Sexual harassment — and how to deal with it — is well understood by most companies. But now new dangers are being recognized in the ways an office romance affects the people around it. “Hostile work environment” claims, and their financial costs, are just the start.

Nonmarket strategy recognizes that businesses are social and political beings, not just economic agents. Smart executives engage with their social and political environment, helping shape the rules of the game and reducing the risk of being hemmed in by external actors. These executives realize that in a global economy, sustained competitive advantage arises from tackling social, political and environmental issues as part of a corporate strategy — not just pursuing business as usual.

To become a customer-focused organization requires senior executives to open up communication with people throughout the organization so they can hear what is actually going on — as opposed to a sanitized version. Few companies make this leap, even though not doing it can hurt long-term performance. However, managers can come to terms with their company’s weaknesses in the realm of customer focus by posing a set of five questions specifically designed to uncover their vulnerabilities.

Teams that fight wildfires have much to teach business managers about preventing complex and dynamic problems from spiraling out of control.

Research suggests that people will spend more freely if you first help them feel more virtuous.

A fundamental shift from push to pull is not limited to marketing; it’s occurring in all aspects of business, from human resources to research and development. A new book argues that companies need to adapt to this change.

From Apple to Twitter, some of the most successful businesses are not what their inventors originally envisioned. The Twitter story, in fact, is a powerful reminder that an entrepreneur’s main job is not to flawlessly execute the business idea so lovingly articulated in his or her business plan. It’s to embark on a learning journey that may or may not reach the destination originally envisioned. Instead, the company may end up at a more successful Plan B.

Customer-centricity may sound like a good idea. But a new breed of companies focuses instead on getting the customer to comply with a company’s systems.

What it means when people who grew up with technology in their hands become the heart of a work force — and what it means if managers don’t understand them.

Some approaches to achieving innovation work well together — but some don’t.

Marketers and sellers hate product returns, but smart companies aren’t passively accepting them as bitter pills to be swallowed. They’re managing product-return policies to maximize future profits.

Companies are remarkably myopic when they go about forming strategic partnerships. Systematizing the analysis process should produce more gain and less pain.

Social web platforms don’t thrive by magic. They can succeed only if they attract the right individuals, motivate them to act in the right ways and empower them to know and trust others in the network. That’s where online reputation systems come in.

This 2010 article explores how large, loosely organized groups of people are working together electronically in surprisingly effective ways — sometimes without even knowing it. To take advantage of the new possibilities and potential of collective intelligence, managers need a deep understanding of how these systems work. The authors employ an analogy from biology and call the building blocks that are combined and recombined in various ways the “genes” of collective intelligence systems.