MIT Sloan Management Review

You can bank on a tenfold improvement in the cost and capability of collaboration technologies over the next five years. What will your organization do with that?

When a behind-the-scenes decision must be “downloaded” to employees, the way it is communicated has a lot to do with its acceptance and eventual success or failure.

The flow of information, ideas and talent across organizational boundaries presents unique opportunities and potential threats.

Many executives talk about the need for greater flexibility and adaptability from their companies. But the truth is that most businesses have organized themselves in ways that inherently discourage change.

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.

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

By sharing insights and perspectives with a group of noncompeting peers from other regions, managers can stay abreast of industry trends and combat complacency.

In volatile and uncertain environments, managers must encourage and enable the spurts of participatory innovation that lead to emergent processes and solutions.

In September 2004, Merck & Co. Inc. initiated the largest prescription drug withdrawal in history. After more than 80 million patients had taken Vioxx for arthritis pain since 1999, the company withdrew the drug because of an increased risk of heart attack and stroke.

With the recent rise in corporate share prices, swelling cash accounts and a weak dollar, prognosticators are heralding the return of strong mergers and acquisitions activity, particularly in the high-tech, pharmaceutical and banking sectors.

Information and knowledge management models that exclude the influence of national and regional culture seriously undercut their potential effectiveness.

Organizations are increasingly able to gather and process information from a variety of new sources. But competitive advantage will still belong to those who know how to use it.

I had probably greeted Tom in passing more than 50 times before we actually met. A new student at the MIT Media Lab, he worked just a few doors down the hall from my office, but I was a busy doctoral student and didn’t have much time to cultivate relationships.

Many companies have struggled to design IT systems, databases and content repositories that provide their employees with easily accessible and relevant information. The authors urge organizations to emulate the strategies of Google, eBay and Amazon.com, whose core competence is based upon making it easy for customers to find what they want — quickly, accurately and usefully.

Teams that are basically left to run themselves can be highly efficient and productive. To be successful, though, such autonomous groups require a specific type of external leadership.

A “postcompany” school of experts says information technology is enabling a new world of seamless collaboration among businesses. They recommend that executives tear down the “walls” and merge their companies into amorphous “enterprise networks.” Nick Carr counters that new technologies will never conquer cutthroat competition and shows why managers need to be wary of alliances that foreclose opportunities for advantage.

As customer power grows, innovative companies are moving beyond traditional push marketing and customer relationship management to become full proponents of the customer agenda.

Knowledge management is creating processes not just for learning and retaining what is important but also for avoiding or unlearning what is not.