MIT Sloan Management Review

Many companies have filled their corner offices with mediocre executives. A set of basic practices can help organizations avoid such a crucial mistake.

To manage relationships with subordinates, colleagues, bosses and others, executives first need to know how to classify those people accurately.

The seeds of effective change must be planted by embedding procedural and behavioral changes in an organization long before the initiative is launched.

The very factors that make partnerships with customers or suppliers beneficial can leave those relationships vulnerable to deterioration.

The key to making new employees productive quickly, known as "rapid on-boarding," is to help them immediately build an informational network with co-workers.

RESEARCH BRIEF: Emerging technologies enable virtual and distributed teams to communicate –and innovate – more effectively.

Employees with deep motivation, strong commitment, unquestioned loyalty and widely shared values can have drawbacks. Much has been written about the upside of deep commitment, but employers need to be wary of workers who identify too much with the company. Overidentification, says the author, may lead to an ends-justifies-the-means outlook, unethical actions, substitution of personal needs for company goals and resentment when the company doesn’t meet employees’ expectations.

A company's ability to execute today's strategy while developing tomorrow's arises from the context within which its employees operate.

Since Peter Drucker heralded the beginning of the knowledge era more than 15 years ago, companies have invested a good deal of time, focus and money trying to improve knowledge-worker productivity, with largely disappointing results. Three leading knowledge-management thinkers — Michael Hammer, Dorothy Leonard and Tom Davenport — suggest the solution lies in better processes, wider experimentation and closer examination of how human beings actually learn.

The health care crisis in the United States has become a business crisis, as exploding costs put increasing pressure on companies’ bottom lines. The authors argue that companies should go on the offensive, both to reduce costs and to seek improvements in the quality of care, by partnering with employees and providers. Many companies, from giants like Johnson & Johnson and Textron to manufacturers with only a few hundred employees, are having success with this approach.