MIT Sloan Management Review

Loose-lipped strangers can be a legal source for hot stock tips, but not if they expect to get something in return.

Want to see your customer-satisfaction levels drop? Tell your customers upfront that you’ll be asking them to evaluate your service.

Three new studies suggest that the most effective leaders admit they don’t have all the answers — and are willing to ask their employees for help.

Whether companies are launching an IPO or investing in one, insights from three recent studies can improve the chances of success.

Countless real-world experiments will drive e-business innovation during the next five years, and academic researchers will contribute to this process by accelerating the rate at which businesses learn from each other’s experiments.

When employees walk out the door, they take valuable organizational knowledge with them. But managers who think creatively can keep it in-house.

Suppliers think social contacts matter a lot — but buyers are much more concerned about prices and switching costs.

Companies seek long-term benefits from upfront spending on R&D, advertising, and other intangibles. A new study quantifies the value of those investments.

Companies want people to shop online, but they have yet to ease many consumers’ fears about doing business through the Internet.

When members of a top team share an optimistic outlook on life, the company’s bottom line is also likely to be positive.

A survey of high-tech companies reveals which techniques get R&D and marketing departments to share vital information with each other.

How do you compete with opponents that have size, strength and history on their side? The authors use Palm Computing (later Palm Inc.) to illustrate how the core principles of judo strategy — movement, balance and leverage. The offer lessons and specific techniques that other companies can emulate in order to compete successfully with a stronger player.

In trying to bring about e-business transformation, companies have paid too much attention to technology. To help company leaders see the bigger picture, the authors developed a research-backed model of e-business value creation based on eight e-business drivers — from mastering supplier-related processes to optimizing IT applications aimed at customers — that lead to operational excellence and improved financial performance.

There are four phases in the life cycle of a technology, and for each there are appropriate ways of partnering with outsiders.

All companies wish they could produce exactly what customers want when they want it. The ability to be that precise would not only delight customers but reduce costs. The challenges, however, are formidable, and most companies settle for manufacturing standard products in bulk, guided by long-term forecasts.

New information technologies bring new business challenges: threats from new competitors and opportunities to change focus and practices. The business impact of new technology usually receives the most attention —appropriately — but managers shouldn’t overlook the rippling effects on the company’s IT function.

Decisions on CEO succession have never been more critical to an organization’s success. No wonder, then, that boards are insisting on being involved in the process and not leaving the choice up to a departing chief executive officer.

Many companies boast that their employees are their greatest assets, but when the going gets tough, they shed those precious assets in an effort to cut costs and boost efficiency and productivity.

During the 1980s, Benetton was known as the archetypal network organization. But it decided to take a new direction representing a major discontinuity with its past and a divergence from industry practices. Without giving up the strongest aspects of its networked model, it integrated and centralized, exerting greater control over its supply chain even as it diversified its operations and product lines. The authors offer a detailed case study of this dramatic transformation.

A new twist on a decades-old analytic technique promises to give marketers a better tool for measuring their customers' willingness to pay (WTP), outperforming common survey-based methods.