A version of this article appeared in the Autumn 2016 issue of strategy+business. Most companies have leaders with the strong operational skills needed to maintain the status quo. But they face a ...

Rita Gunther McGrath thinks it’s time for most companies to give up their quest to attain strategy’s holy grail: sustainable competitive advantage. Neither theory nor practice of strategy has kept ...

A global electronics manufacturer seemed to live in a perpetual state of re-organization. Introducing a new line of communication devices for the Asian market required reorienting its sales, marketing ...

The good news for business leaders is that research and experience point toward sound approaches to the delivery and positioning of sustainable products. Working in tandem, PwC and the Center for ...

But simply understanding the need for distributed responsibility is not sufficient if leaders don’t understand what it means to demonstrate responsibility themselves. One way of demonstrating ...

Anyone who has watched a company go through a change of leadership is keenly aware of how strongly the personality of the chief executive can shape performance. Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, the Raoul ...

Indeed, elegance in enterprises is more necessary than ever because of the increasingly complex challenges executives face. Leaders must meet the evolving demands of workers as well as customers, and ...

A specialist in decision making, Santos started a class in the spring 2018 term called Psychology 157: Psychology and the Good Life. She wanted to understand what social science could teach people ...

On March 1, 2010, Hiroshi Mikitani, the founder and CEO of Rakuten, a Japan-based e-retailer, announced that henceforth English would be the official language of the company’s 10,000 employees.

Establishing a foothold in a new market can be a potent weapon against rivals, according to this paper, which finds that the value of footholds far exceeds their small size and the costs of their ...

Since its founding in 1957, GreenShield has been a nonprofit, focused on responding to the evolving healthcare and insurance needs of Canadians, while pursuing its social mission of Better Health for ...

Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder letters are famous, a key element of his mystique. Inevitably, they’re described in the business media as “folksy.” But this description misses the reason these ...