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A down economy is not the time to “slash-and-burn,” but rather to ensure growth potential during the ensuing rebound. This requires a focus on strengthening key relationships, capitalizing on underutilized staff, clarifying strategic roles and forging stronger links between compensation and results.” More than 20,000 times last year, midsize and large U.S. companies responded to adversity by slashing on average 100 staffers at a time. It’s a safe assumption, says compensation consultant Jeffrey Oxman, that many of those organizations destroyed value by cutting capacity they soon had to replace, by making poor choices as to who should go and who should stay, by failing to communicate the rationale for change so as to keep surviving employees motivated, and by missing the opportunity to rethink their business model to optimize their positioning for the recovery ahead. Such issues, says Oxman, go beyond the question of layoffs; they go to the heart of how companies can avoid lasting damage and build long-term value. The conventional wisdom is suspect. Recessionary economies may not require re-engineering or moving noncore competencies outside the organization for greater efficiency. Oxman suggests four critical ways to prepare for economic recovery: strengthening key relationships across customers, employees and shareholders; leveraging downtime by capitalizing on underutilized staff for innovation initiatives; refocusing staff on what’s important by prioritizing strategic roles and clarifying individual goals; and building return on compensation by forging stronger links between pay and results.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Businesses develop strategies to address complex, multi-layered business environments and challenges — but to execute a strategy in a meaningful way, it must produce a set of specific actions focused on achieving clear goals. Rather than trying to boil the strategy down to a pithy statement, executives will get better results if they develop a small set of actions that everyone gets behind.

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.

Conceptual frameworks provide insight into creating marketing strategies targeted at groups.

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