MIT Sloan Management Review

Companies such as Procter & Gamble, Cisco Systems, Genzyme, General Electric and Intel are often credited with having attained market leadership through open innovation strategies. By tapping into and exploiting the technological knowledge residing beyond their own R&D structures, these companies outmaneuvered rivals. But while other organizations try to follow their example, many are failing because they neglect to ensure that the outside ideas reach the people best equipped to exploit them.

When it comes to tapping into the passions of employees, the opportunities and threats that sustainability presents are two sides of the same coin.

Most mergers fail because the newly constructed management team has been put in no position to actually lead. Can the pitfalls faced by merged teams be avoided, and the opportunities seized? Here are six guidelines for setting up new management to succeed.

At top companies, where the inspired use of metrics helps to identify potential leaders and develop their skills, the answer is yes.

New research indicates that there are five steps that can help business leaders increase CSR’s effectiveness as a lever for talent management.

Finding the right individuals to fill executive positions has never been easy, and the process is only getting more difficult with increased globalization.

Many studies have shown that the most treacherous time in the failure-strewn business of mergers comes after two companies tie the knot, when they attempt to combine operations. Surprisingly, however, they often destroy value not as a result of inattention to detail but through excessive zeal in their integration efforts.T

Is it appropriate to integrate spirituality into the management of an organization? Does spirituality make a company more profitable?

The corporation has emerged as perhaps the most powerful social and economic institution of modern society. Yet, corporations and their managers suffer from a profound social ambivalence. Believing this to be symptomatic of the unrealistically pessimistic assumptions that underlie current management doctrine, Ghoshal et al. encourage managers to replace the narrow economic assumptions of the past.

In many large organizations, and some small ones, a new corporate executive is emerging — the chief knowledge officer. Companies are creating the position to initiate, drive, and coordinate knowledge management programs.

A unifying framework for thinking about processes —or sequences of tasks and activities — that provides an integrated, dynamic picture of organizations and managerial behavior.

Three leading professional service firms have succeeded by creating capabilities for collaboration and learning that leverage individual competency into enhanced problem solving for clients.

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.

Falling communication costs are enabling companies to decentralize their decision-making structures. Now they must seek a balance between empowerment and control.

How to understand the various techniques for improving organizations, identify the relationships among them, and merge them so that they become complementary rather than competitive.

What can the plant manager at a Japanese soy sauce producer teach us about reengineering? In this case study, the authors describe Toshio Okuno’s five techniques for managing major changes in his company. By focusing first on changing people’s attitudes toward change and encouraging them to be creative, Okuno brought about significant improvements in processes and results. And the managers and workers, rather than reengineering consultants, began to propose ideas for change. Okuno’s techniques work as an integrated system that allow his company to innovate continuously and present many lessons for making change fun.

I come from an environment where, if you see a snake, you kill it. At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is go hire a consultant on snakes. Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you discuss it for a couple of years.

With the decline of some well-established firms, the diminishing competitive power of many companies in a burgeoning world market, and the need for organizational renewal and transformation, interest in organizational learning has grown. Senior managers in many organizations are convinced of the importance of improving learning in their organizations.