Leadership

Vertical command and control” sabotages organizations that need bottom-up innovation to be competitive. Yet organizational integration is increasingly essential. New research shows how technology is helping cutting-edge companies meet the challenge by integrating horizontally.” A fundamental management challenge, particularly in large, diversified global enterprises, is the tension between subunit autonomy and companywide cohesion. New research uncovers several ways top companies balance that tension.In the last decade, performance criteria often ignored how managers of subunits contributed to companywide performance. Empowerment efforts improved unit competitiveness but left knowledge sharing behind. Today (because customers’ needs span internal boundaries and because technology has changed the way innovation gets managed) managers are recognizing the need to address the integration side of the tension. At one company, BP, CEO John Browne created a peer-assist process to help his business-unit leaders integrate horizontally. Managers who ran similar businesses were assigned to help one another improve both individual and collective performance. As the culture evolved and managers successfully handled ever tougher endeavors, both entrepreneurship and mutual trust were strengthened. Executives who want to build horizontal integration without disrupting entrepreneurship must allow time for persistent action and reinforcement to take hold. Although they have to be relentless in driving the process, they must be patient about results. Such leaders will reap enhanced organizational capability and sustainable improvement of business performance.

Most executives today recognize that their organizations’ ability to manage knowledge effectively is a strategic imperative. Just how they should go about developing that ability is the challenge. As in most other areas of management advice, there is no shortage of useful frameworks, models and checklists to choose from. Unfortunately, these solutions are generally presented as applicable in any and all situations, and managers are left to make their own mistakes as they use one tool or another to limited effect. Executives can begin to take a more effective approach if they realize that knowledge has a life cycle. Over the course of a five-year study, the authors have devised a model to help explain the life of an idea in commercial settings. The model shows that new knowledge is born as something fairly nebulous and that it takes shape as it is tested, matures through application in a few settings, is diffused to a growing audience and eventually becomes widely understood and recognized as common practice. In this article, the authors develop the concept of the knowledge life cycle in detail and then describe the appropriate strategies for managing ideas at each stage of the cycle.

Adapting to rapid structural change requires exploration, not contraction.

The image of the CEO as Alexander the Great has faded; comparisons today are more likely to be made with Charles Ponzi. It may seem like odd timing, then, for an important thinker on corporate leadership and public policy to be issuing a call for CEOs to undertake a serious, committed engagement with a whole range of social, economic and environmental issues & #8212; topics that for years have been at the bottom of most top-executive agendas. But that is precisely what Jeffrey Garten, dean of the Yale School of Management, envisions in his latest book. Garten seeks a new kind of leadership from chief executives, yet one that hearkens back to a period in our history that also required people from all walks of life to come together in the pursuit of common goals.In this interview with SMR senior editor David A. Light, Garten speaks of the need to balance regulation and free markets, the historical precedents for business leadership on public-policy questions, and the urgent need for institutions that can manage the progress of globalization. He also discusses the important first step that CEOs must take before they can exert leadership on a bigger stage: restoring their reputations.

As far back as 1959, Peter Drucker insisted on the need to pay more attention to knowledge work and the people doing such work. More than 40 years later, the subject still lacks its Frederick Taylor or Henry Ford; at best, it has been explored by approximations of William Morris and the Italian Futurists & #8212; artists who expressed an understanding of industrial developments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the spirit of the artists concerned with industrialism a century ago, but with an eye toward more scientific advances, the authors spent more than a year investigating the mysteries of knowledge-worker performance. In the process, they realized that organizations can’t begin to increase their understanding of what makes knowledge workers effective until they recognize the importance of such workers as a whole and how to differentiate among them as individuals. In this article, the authors explore five key issues that companies are struggling with and then develop a framework to help organizations think more clearly about how to improve the performance of their knowledge workers.

How some companies are responding to recent corporate scandals.

Hiring CEOs from outside the industry is a higher-risk, higher-reward proposition.

Storytelling has emerged as the preferred approach for teaching leadership effectiveness in many companies.

In 1996, the Web-browser "wars"