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Every decade or two, a big idea in management thinking takes hold and becomes widely accepted. The next big idea must enable businesses to improve the hit rate of strategic initiatives and attain the level of renewal necessary for successful execution. Scientific research on complex adaptive systems has identified principles that apply to living things, from amoebae to organizations. Four principles in particular are relevant to new strategic work, as activities at Royal Dutch/Shell demonstrate: 1. Equilibrium equals death. The lure of equilibrium poses a constant danger to successful firms. In 1996, Shell was highly profitable, but fissures were forming below the surface. Downstream, Shell's oil products business faced grave competitive threats. Steve Miller, the business's group managing director and a student of complexity theory, recognized that to meet those threats, he would have to disturb equilibrium by bypassing the resistant bureaucracy and involving the front lines in renewal. By 1997, after a series of initiatives, Shell ranked first in share among major oil companies; by 1998, the business had made a contribution of more than $300 million to Shell's bottom line. 2. Complex adaptive systems exhibit the capacity of self-organization and emergent complexity. The living-systems approach focuses on the intelligence in the nodes. To tap the retailing potential of the forecourt of Shell's service stations, Miller drew on the insights of frontline troops. He assembled teams from operating companies around the world into "retailing boot camps," workshops for identifying and exploiting market opportunities. These generated many new ideas for beating the competition. 3. Complex adaptive systems move toward the edge of chaos when provoked by a complex task. Novelty emerges in the space between rigidity and randomness. At Shell, the coaching of country teams and the new project work that resulted led to a more direct, informal, and less hierarchical way of working. 4. One cannot direct a living system, only disturb it. Managers cannot assume that a particular input will produce a particular output. Miller has learned that "top-down strategies don't win ballgames. Experimentation, rapid learning, and seizing the momentum of success is the better approach." While leaders provide the vision and establish the context, solutions to ongoing challenges are generated by the people closest to the action.

The role of brands and the ways of managing brands are changing. The authors review how brands aid the buyer and seller and, by focusing on the customer-oriented functions of brands, offer insight into how brand management is evolving. Factors propelling changes in brand management include: 1. Information technology. By simplifying customer search and by enabling retailers to collect real-time information about individual shoppers, IT shifts power away from consumer goods manufacturers and their brand managers. 2. Maturing consumer values. Changing demographics ensure that future markets will consist of experienced buyers. Skeptical of superficial blandishments, they seek to understand the relationship between quality and price, aided in their search by technology. 3. Brand mimicry and brand extension. An abundance of copycat or extension products degrade the brand as a marketing tool, confounding a consumer's attempts to differentiate among products. 4. Autonomy of retailers. Trade concentration, exemplified by supermarket retailing, is shifting the "center of marketing gravity" to retailers who are managing for product category profitability. The authors propose three scenarios for the future of brand management: In Scenario 1, current trends continue. Copycat and brand-extension products diminish as pressure on all but the leading brands increases due to restricted shelf space. Companies emphasize "umbrella" branding at the corporate and product-family levels; brand managers begin working on cross-functional teams organized around categories or processes. Scenario 2 is at least partially in place in some companies. Simplified brand and organizational structures focus on trade customers with whom manufacturers develop joint strategies. Scenario 3 differs radically from the past. By using increasingly economical, IT-based techniques, firms identify customers individually, enabling them to organize and manage customers rather than brands or products. The key lesson is that managers should focus on the dynamically evolving functional patterns of brands rather than on the brands themselves.

Technology has made it possible to redefine where work is done. The "virtual office" offers companies and their workers many benefits: lower real estate costs, higher productivity, and increased flexibility. At the same time, organizations forfeit the benefits of the traditional office: a shared understanding of the corporate culture; a sense of loyalty; informal communication; access to people, information, and materials; and managerial control. Drawing on the results of field research, the authors discuss how firms can maximize the benefits while minimizing the losses of these alternative work arrangements. The authors identify five common arrangements: "telecommuting" refers to situations in which workers with fixed offices occasionally work at home; "hotel"-based workers come into the office frequently, reserving a cubicle where they can use the telephone and link their laptop computers to the network; the "tethered worker" has some mobility but reports to the office on a regular basis; "home" workers work entirely from a room in their homes; and "fully mobile" workers are on the road or at customer sites during the workday. Companies considering adopting virtual work must be clear about the type of virtual office that best addresses their needs and its advantages and disadvantages. If virtual work is to pay off, managers must adopt new approaches in five key areas: managing people, managing information, managing teams, managing processes, and managing facilities. Companies need to institute new information flows to replace those that are lost; educate workers on how to be more effective providers and consumers of information; provide training in virtual worker management skills and personal work strategies; and create dialogue on how to deal with changed family relationships. Effective management of alternative work arrangements means mixing virtual and nonvirtual offices. Companies should analyze the variety of approaches possible and their particular circumstances to determine just how much virtuality is appropriate.

Positioning products in a complex market can be one of a company's most difficult decisions. In determining whether to combine or maintain separate product lines, Hewlett-Packard used an approach it calls strategic market modeling (SMM) to design "what if" scenarios and run simulations to predict market behavior. SMM combines demographic, user needs, and competitive perception data into a database for testing alternative positioning strategies. The author describes HP's development of SMM and the lessons learned.

Accounting is an integral part of the planning and control system of any manufacturing operation. Yet in many companies the accounting function has failed to adapt to a new competitive environment that requires continuous improvement in the design, manufacturing, and marketing of a product. As a result, corporate strategies that depend on success in manufacturing are endangered by obsolete and restrictive accounting systems. This article describes how one division brought its accounting systems into line with the rest of the operation.

Manufacturers have four strategic options when facing the dynamics of consolidating channels.

Dion Hinchcliffe of The Dachis Group provides strategies to help an organization succeed in social business.

New research reveals five communication strategies that boost performance in virtual teams.

The increasing popularity of platform strategies masks a difficult truth: They are hard to execute well.

Seven strategies that can make marketing both relevant and rigorous in today's world.