MIT Sloan Management Review

Ask any CEO or speaking consultant what the most important aspect of public speaking is, and they will most likely say, “Know your audience.” But according to Thomas P.

Last September, executives from Arla Foods amba, the Danish dairy giant, probably paid scant attention to a series of caricatures of the prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten. Six months later, they learned a hard lesson about religion and commerce.

Managing change does not mean dealing with chaos. In fact, continuous change is a predictable cycle with four phases, each requiring certain resources and a specific type of champion.

Are you battling imports and losing market share? Has your product become an “unplanned commodity” as your sales negotiations with customers more and more revolve around price rather than value? Is your marketing team launching new products that support your brand and differentiate your company in the marketplace? Do you

Departing employees leave with more than what they know; they also take with them critical knowledge about who they know. That information needs to be a part of any knowledge-retention strategy.

Many manufacturers have established product development activities in different countries around the world. Yet their senior managers often struggle to tie those decentralized organizations into a cohesive, unified operation that can efficiently drive growth and innovation. New empirical frameworks may help unlock practices with which managers can deploy well-coordinated global product development strategies.

Few companies understand how such innovation occurs — and how to encourage it. To foster new management ideas and techniques, companies first need to understand the four typical stages in the management innovation process.

Too many managers still view their workforces as costs to be controlled and cut. There is a better way, but it requires organizational and societal will.

Reaping the elusive productivity rewards of information technology requires that an organization must change the way it does business. Schneider National took that dictum to heart and became a trucking and logistics powerhouse.

Despite the commoditization of information technology, companies are growing increasingly dependent on it for strategic advantage.

When one company acquires another, executives have 10 distinct options for the corporate rebranding. Selecting the right strategy can set forth a compelling vision for the combined entity and send important signals to employees and the outside world.

The Internet marketplace allows companies to produce and sell a far wider range of products than ever before. This profoundly changes both consumer behavior and business strategy.

Breaking free of linear chain thinking and viewing value creation from a multidimensional grid perspective provides the greatest opportunities for innovation.

More experience generally means better productivity, except in high tech, where the answer is unclear.

The modern corporation can be traced back four centuries to the formation of the Dutch East India Company, considered the first joint-stock company. On the other hand, democracy has been employed in different parts of the world for millennia.

In January 2005, responding to a class action suit, Netflix Inc., the world’s leading delivery-based DVD-rental company, publicly acknowledged a policy it had practiced since it launched in 1999.