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Measuring sustainability's impact on revenue, productivity and risk would speak to mainstream investors.

What happens when a company whose roots go back over a century — a bank, no less — decides to adopt agile management methods developed in the software industry? Though ING bank in the Netherlands is less than three years into the process — and it’s therefore premature to declare the initiative a success — taking a deep dive into the organization’s early experience with agile is nonetheless instructive.

Dave Stangis, VP of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability for Campbell Soup, believes that setting "big, hairy, audacious goals" is necessary to set up the kind of tension needed to motivate and inspire the people who need to reach them. Formerly the Director of Sustainability at Intel, he was able to build on his knowledge and bring a wealth of experience when he was hired into his new position at Campbell three years ago. Setting the right goals and metrics is important, but so is getting buy-in and support across the organization. Stangis says it's critical to have top-level CEO involvement, and to establish governance structures that work. He talked with MIT Sloan Management Review's Managing Editor Nina Kruschwitz about the kinds of language and conversations that propel a sustainability agenda, the benefits of engaged employees, and using stakeholder conversations to see into the future.

What's smarter: To charge separately for extras -- or to combine all charges into one total price?

Companies have long used teams to solve problems: focus groups to explore customer needs, consumer surveys to understand the market and annual meetings to listen to shareholders. But the words “solve,” “explore,” “understand” and “listen” have now taken on a whole new meaning. Thanks to recent technologies, including many Web 2.0 applications, companies can now tap into “the collective” on a greater scale than ever before. Indeed, the increasing use of information markets, wikis, crowdsourcing, “the wisdom of crowds” concepts, social networks, collaborative software and other Web-based tools constitutes a paradigm shift in the way that many companies make decisions. Call it the emerging era of “Decisions 2.0.” But the proliferation of such technologies necessitates a framework for understanding what type of collective intelligence is possible (or not), desirable (or not) and affordable (or not) & #8212; and under what conditions. At a minimum, managers need to consider the following key issues: loss of control, diversity versus expertise, engagement, policing, intellectual property and mechanism design. By understanding such important issues, companies like Affinnova, Google, InnoCentive, Marketocracy and Threadless have successfully implemented Decisions 2.0 applications for a variety of purposes, including research and development, market research, customer service and knowledge management. The bottom line is this: For many problems that a company faces, there could well be a solution out there somewhere, far outside of the traditional places that managers might search, within or outside the organization. The trick, though, is to develop the right tool for locating that source and then tap into it.

Much lip service is given today to “values-based decision making,” with the implication that the underlying values are “good” values, occupying high moral ground. But the fact is that all decisions & #8212; whether highly ethical, grossly unethical or anywhere in between & #8212; are values-based. That is, a decision necessarily involves an implicit or explicit trade-off of values. The values represented in a particular decision are not always easy to identify and evaluate, however, and the shortcuts that people often take in decision making can make deeper analysis of values all the more difficult. This article presents a framework designed to explore the values implicit in decisions. Moving systematically from concrete consequences to higher-ordered values, the framework, embodied in a decision-mapping technique, helps the decision maker think through what is gained and what is given up as a result of a decision. It also encourages an expansion of choice options, motivates a more balanced view of positive and negative consequences, and provides insight into the dynamics of decision making. When good people at times say yes to bad & #8212; unethical or illegal & #8212; actions, there are four possible reasons: (a) the organization’s values are fuzzy to them, leading them to resort to undeveloped intuition and expedient criteria, (b) they may not be clear on their own values, (c) their interpretation of probability conveniently favors their a priori preferred option, or (d) they see no other options (they believe their hands are tied). Each of these possibilities reflects issues that senior managers need to account for directly in addressing ethical decision making in their organizations. Illustrating the framework through a case study based on actual events, the article aims to help managers build a culture that better integrates the organization’s values into staff members’ decisions.

Despite the general understanding that leaders learn from experience, only a few organizations, such as Toyota, Boeing and General Electric, have truly taken it to heart by putting programs into place specifically to take advantage of experiential learning. Most companies stay within a narrow comfort zone. They certainly encourage aspiring and emerging leaders to "get experience," to take on "stretch" assignments and to take risks. But they provide precious little guidance on how to learn from experience -- how to mine it for insight about leading and adapting to change over the course of one's life. Organizations generally don't look outside their industry, or business itself, for new approaches. Instead, a banking model of learning predominates -- a semi-industrial process in which cost per unit is the key performance measure and knowledge is something deposited in aspiring leaders' heads for later use. That is unfortunate, because organizations are missing the opportunity to develop leaders by integrating their life and work experiences, especially those experiences the authors call "crucibles." Crucible experiences can be thought of as a kind of superconcentrated form of leadership development. Surprisingly, the best examples of organizations that deliberately employ such alchemy do not come from the business world. The authors draw on lessons from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormons, and the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club to develop four lessons for helping to develop managers. First, both the Mormons and the Hells Angels demonstrate how it is possible to craft or convert core activities to serve as practice fields for leaders. Second, they engage in elaborate preparation before sending would-be leaders out into the field. Third, they provide a supporting infrastructure while members are in the midst of a crucible. Finally, they recognize the need for renewal in individuals and the organization.

Thanks to a variety of online social applications -- including blogs, social networking sites like MySpace, user-generated content sites like YouTube and countless communities across the Web -- people are increasingly connecting with and drawing power from one other. In fact, customers are now beginning to define their own perspective on companies and brands, a view that's often at odds with the image a business wants to project. But organizations need not be on the defensive. Indeed, some savvy executives have already been turning this groundswell of customer power to their advantage. To investigate how, the authors interviewed managers and employees at more than 100 companies that were rolling out social applications. From this research, they developed a strategic framework that businesses can use to implement social applications in a number of departments, including research and development, marketing, sales, customer support and operations. The potential benefits are numerous: Social applications can generate research insights, extend the reach of marketing, energize sales efforts, cut support costs and stoke the innovation process. (And for companies that tap into employee groundswells, the result can be increased opportunities for collaboration across departments and geographical locations, as well as greater productivity and decreased inefficiencies.) But the greatest benefit might be cultural, because social applications help weave two-way customer communications into the fabric of an organization. But anything that changes culture tends to face resistance, and this is especially true of social applications, because they require managers to embrace an unknown communications channel, one that responds poorly to attempts to control it. Based on an analysis of companies that succeeded or failed in deploying social applications, the authors have derived a number of key managerial recommendations for any organization attempting to harness the power of the groundswell.

Successful companies recognize that information technology can fundamentally alter the very nature of work. Such a transformation, however, often requires that an organization rethink its corporate strategy and remake its basic structure and processes. The authors, drawing on interviews with Schneider International as part of MIT's Management in the 1990s Research Program, show that the benefits to organizations are related to the extent that organizations adapt their internal structures, processes and culture to extract the greatest value from technology. Although IT has enabled the growth of new companies and even entire industries, these technologies have also transformed the opportunities and challenges facing established manufacturing and service firms. This article examines Schneider's implementation of technologies such as GPS and satellite tracking not only to improve dispatch but also to provide value to customer service such as pinpointing delivery times, driver availability and the ability to alter delivery pickup and drop-off locations. The authors demonstrate that if organizations invest in complementary assets (people skills, new organizational structures and new work processes) to support their IT, they can transform services into products that will evolve into yet more new services, creating a virtual spiral with enormous competitive advantages.

Advanced tools like computer simulations can significantly increase developers' problem-solving capacity as well as their productivity, enabling them to address categories of problems that would otherwise be impossible to tackle. This is particularly true in the pharmaceutical, aerospace, semiconductor and automotive industries, among others. Furthermore, state-of-the-art tools can enhance the communication and interaction among communities of developers, even those who are "distributed" in time and space. In short, new development tools (particularly those that exploit information technology) hold the promise of being faster, better and cheaper, which is why companies like Intel and BMW have made substantial investments in these technologies. But that enthusiasm should be tempered: New tools must first be integrated into a system that's already in place. It is important to remember that tools are embedded both within the organizations that deploy them and within the tasks the tools themselves are dedicated to performing. Moreover, each organization's approach to how people, processes and tools are integrated is unique -- a result of formal and informal routines, culture and habits. All too often, companies spend millions of dollars on tools that fail to deliver on their promise, and the culprit is typically not the technology itself but the use of the technology. When new tools are incorrectly integrated into an organization (or not integrated at all), they can actually inhibit performance, increase costs and cause innovation to founder. To avoid this, companies should beware three common pitfalls: (1) using new tools merely as substitutes, (2) adding -- instead of minimizing -- organizational interfaces and (3) changing tools but not people's behavior.