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Banning GenAI tools won’t work. Leaders should set guidelines that let employees experiment: This mitigates risks while opening the door to organizational gains, research shows.

Learn three principles for reorganizing work around AI.

Traditional goal setting undermines the alignment, coordination, and agility needed to execute strategy.

A collective corporate memory can permeate processes, products, services and even distributed digital networks.

Organizations tend to downplay or ignore how hard it is to be a good manager. Here are the skills that can turn the tide.

Edward R. Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and other classics of information visualization, says that businesses would think better, make better decisions and present themselves more powerfully if they would only learn to talk--both among themselves and externally--in facts. To present themselves and their products better and more honestly, Tufte recommends that companies concentrate on delivering facts (rather than pitches), deliver as many of those facts as they can, not count on the marketing department to make it happen, and look to news sites and scientific publications for models of success. In particular, he argues that Google Inc. is where most companies should turn for design inspiration, and Tufte continues his examination of the corrosive influence that he says presentation software has on thought. Following his big ideas about information presentation, he says, will help companies differentiate themselves.

For many years, multinational corporations could compete successfully by exploiting scale and scope economies or by taking advantage of imperfections in the world's goods, labor and capital markets. But these ways of competing are no longer as profitable as they once were. In most industries, multinationals no longer compete primarily with companies whose boundaries are confined to a single nation. Rather, they go head-to- head with a handful of other giants. Against such global competitors, it is hard to sustain an advantage based on traditional economies of scale and scope. MNCs must seek new sources of competitive advantage. While multinationals in the past realized economies of scope principally by utilizing physical assets and exploiting a companywide brand, the new economies of scope are based on the ability of business units, subsidiaries and functional departments within the company to collaborate successfully by sharing knowledge and jointly developing new products and services. Collaboration can be an MNC's source of competitive advantage because it does not occur automatically -- far from it. Indeed, several barriers impede collaboration within complex multiunit organizations. And in order to overcome those barriers, companies will have to develop distinct organizing capabilities that cannot be easily imitated. The authors develop a framework that links managerial action, barriers to interunit collaboration and value creation in MNCs to help managers understand how collaborative advantage can work. The framework conceptualizes collaboration as a set of management levers that reduce four specific barriers to collaboration, leading in turn to several types of value creation. They draw on BP's experience to illustrate the effectiveness of a collaborative approach.

Between 1991 and 2001, the average number of joint-venture deals announced each year increased from 1,000 to 7,000. Executives are clearly setting great store by these temporary partnerships as a way of achieving both short-term and longer-term goals. As with any type of alliance, however, success can be elusive, and a poor relationship between the partners is often at the root of difficulties within a venture. A negative cycle frequently develops in which poor partner relations lead to poor performance, which in turn puts the partner relations under greater pressure. In the course of her work with executives from joint ventures and their parent companies, the author identified five minefields that can explode and damage the relationships in an otherwise fruitful operation. Since joint ventures are here to stay -- they are still sometimes the only way for a company to enter a new market or to gain access to key technology or people -- managers must learn to avoid the minefields if they are to realize the full potential of these strategic partnerships.

In an often overemphasized focus on efficiency, many companies turn to packaged information-technology systems to manage business processes. University of Michigan Business School professors C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan suggest they should be more concerned about strategy & #8212; and getting line managers and IT managers to use information systems in ways that facilitate strategic change. A new applications-portfolio scorecard helps managers assess information infrastructure before making investments. Six key considerations are each IT application’s role in strategy, whether the knowledge embodied in the application (say, salaries in a payroll application) is stable or evolving, how much change will be needed, where the application will be sourced, whether the data is proprietary or public, and the application’s freedom from conformance defects. Those parameters differ for different functions. Managers may not need the latest software for a stable function. They may decide not to purchase a customized package, because it could be out of sync with the vendor’s future software. Only those companies that deeply analyze what they need from each IT application will acquire the right portfolio. The authors’ work with 500 executives revealed that few managers believed their information infrastructure was able to handle the pressures from deregulation, globalization, ubiquitous connectivity and the convergence of industries and technologies. Though fully aware their organizations lacked rapid-response capability or flexibility, the managers rarely knew how to fix the disconnection between the quality of IT infrastructures and the need for strategic change. Considering that information-infrastructure expenditures are generally 2% to 8% of companies’ revenues, new measures to address the disconnection are essential. A corresponding change in the mind-sets and the skill sets of smart line managers and IT managers also is helping improve overall competitiveness.

As adapting to globalization becomes increasingly necessary, business customers are pressuring suppliers to accept global-pricing contracts (GPCs). So far, most of the benefits of GPCs have redounded to the business customer. Although purchasers may promise a supplier access to international markets, guaranteed production volumes and improved economies of scale and scope, too often they fail to deliver. They may not buy as much as planned, may demand customization that the supplier cannot leverage with other customers, may force the supplier to drop the customer's competitors -- or may fall on hard times and have to scale back commitments. That is why, before signing a contract, suppliers should do due diligence. According to Das Narayandas of Harvard Business School, John Quelch of the London Business School and Gordon Swartz of Oxford Associates, suppliers must fully understand the customer's global strategy and the business conditions in its respective markets. They also need a firm grasp of their own strategy and local practices. Which GPCs would be suitable and which would be detrimental? Suppliers don't want to turn down all GPCs. They recognize that their global customers may be both their largest customers and their fastest growing ones -- and understandably, they want to share in the benefits of growth. Using data collected from interviews with global-account managers in diverse industries on four continents, the authors bring the global concepts down to earth to help suppliers navigate the uneven terrain. By exploring why customers want GPCs, under what circumstances the contracts are likely to profit suppliers, and how to successfully implement contracts, Narayandas and his colleagues identify preparation as the key to success. The more information suppliers can gather (for example, about variances in their own pricing in different markets, about the cost to serve the customer, about exchange rates and local regulations), the better their negotiating position. During negotiations, it might be useful to know whether the customer demands the same price in every market regardless of the supplier's varying costs -- yet continues to charge its own customers varying prices. A carefully negotiated GPC can be a winning outcome for both supplier and customer and can serve as the foundation for a broader, mutually advantageous relationship that extends beyond price.