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Distorted information along a supply chain can lead to tremendous inefficiencies. How can companies mitigate them?

Blaine attributes the U.S. trade deficit to the declining capacity of the United States to satisfy domestic demand for manufactured products with domestic production. Every year, more Americans buy more from other countries than foreigners purchase from the United States. U.S. companies have contributed to the problem by shifting their manufacturing to companies overseas. At the same time, foreign firms are exporting more goods to the United States. Thus, says Blaine, the bulk of trade occurs between foreign units of companies rather than between independent companies located in foreign countries. According to Blaine, in his study of extensive data from a multitude of sources, multinational corporations will have a greater role in shaping international trade flows than will nations themselves. This, in turn, diminishes the efficiency of traditional macroeconomic policies. And countries like the United States that rely on the exchange rate to give firms an incentive to increase exports are less successful than countries like Japan that develop policies to give firms an incentive to increase export activities. Thus, says Blaine, changes in the value of the dollar will have only minimal effect on the trade deficit. The only way to correct the trade imbalance, then, is for U.S. firms to increase domestic production and stop satisfying U.S. demand with products made abroad.

Cultivating an age-diverse team can strengthen your organizations’ innovation and decision-making capabilities.

To bring out the best from teams, leaders can draw from a toolkit of strategies that prioritize connection, organization, and vision.

There’s a great deal of enthusiasm about platform strategies these days. Entrepreneurs pitch their startups as the next Uber, the next Facebook, or the next Airbnb, while executives in established companies are retooling their strategies around platforms to drive growth and compete digitally. But creating a successful platform business is not easy — as economists Richard Schmalensee and David S. Evans explain in this MIT Sloan Management Review interview.

Phil Fernandez, President and CEO, Marketo, interviewed by Renee Boucher Ferguson,, Data Analytics researcher and editor at MIT Sloan Management Review. A serial entrepreneur he's taken two marketing-oriented companies public and is looking to do the same with his current endeavor Marketo president and CEO Phil Fernandez knows a thing or two about social business. Marketo utilizes social media, data analytics and Web site traffic to help companies find prospects, interact with them and ultimately, sell to them. His track record to date is impressive. Since Marketo started in 2006, Fernandez and his team have raised $107 in venture capital (yes, in this climate) earned $33 million in subscription revenue in 2011 alone revenue is expected to double that in 2012 -- and signed more than 2,000 customers, including the likes of Intel, LinkedIn, PayPal and McKesson. As a 30-year veteran in Silicon Valley and the author of Revenue Disruption, a book that outlines strategies for companies to transform their sales and marketing organizations to accelerate growth, Fernandez has seen a few shifts in marketing strategies. He believes we're in the midst of another big one. A shift that has many companies, particularly in the business-to-business sector, caught off guard. "We see it playing out over and over and over again, where social is everywhere in B2B, but a lot of people are in denial," says Fernandez. "They're not quite matching up that all those same themes and trends that are affecting them in their consumer lives, are affecting their businesses, too." In a conversation with Renee Boucher Ferguson, a researcher and editor at MIT Sloan Management Review, Fernandez discussed the changing social business landscape and how companies can start to think about and capitalize on those changes.

For several years now, marketers have been urged to embrace one-to-one marketing and to offer microsegmented consumers customized products and services through targeted outreach. While the "market of one" approach can pay off, says the author, it requires a significant upfront investment, including: implementing customer relationship management software applications; filtering, enhancing and cleaning customer data; and personalizing interactions (e-mail, billing, offers and so on). These activities take time and coordination of multiple parts of the organization (marketing, customer service, sales, information technology), which can be daunting for companies trying to react quickly to a changing environment. In addition, those systems have often produced disappointing results because their use was not well integrated with corporate strategy. Also, micro-marketing strategy, on its own, is too narrow. Companies still need to reach broad groups of people with messages that are not dependent on an individual's decision to open an envelope (whether virtual or physical), pick up the phone or click on a box. But broad-based, broadcast media is ineffective and expensive. Fortunately, there are alternative solutions, such as one-to-one targeting and the broadcasting of 30-second television spots. The author's research on trends in marketing spending and consumer attitudes about advertising reveals four strategies available to companies that want to reach broad groups of people without breaking their marketing budget. The strategies are liberally illustrated with examples of Nike, Microsoft, UBS, Delta, Sony, Procter & Gamble, Citibank, Nextel, Honda, Nokia and McDonald's, among others.

Green marketing has not lived up to the hopes and dreams of many managers and activists. Although public opinion polls consistently show that consumers would prefer to choose a green product over one that is less friendly to the environment when all other things are equal, those "other things" are rarely equal in the minds of consumers. For example, when consumers are forced to make trade-offs between product attributes or helping the environment, the environment almost never wins. And hopes for green products also have been hurt by the perception that such products are of lower quality or don't really deliver on their environmental promises. And yet the news isn't all bad, as the growing number of people willing to pay a premium for green products -- from organic foods to energy-efficient appliances -- attests. How, then, should companies handle the dilemmas associated with green marketing? They must always keep in mind that consumers are unlikely to compromise on traditional product attributes, such as convenience, availability, price, quality and performance. It's even more important to realize, however, that there is no single green-marketing strategy that is right for every company. The authors suggest that companies should follow one of four strategies, depending on market and competitive conditions, from the relatively passive and silent "lean green" approach to the more aggressive and visible "extreme green" approach -- with "defensive green" and "shaded green" in between. Managers who understand these strategies and the underlying reasoning behind them will be better prepared to help their companies benefit from an environmentally friendly approach to marketing.

Most suppliers lack sufficient customer knowledge to implement anything but the most sales-oriented growth strategies and tactics. If they wish to achieve profitable, sustainable growth and a larger share of their customers’ wallets, they need a fine-grained, disciplined approach to obtaining, leveraging and documenting customer knowledge. James C. Anderson of Northwestern’s Kellogg School and James A. Narus of Wake Forest University have been conducting management-practice research with companies that have superior knowledge of their customers and use it to devise and implement focused, inventive strategies that create profitable growth while increasing the value delivered. Using the examples of best-practice suppliers such as Bank of America, Seghers, Technische Unie, KLM Cargo and Telindus, the authors suggest a strategic framework to guide supplier managers in the selective pursuit of a greater share, predicated on estimating the current share of each customer’s business, selecting and pursuing appropriate and inventive opportunities to increase that share, and carefully documenting the profitability efforts. According to Anderson and Narus, building the scope of the market offering, broadening collaboration and using multiple single sourcing each represent ways of growing business share selectively with a customer while improving profitability for both the supplier and customer.

Some business builders in the Internet era have blindly focused on “getting big fast” in the mistaken belief that Metcalfe’s Law applies ad infinitum. The value of a network, in fact, does not increase forever, but there are ways to counteract the forces that put the brakes on network effects.” Around 1980 Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet standard and founder of 3Com, observed that the value of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of people using it. This observation came to be known as Metcalfe’s Law. It was similar to an idea developed by economists about network effects” & #8212; meaning that some resources become more valuable to a person using them according to the number of other people also using them. At the dawn of the Internet era, network effects became the Holy Grail for many business builders, who wanted to “get big fast” in order to exploit them before the competition did. But Metcalfe’s Law doesn’t always hold, say Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee and consultant Fran ois-Xavier Oliveau. As networks become very large, they can fall prey to saturation, cacophony, contamination, clustering and high search costs. Those phenomena mean that larger networks can, in some cases, have less value than smaller ones. The authors have identified several strategies that network builders can employ to maintain network effects or limit their decline. When followed properly, these strategies are more effective than a blind, bigger-is-better approach in which network builders rush to sign up as many users as quickly as possible.