Management training rightly stresses the resolution of tensions and conflicts. But there are some organizational tensions and conflicts that managers shouldn’t try to resolve. For example, a necessary tug of war exists between how companies generate knowledge in practice versus how they implement it through process. The tension reflects the countervailing forces that, on the [...]

Few industries have more to gain from digital technologies than financial services. After all, finance is a pure bits business, based on the flow of data through billions of transactions.
To date, most digital efforts in banking, insurance and brokerage have been directed at developing an online presence with no clear picture of customer benefits, and [...]

Innovation has become the defining challenge for global competitiveness. The authors show the degree to which location matters for successful innovation at the global technology frontier. Such locational advantages help to explain an apparent paradox of globalization: Ideas and technologies that can be accessed at a distance cannot serve as a foundation for competitive advantage.

Research shows that the most successful strategic alliances are in companies that have a dedicated function specifically assigned to oversee alliances. Such companies more readily solve problems related to the four key alliance-management elements — knowledge management, external visibility, internal coordination and accountability.

The Internet has created new markets, customers, products and modes of conducting business. The authors explain why seven popular strategies are not the path to profitable growth and provide thoughtful guidelines for avoiding misconceptions and taking a sensible approach to business on the Internet.

Getting a customer’s online order is not enough: E-businesses also must show that they can deliver products quickly and efficiently. Based on their research with successful online companies, the authors identify two core concepts for improving e-fulfillment efficiency: making greater use of information flows and capitalizing on existing pipelines and infrastructures. Those concepts underlie five key e-fulfillment strategies: logistics postponement, dematerialization, resource exchange, leveraged shipments and clicks-and-mortar. The authors describe how to determine the best strategy for a given situation.

How can companies reverse the generally weak performance of faltering global teams? The authors’ survey of 58 senior executives from five U.S. and four European multinational organizations reveals the corrosive effects of a number of cross-cultural impediments. The authors elaborate on how carefully crafting a cross-border team’s charter, composition and process work holistically to increase the odds of success.

What company in a service business has not weighed the advisability of offering products? The software industry provides instructive examples but their attempts to cross the chasm have met with grim results: Approximately 87% of software service companies’ product initiatives failed. On five key issues — intellectual property rights, product complementarity, returns from scale, abstracting knowledge and connections with users — service companies and product companies are often at opposite poles. Five case studies show why service companies must modify the service mind-set to suit the product market, but without giving up their unique service-sector insights.

If the open-source software movement is any harbinger of future trends, companies in many industries need to be concerned not only about what they produce, but also about what their customers might produce without them. Aided by the Internet to support collaboration and distribution, the power and pervasiveness of innovation and development communities will have to be factored into the strategic equation. The author identifies the conditions that favor user innovation and explores how circumstances evolve — sometimes to include commercial manufacturers and sometimes not.