RESEARCH BRIEF: Recent research has greatly improved management's ability to anticipate customer wants.

RESEARCH BRIEF: Companies increasingly need to engage a wide range of stakeholders, but managers often underestimate the complexity of the task.

Too much familiarity with customers can backfire, but engaging them in multisided conversations, or "polylogues," can manage the risks and get better results.

Some managers are discovering that the process of purposeful play can inject much needed vitality into their organizations.

Despite the recent popularity of the "behaviorist" view, analysis indicates that, on the whole, investors make rational investment decisions based on their view of future cash flows.

Global sourcing is an increasingly popular business strategy, but it's not easy to execute. There are seven typical characteristics of organizations with outstanding global sourcing.

In developing countries, examples of successful sustainable enterprise often involve informal networks that include businesses, not-for-profit organizations and communities.

An organization's ability to recover from disruption quickly can be improved by building redundancy and flexibility into its supply chain. While investing in redundancy represents a pure cost increase, investing in flexibility yields many additional benefits for day-to-day operations.

Although the relevance of corporate philanthropy is widely accepted, few companies achieve significant, lasting societal impact because most lack a cohesive strategy. Effective philanthropy must be run no less professionally than the core business.

In service businesses as in others, work can be performed and stored in anticipation of demand. By wisely choosing what kind of inventory to hold, companies can improve quality, response times, customization and pricing.

Board self-evaluations are now a requirement at many companies. But what's the most effective way for directors to assess their own performance?

To coordinate work across different business units, executives should think of the organization as a nexus of commitments, or personal promises between employees, that must be actively managed.