MIT Sloan Management Review

For manufacturers and service companies alike, the ability to sell integrated solutions requires completely new organizational structures and capabilities.

Customers frequently play key roles in the delivery of services. But if customers fail in those roles, their experiences may be unsatisfactory for them — and for the companies with which they do business.

Negative services — those that are needed in emergencies, when problems arise or to ensure against unwanted outcomes — are part of most businesses and central to many. Their very nature presents unique growth challenges.

Companies often make crucial mistakes when trying to protect trade secrets, sometimes relying on policies that actually lead to more information being divulged.

Electronic information can easily overwhelm people with large volumes of data. An abundance of information often strains human limits: attention, memory, motivation or other factors. In response to this challenge, software that assists humans in filtering and organizing information into more digestible amounts and formats have appeared (Alba et al.,

Too often, leaders impose top-down visions on their organizations. The best leaders identify and express the meaning that is inherent in the organization’s work.

It takes a tremendous amount of detailed management on both the client and supplier sides to realize the expected benefits of offshore outsourcing of IT work. Here are 15 best practices that can accelerate learning and make the strategy eminently worthwhile.

To manage research and development projects, companies need to ensure that informal social networks are reinforced — and not thwarted — by formal organizational structures.

The pursuit of self-interest can produce a lot of good, but it needs a bit of guidance if society is to prosper.

Companies with a restricted view of innovation can miss opportunities. A new framework called the “innovation radar” helps avoid that.

Do we finally have the right technologies for knowledge work? Wikis, blogs, group-messaging software and the like can make a corporate intranet into a constantly changing structure built by distributed, autonomous peers — a collaborative platform that reflects the way work really gets done.

Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently noted that in many cases, “old-fashioned corporate decision-making hasn’t caught up with new Information Age tools.” Indeed, companies must increasingly function as nodes in vast knowledge networks, and it is obvious that many of them are not up to the challenge.

Risk management helps people reach consensus and make better-informed decisions that lead to quantifiable results.

Customer service is not found on a T-shirt or a bumper sticker or in a mission statement.