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Planning a major change in your organization? If so, chances are you have arranged a huge rally, rousing speeches, videos, and special editions of the company paper. Stop. This sort of communication is not working. If you want people to change the way they do their jobs, you must change the way you communicate with them. Drawing on their own research and the research of other communication experts from the past two decades, the authors argue that senior managers--and most communication consultants--have refused to hear what frontline workers have been trying to tell them: When you need to communicate a major change, stop communicating values, communicate face-to-face, and spend most of your time, money, and effort on frontline supervisors.

A successful strategy for selling your products or services depends on your ability to get into the minds of your targeted customers. But sometimes the customers themselves do not know what is in their minds. A simple tool called the ACE (Attribute Categorization and Evaluation) Matrix can help managers understand customers' behavior and bring hidden product attributes to the surface. It helps companies see that a product may have different salient attributes for different customer segments. The matrix gives companies an iterative process for validating assumptions about product attributes and for monitoring changes that occur because of competition.

The collapse of communism has led many in the West to declare that capitalism has triumphed. But Henry Mintzberg, professor of management at McGill University and INSEAD, says that this idea is overly simplistic. He argues further that the push for government to become more like business ignores both the value of the alternative forms of ownership we have in the West--including cooperative and nonprofit organizations--and the purpose of balance in our societies. A business model for managing government would treat its constituents as customers in an arm's-length trading relationship. But we are not merely customers of our government; we are also subjects (who have obligations), citizens (who have rights), and clients (who have complex needs). Thus we need a wide range of management models for providing public services.

In recent years, major industries in the United States have been deregulated--for example, telecommunications, airlines, and banking--and now the winds of change are blowing through the electric utility industry. But the experts do not agree on how much change is good for the country and how fast it should occur. Thomas R. Kuhn of the Edison Electric Institute, Pradeep ("Pete") Mehra of the Ford Motor Co., Robert L. Ball of Alcan Aluminum Corp., Richard C. Green, Jr. of UtiliCorp United, Donald E. Felsinger of San Diego Gas & Electric Co., David L. O'Connor of the Massachusetts Division of Energy Resources, Michael Shames of the Utility Consumers' Action Network, and John R. Hodowal of IPALCO Enterprises express their differing viewpoints in HBR's Perspectives, covering such topics as stranded costs, aggregation of small consumers, vertical deintegration, performance-based rate making, and retail wheeling of power.

In spite of top-notch efforts, many social-change initiatives fail. What goes wrong? How can the initiatives be presented more effectively? Analyzing the costs and benefits of the proposed change from the perspective of the targeted community can help marketers answer those questions. The authors present a framework to facilitate such an analysis and to help form effective marketing plans. When the proposed behavior change involves little cost to the targeted community and provides a significant personal benefit, conventional marketing methods--such as those used for marketing consumer goods--can be effective. When the proposed change involves a high cost, in terms of either money or some other measure (difficulty, for instance, in quitting smoking), the social marketer's job becomes harder. Social marketers face their greatest challenge in cases where the cost is high and the personal benefit is intangible.

The Internet promises a radical new world of business. But for many companies, it has yet to deliver. Although doing business in cyberspace may be novel and exhilarating, it can also be frustrating, confusing, and even unprofitable. Debora Spar and Jeffrey Bussgang argue that the problems companies face have little to do with a lack of technology or imagination. Their problems stem instead from a lack of rules. The authors explain why the informal rules that have developed on the Internet since the 1960s are no longer sufficient. Businesses thinking of allowing millions of dollars of transactions to occur on the wide-open Net need specific assurances. They require clear definitions of property rights, a safe and useful means of exchange, and a way to locate and punish violators of on-line rules.

Despite the best efforts of senior executives, major change initiatives often fail. Those failures have at least one common root: Executives and employees see change differently. For senior managers, change means opportunity--both for the business and for themselves. But for many employees, change is seen as disruptive and intrusive. To close this gap, says Paul Strebel, managers must reconsider their employees' "personal compacts"--the mutual obligations and commitments that exist between employees and the company. Personal compacts in all companies have three dimensions: formal, psychological, and social. Employees determine their responsibilities, their level of commitment to their work, and the company's values by asking questions along these dimensions. How a company answers them is the key to successful change.

Increasingly, work in today's corporations unfolds in small, temporary groups where the stakes are high, turnover is chronic, foul-ups can spread, and the unexpected is common. Karl E. Weick finds lessons for senior managers watching over such groups in an unusual source: Norman Maclean's 1992 book, Young Men and Fire, which reconstructs the circumstances of a deadly fire in Montana's Mann Gulch that claimed the lives of 13 young men. The author believes that corporate leaders can learn from this example by developing groups capable of improvisation, wise behavior, respectful interaction, and communication.

Companies that compete effectively over the long run in technology-intensive fields exhibit an ability for both continuous (or incremental) innovations and discontinuous (or radical) innovations. The latter, which lead to the creation of entirely new businesses and product lines, pose a unique set of challenges for management. They typically require a long, investment-intensive process, marked by pervasive uncertainty, unpleasant surprises, and no guarantee of success. Conventional approaches to new product development, while appropriate for continuous innovation, are inappropriate and sometimes even detrimental when applied to the more discontinuous regime of innovations. For instance, the familiar admonition to be customer-driven is of little value when it is not at all clear who the customer is or will be, or when the product class itself does not yet exist. This article presents four discontinuous innovations--CAT scanners (by GE), optical fibers (by Corning), cellular phones (by Motorola), and NutraSweet (by Searle, now Monsanto)--which explore the process of developing discontinuous innovations and demonstrate how they are different from incremental innovation.

To many managers, the idea of introducing process management to their development organizations sounds like a sure way to destroy creativity. Product development, they contend, is not the same as manufacturing: Each project has unique challenges that require unique solutions. In fact, the authors argue, managers who need to know how many projects their development organizations can handle and how quickly those projects can deliver new products to market must think of product development as a production process in which projects move through the knowledge-work equivalent of a job shop.

The notion that the future rests on more than just a whim of the gods is a revolutionary idea. It is also a very young idea. A mere 350 years separate today's risk-assessment and hedging techniques from decisions guided by superstition, blind faith, and instinct. More than any other development, the quantification of risk defines the boundary between modern times and the rest of history. Yet is today's sophisticataed approach to risk management and decision making an unalloyed blessing? What have we gained by the transformation from superstition to the supercomputer? What does it mean that the elaborate apparatus of probability analysis has supplanted hunches and intuition in business, finance, and other areas?

Corporate success depends on breaking through the clutter of messages and products facing consumers in the marketplace. But the more innovative the idea--whether it is a new product, package, price, or promotion--the greater the risk. Traditional marketing research methods, such as test markets, focus groups, controlled field experiments, and even STMs, have limitations. Some are vulnerable to observation and manipulation by competitors; others are contrived and unrealistic, too expensive, or simply incapable of providing the information that managers need. But a new alternative--the virtual store--not only addresses those limitations, it also broadens the horizons of marketing research.

Will banks as we know them continue to exist in the twenty-first century? Today other financial institutions are usurping the roles traditionally played by banks--and banks themselves are reconsidering the services they offer. Some have narrowed their focus, while others are broadening their product offerings. The authors show how a functional perspective developed by the Global Financial System Project at the Harvard Business School provides a framework for explaining the changes under way and helps predict how the future will evolve.

A decade ago, many observers predicted Caterpillar's demise. Yet today the company's overall share of the world market for construction and mining equipment is the highest in its history. And the biggest reason for the turnaround, writes Caterpillar's chairman and CEO Donald Fites, has been the company's system of distribution and product support and the close customer relationships it fosters. The backbone of that system is Caterpillar's 186 independent dealers around the world. They have played a central role in helping the company build close relationships with customers and gain insights into how it can improve products and services.

We entrust nonprofit and governmental organizations with society's most important functions--educating our minds, uplifting our souls, and protecting our health and safety. Lately, however, the public's faith in these institutions has been seriously undermined by revelations of wrongdoing and mismanagement. Can anything be done to restore the public's confidence? Regina Herzlinger argues forcefully that the answer lies in accountability. She points out that nonprofits and governments lack the mechanisms that compel accountability in the business world. Thus they require regulatory oversight to help them accomplish their social missions effectively, efficiently, and responsibly.

A corporation's success today lies more in its intellectual and systems capabilities than in its physical assets. Managing human intellect--and converting it into useful products and services--is fast becoming the critical executive skill of the age. It is therefore surprising that so little attention has been given to that endeavor. Few managers have systematic answers to even these basic questions: What is professional intellect? How can we develop it? How can we leverage it? According to James Brian Quinn and his coauthors, an organization's professional intellect operates on four levels: cognitive knowledge, advanced skills, systems understanding, and self-motivated creativity. They argue that organizations that nurture self-motivated creativity are more likely to thrive in the face of today's rapid changes.

U.S. corporations lose half their customers every five years. But most managers fail to address that fact head-on by striving to learn why those defectors left. They are making a mistake, because a climbing defection rate is a sign that a business is in trouble. By analyzing the causes of defection, managers can learn how to stem the decline and build a successful enterprise. The longer customers stay with a company, the more they are worth. The key to customer loyalty is value creation. The key to value creation is organizational learning. And the key to organizational learning, says the author, is grasping the value of failure.

The airline industry has already made competitive use of the technology that enables it to change prices daily or even hourly. But this technology now exists for everyone. Are we soon to see the price of blue jeans change by the hour? Those who wait to see what the competition does before they themselves react, may never be able to catch up.

Many companies today find themselves with a surplus of cash and a shortage of places to use it. In the past five years, more than 1,300 companies have stashed upwards of $150 billion into their coffers. Yet when CEOs look for ways to spend that cash, they find few options. This litany, however, precludes one important option--nonsynergistic acquisitions. A new study by McKinsey consultants Patricia L. Anslinger and Thomas E. Copeland has found that companies can pursue nonsynergistic deals profitably. In fact, their yearlong research has uncovered a diverse group of organizations, including Thermo Electron, Sara Lee, and Clayton, Dublier & Rice, that have grown dramatically and captured sustained returns of 18% to 35% per year by making nonsynergistic acquisitions.

In this double-barreled review, two leading authors present different but complementary theories of leadership. Warren Bennis reviews Howard Gardner's Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership, predicting that it will become a classic text on leadership. Harry Levinson presents us with "The Leader as Analyst," a review of Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries's Life and Death in the Executive Fast Lane.