Articles

Even good ideas can fail if the pilot lacks credibility, replicability and feasibility.

There's a problem with most major environmental rankings of businesses: Too often, the ratings fail to incorporate advocacy activities that influence environmental regulation.

It takes a special breed of project manager to execute business analytics projects.

Companies that pursue a number of improvement initiatives at once risk creating information overload for employees.

According to von Hippel, users are often the first source of new products.

Lessons for managers who are listening to social media.

Managers must figure out when it's best to pursue strategies of position, leverage or opportunity.

Companies experienced in analytics use are increasingly gaining competitive advantage.

"We're taking analytics from a planning perspective to a planning, execution and evolution perspective," says David Kreutter, at Pfizer Inc. As a result, analytics has become "much more operational than it's been in the past." The ways that Pfizer Inc., [link: http://www.pfizer.com/home/ ] the global pharmaceutical company, uses analytics is changing, in no small thanks to the pressure on physicians to prescribe generic rather than brandname drugs. David Kreutter, is accountable for Pfizer's U.S. commercial operations and analytics. He says that "in terms of customer analytics and commercial operating analytics, Pfizer U.S. has a strong legacy of management science in operations research support." With a team of 40-50 economists, statisticians, operations research colleagues and scientists, Kreutter says the group historically has focused on promotional tactics: understanding the effectiveness of strategies used in the field, in conversations with physicians and other players who influence whether a Pfizer drug is prescribed or not. Today, that's a little different. Today, Kreutter says his team closely track how sales representatives present material and how presentations are received. It's information, he says, that's critical. Kreutter spoke with David Kiron, executive editor at MIT Sloan Management Review, and Rebecca Shockley, the business analytics and optimization global lead for the IBM Institute for Business Value, about how the company is generating daily data reports, why precision is overvalued and what the coming generic version of the company's popular Lipitor drug has meant in terms of attention to analytics.

A look at key leadership decisions made during the 2010 mine cave-in crisis.