dee Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Business School) identifies widely accepted "fictions" about pay, disproves them with evidence, and then offers advice on how managers should pay their employees, and why. Every day, executives make decisions about pay, and they do so in a landscape that's shifting. As more and more companies base less of their compensation on straight salary and look to other financial options, managers are bombarded with advice about the best approaches to take. Unfortunately, much of that advice is wrong. Indeed, much of the conventional wisdom and public discussion about pay today is misleading, incorrect, or both. The result is that business people are adopting wrongheaded notions about how to pay people and why. In particular, they are subscribing to six dangerous myths about pay: 1) Labor rates are the same as labor costs; 2) Cutting labor rates will lower labor costs; 3) Labor costs represent a large portion of a company's total costs; 4) Keeping labor costs low creates a potent and sustainable competitive edge; 5) Individual incentive pay improves performance; and 6: People work primarily for the money. The author explains why these myths are so pervasive, shows where they go wrong, and suggests how leaders might think more productively about compensation. With increasing frequency, the author says, he sees managers harming their organizations by buying into--and acting on--these myths. Those that do, he warns, are probably doomed to endless tinkering with pay that at the end of the day will accomplish little but cost a lot.

This article argues that a good strategic plan must be written in a narrative form that tells an exciting, detailed, nuanced story. Virtually all business plans are written as a list of bullet points. Despite the skill or knowledge of their authors, these plans usually aren't anything more than lists of "good things to do." Rarely do these lists reflect deep thought or inspire commitment. Worse, they don't specify critical relationships between the points, and they can't demonstrate how the goals will be achieved. 3M executive Gordon Shaw began looking for a more coherent and compelling way to present business plans. He found it in the form of strategic stories. Telling stories was already a habit of mind at 3M. Stories about the advent of Post-it Notes and the invention of masking tape help define 3M's identity. They're part of the way people at 3M explain themselves to their customers and to one another. Shaw and his coauthors examine how business plans can be transformed into strategic narratives. By painting a picture of the market, the competition, and the strategy needed to beat the competition, these narratives can fill in the spaces around the bullet points for those who will approve and those who will implement the strategy. When people can locate themselves in the story, their sense of commitment and involvement is enhanced. By conveying a powerful impression of the process of winning, narrative plans can mobilize an entire organization.

The increasing liberalization of markets coupled with the creation of new markets for intermediate products is stripping firm-level competitive advantage back to its fundamental core: difficult to create and difficult to imitate intangible assets. This article explores these developments and elucidates implications for the management of intellectual capital inside firms.

A set of firms exists whose output consists solely of innovative solutions to novel problems, and whose long-term success depends on their ability to continuously innovate. These firms act as knowledge brokers, spanning multiple industries to innovate by transferring knowledge from where it is known to where it is not. They are often consultants to clients in a range of markets, but are also groups within a large organization that serve a range of otherwise independent divisions. Rather than producing breakthroughs in any one technology or dominating any one industry, knowledge brokers rely on an alternative but equally powerful strategy that lends itself to continuous innovation. These firms create new products and processes by combining existing technologies in ways that result in dramatic synergy. This article presents a theory of innovation through knowledge brokering that explains the actions and advantages of such firms, and it considers the lessons these firms can offer to others seeking to innovate.

One of the most effective avenues toward improvement is the process of internal benchmarking--identifying, sharing, and using the knowledge and "best practices" inside one's organization. But the process can be tricky and time consuming because of obstacles such as ignorance about resources or others' needs, a culture that values personal expertise more than knowledge sharing, and a lack of resources for implementation of best practices. This article explores how organizations conduct successful internal benchmarking, relating details ranging from requirements for successful transfer to lessons learned.

The biotechnology and pharmaceutical fields are rife with a wide range of collaborative relationships intended to access knowledge, skills, and resources that cannot be produced by organizations internally in a timely fashion. As more firms rely on external relationships for knowledge, the ability to process, transfer, and transmit knowledge gained in one context to other activities becomes critical. This article examines the capability for learning both how and what to learn in the context of these inter-organizational relations, and it surveys various practices developed by companies for accessing and distributing knowledge. The key challenge in innovation-intensive fields is to develop organizational routines for learning that are robust, flexible, and durable.

This article deals with the role of purchase-supply relations in organizational learning and knowledge-creation in Japan and how such relations are currently undergoing change. Drawing on interviews with managers, it presents case studies of the customer-supplier partnerships of three prominent Japanese manufacturing firms: Hitachi, Matsushita, and Toyota. The Hitachi case illustrates in a somewhat novel way the prevailing paradigm of how long-term, high-trust supply relations in Japan enhance organizational knowledge creation, learning, and innovation. The Toyota and Matsushita cases demonstrate that the dynamics of learning are behind two very different kinds of change in keiretsu supply networks. Toyota's evolving relationship with long-term partner Denso Corporation appears to fit the popular view that globalization and technological change are eroding Japanese keiretsu ties. The Matsushita case, by contrast, demonstrates that these same forces of change in other industrial settings may in fact be strengthening keiretsu-style partnerships.

This article draws attention to a number of errors that could potentially cripple the efforts of any organization attempting to generate and leverage knowledge. Many of these errors are associated with the concept of knowledge itself--how knowledge is understood in organizational settings. The article notes the sources of each error as well as some key implications for managing knowledge. It concludes with some brief suggestions on how to avoid, or at least ameliorate these errors.