MIT Sloan Management Review

Markets are changing, competition is shifting and businesses are suffering or perhaps thriving. Whatever the immediate circumstances, corporate managers ask the same questions: Where do we go from here, and which strategy will get us there? To figure out when it makes sense to pursue strategies of position, leverage or opportunity, managers must understand their company’s immediate circumstances, take stock of their current resources and determine the relationships among the various resources.

Researchers confirm what many workers intuitively know: You’ll be less productive if your attention is spread too thin.

While technological innovations have revolutionized the workplace, it is ironic that relational boundaries — obstacles to productive human interactions — remain largely unchanged. This article identifies five types of such boundaries, and suggests that all five of them may be overcome when collaborative and creative leaders engage in six boundary spanning practices: buffering, reflecting, connecting, mobilizing, weaving and transforming.

The timeline of energy development projects now is largely driven by sustainability and social performance issues, says Marvin Odum, president of Shell Oil. That’s prompting innovations in how the company involves external stakeholders, incentivizes employees and drives changes throughout the entire energy industry.

Companies have been trained to think about data all wrong, say Attivio’s Ali Riaz and Sid Probstein. “Analytics don’t have to be based on super-precise data,” they say. “The report doesn’t have to be perfect. It needs to capture the behavior, not the totality of it.”

New research suggests that five crucial conversations — often overlooked or avoided — are essential to the success of any high stakes project or initiative.

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

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

Advances in development tools have tremendous potential for increasing productivity, cost savings and innovation. To reap the full benefits of such technologies, though, companies need to avoid some common pitfalls.

The benefits of knowledge management are often accepted as a given, but its role in producing specific desired outcomes is not well known. Recent research employs survey-based and qualitative analysis to determine the effectiveness of various knowledge management methods in driving and supporting new product development.&

Rather than trying to apply an exhaustive IT implementation checklist, executives should focus on identifying the likely pitfalls for the specific project at hand.

As service and product outsourcing become more commonplace, new organizational forms are emerging to facilitate these relationships. Chase Bank has created “shared services” units that compete with outside vendors to furnish services to the bank’s own operating units.

Processes to solidify and streamline supplier-customer relationships can result in mutually beneficial commercial success.

Successful strategy emerges from a decision process in which executives develop collective intuition, accelerate constructive conflict, maintain decision pacing, and avoid politics.

A platform is a collection of components, processes, knowledge, people, and relationships shared by a set of products, allowing companies to efficiently develop differentiated products and to better meet customer needs. The authors describe the benefits and challenges of platform planning, presenting three underlying ideas, a method for planning a new product platform, and recommendations for managing the process.

Local initiatives provide winning opportunities and new vitality for MNCs. But managers need tactical savvy, persistence, and luck to break through corporate barriers.

Scholars and observers from disciplines as disparate as sociology, economics, and management science agree that a transformation has occurred — knowledge is at center stage.1 Knowledge is information combined with experience, context, interpretation, and reflection.

While outsourcing might be attractive for some parts of a value center, it is not a substitute for crafting a strategy to leverage IT resources for business success. An effective strategy framework recognizes four interdependent sources of value from IT resources and the approaches for managing each source.

The failure to integrate a product strategy, a well-planned portfolio, and a facilitating organization structure with clearly identified customer needs, a well-defined product concept, and a project plan can severely hamper new product development. An examination of eleven companies aims at improving the effectiveness of the front-end process.

A revolution is now underway. Most innovation occurs first in software.1 And software is the primary element in all aspects of innovation from basic research through product introduction:Software provides the critical mechanism through which managers can lower the costs, compress the time cycles, and increase the value of innovations.