MIT Sloan Management Review

There’s a business relationship that’s often overlooked: the relationships in between friends and allies — in other words, business relationships with people you enjoy being with. This article defines these people as chums and asserts that their importance too often goes unnoticed. Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends & Influence People is a practical classic on the art of cultivating chums — of inviting business allies into your courtyard while keeping them out of your kitchen.

Research into the ways that people can feel less time-pressed and more time-affluent suggests that the answer lies in focusing attention on the present and away from the self.

Employees who work out of the office employ a variety of tactics to make sure that their contributions are noticed and that their colleagues have a favorable impression of them.

In May, 2012, the New Yorker published an 11-page profile of Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor. The article details his fascination with low-end disruptive products (articulated in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma), his Mormon faith, and how good people, like good companies, can lose their way in life. That last topic is the subject of Christensen’s book How Will You Measure Your Life? and his TED talk of the same name.

Adding a bar code to a paper resume can send employers directly to online portfolios, additional application materials or detailed contact information. It also is a quick cue into your tech savvy.

Working from home or other remote work arrangements can be beneficial to both employees and companies. However, these nontraditional arrangements also have hidden pitfalls. Employees who work remotely may end up getting lower performance evaluations, smaller raises and fewer promotions than their colleagues in the office — even if they work just as hard and just as long. The difference is something called “passive face time” — the simple act of merely being seen in the workplace.

Tips for how to walk into a room of strangers, carry yourself with composure and walk out with contacts.

New research suggests that clothing can have an effect on our behavior if that clothing has a symbolic meaning and if we have the physical experience of wearing the clothes. Researchers at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University call this “enclothed cognition.”

Executives become isolated if they don’t get on-point coaching and honest feedback. But too often, their “coaches” are people outside the company who don’t seem them in action. Robert S. Kaplan of Harvard Business School says that the better tactic is to get coaching from direct reports.

Clay Johnson’s new book “The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption” makes the case that “much as a poor diet gives us a variety of diseases, poor information diets give us new forms of ignorance — ignorance that comes not from a lack of information, but from overconsumption of it.”

Author Christopher Johnson’s new book Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little highlights the best ways to get messages noticed, remembered, and passed along. “Brevity is just a minimal requirement,” he says.

Managers who screen suggestions are busy and have short attention spans, so the ability to be succinct can make or break an idea. They want proposals that are neither skimpy nor turgid. And 250 words is often just right.

Adam Bryant identifies 5 key traits to leadership in his new book “The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons From CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed.” The most counterintuitive: “A Simple Mind-Set.”

Want to change a bad habit that you have -- or that your organization has developed?

In their new book Change Anything, authors Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler, all affiliated with the consulting firm VitalSmarts, present research and insights about how to change bad

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

No doubt about it: Technology has changed the way knowledge work gets done. But have you changed your work habits enough to get the most from information technology?

Researchers Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson and Marshall Van Alstyne have been studying information worker productivity for a number of years.

People with optimistic dispositions get jobs more easily and get promoted more, new research suggests.

Recent research finds evidence that optimism pays off in job hunting and promotions.

Researchers Ron Kaniel (Fuqua School of Business, Duke), Cade Massey (Yale School of Management) and David T.

"I see nothing constructive about an annual pay and performance review. It’s a mainstream practice that has baffled me for years."

Too often, business students see little overlap between the jobs they plan to do — and those they consider most socially responsible or would most enjoy.