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Sustainability is the buzzword du jour, but how do you actually go about achieving it? Well, it’s clear there isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy. Look at five companies, and you will see five different paths, each particular to a specific company’s market and problems. Take Nike Inc., whose brand is synonymous with cutting-edge design. Redesigning the athletic shoe to cut down on material became a core element of its approach to reducing waste. But what works for Nike might not exactly work for a company like start-up electric vehicle supplier Better PLC, LLC, which is rolling out electric car recharging stations. How does it pursue sustainability? By identifying the countries most receptive to its cutting-edge idea. General Electric Co. takes yet another approach, seeing sustainability not only as a cost-savings measure within the company (cut energy use, and emissions and costs go down) but also as a solution to sell to other companies–hence, its $17 billion ecomagination unit. Mining giant Rio Tinto, in turn, looks at it through a social lens, while Wal-Mart Stores Inc. sees sustainability as a challenge to revamp the practices of its more than 100,000 suppliers. In short, sustainability is less a target than an approach, which is why it is continually being refined. As companies ramp up understanding, they also push the envelope of what can be accomplished. Though it takes investment and commitment, the rewards are seen in cost savings, new products, customer engagement and employee commitment. In this way, sustainability becomes a competitive advantage.

Current models of organizational strategy and structure fail to meet the challenges of the information age. Based on field study, the authors conceptualize an architecture, or guide, for virtual organizing that focuses on the importance of knowledge and intellect in creating value. Information technology lies at the heart of this business model for the twenty-first century. The authors' approach incorporates three interdependent vectors: customer interaction deals with new challenges and opportunities for company-to-customer interactions; asset configuration focuses on creating and deploying intellectual assets while sourcing physical assets from a complex business network; and knowledge leverage is concerned with opportunities for leveraging diverse sources of expertise within and across organizational boundaries. Each of the vectors in turn has three stages. Stage one focuses on task units such as customer service, purchasing, or new product development. Stage two focuses on coordinating activities to create superior value. Stage three focuses on the interorganizational network to design and leverage interdependent communities for innovation and growth. Each vector raises a distinct series of questions for managers. The overall challenge for companies is to harmonize the three vectors and to undertake external benchmarking when experimenting with different approaches to design.

Sellers know things about their customers' businesses that the customers don't know and can't find out on their own yet value immensely. Because they come into contact with many and varied buyers, sellers have a bird's-eye view of the forest -- the industry's competitive landscape -- in contrast to customers, who often see only the trees. And they can use their wide range of experience to teach customers about their own businesses. This isn't a matter of divulging confidential aspects of clients' businesses to their competitors. The challenge is to translate an industrywide perspective into knowledge that customers can use. Companies that can do that successfully reduce their customers' costs or operating risks and are rewarded in turn with customer loyalty, pricing flexibility or both. The authors lay out three strategies that companies can adopt to turn a view of the forest into value for customers and competitive advantage for the business. They also explain the steps companies should take to collect, aggregate, adapt and share customer experiences.

For a firm to succeed over the long term it needs to master both adaptability and alignment -- an attribute sometimes referred to as ambidexterity. The concept is alluring, but the evidence suggests that most companies have struggled to apply it. The standard approach has been to create separate structures for different types of activities. But separation can also lead to isolation, and many R&;D and business development groups have failed because of their lack of linkages to the core businesses. In an attempt to shed new light on the discussion, the authors develop and explore their concept of contextual ambidexterity, which calls for individual employees to make choices between alignment-oriented and adaptation-oriented activities in the context of their day-to-day work. The authors introduce this as a complementary concept to traditional structural ambidexterity. By means of their survey- and interview-based research -- which took place over a three-year period and involved 4,195 respondents across 41 business units in 10 multinational firms -- the authors identify the four behaviors displayed by ambidextrous individuals, each of which involves taking independent, adaptive action in the service of overall company goals. They then present a framework for describing and analyzing which organizational contexts encourage or discourage such behaviors. They link organizational context to ambidexterity and, in turn, ambidexterity to high performance. Finally, the authors describe how companies such as Nokia, Ericsson, Oracle and Renault have been able to create such high performance contexts, and they offer managers guidance on how to create them in their own companies.

The authors' research suggests that a variety of traps that forestall innovation can be avoided by, paradoxically, placing boundaries on innovation activity. In an environment without boundaries, say the authors, there is no context for shared interpretation or common expectations. Boundaries, on the other hand, act not as constraints but as aids to defining innovation needs and producing useful outputs that business units can exploit. Smartly placed constraints actually act as enablers of innovation by making it more palatable and execution friendly and giving it traction in the competition for corporate attention and resources. Drawing on their research, the authors offer several scenarios of "boundaries in use." They describe how Shell makes the radical legitimate by making it thematically relevant to core business, how Nokia restricts its innovation efforts to business-unit strategies and environmental turbulence, how Air Products focuses on ideas that leverage operational capabilities, how Siemens focuses on innovation potential that crosses products and businesses, and how IDEO's work with Texas Health Resources reframes the customer experience to anchor solutions in new ways.

The place of multinational corporations in China has rapidly changed since the 1970s. No longer expected to bring cash and management expertise to China, the authors argue that MNCs have taken on a new role as teachers and role models. However, recent high-profile mistakes including a McDonald's Corp. (of Oak Brook, Illinois) ad that over 80% of Chinese surveyed found offensive, show that MNCs are not entirely up to this task. They illustrate the consequences of this inability to cope and suggest eight strategies for improving MNC's success in China: Think local-act global, don't apply double standards, don't bend the rules, avoid making "symbolic" acquisitions, avoid employing aggressive tactics over intellectual property rights, guard against management insensitivity, don't "strip mine" profits and don't use China as a lab. The authors then go on to show how these strategies can be executed to increase MNC's profits and standing in China.

Many leaders are building AI into their DNA. Some are still experimenting and some are pursuing AI at scale. This guide, a compilation of insights from MIT SMR, gives leaders research-based frameworks for how to think about changing your leadership, your culture, your data, and your talent in order to incorporate AI into your organization’s DNA.

Marketing strategies are increasingly subject to public scrutiny and are being held to higher standards. Caveat emptor is no longer acceptable as a basis for justifying marketing practices. The author's "marketing ethics continuum" explains the shift in society's expectations of marketers and provides benchmarks against which marketers can evaluate their practices and perspectives. Today, consumers' interests are increasingly favored over producers'; consumers can make more informed choices, and less capable consumers are offered special protection. The author provides a practical framework - including the consumer sovereignty test - for marketers to apply to their decision making. The framework attempts to answer the question: What constitutes ethical marketing practice? The test examines consumer capability, information provision, and consumer choice.

When employees leave an organization, they depart with more than what they know; they also leave with critical knowledge about who they know. Thus, the departure of key people can significantly affect the relationship structure and consequent functioning of an organization. In particular, companies should be aware of the unique knowledge held by three important types of employees: "central connectors" (those who are regularly asked for help, typically because they have a high level of expertise in one or more areas), "brokers" (those who act as bridges across subgroups) and "peripheral players" (those who reside on the boundaries of a network but could still possess valuable niche expertise and outside knowledge). Departure of an employee who filled any one of these roles presents knowledge-loss risks that need to be addressed. The departure of a handful of key brokers, for example, could fracture the social network of an organization into isolated subgroups. Thus companies need to take various measures to (1) identify key knowledge vulnerabilities by virtue of both what a person knows and how that individual's departure will affect a network and (2) address specific knowledge-loss issues based on the different roles that employees play in the network.

Some managers in our 2012 global executive survey are seeing profits from their sustainability-related activities.