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Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe are delivering strong revenue and profit growth.

It has become accepted wisdom in the corporate world that at one time or another every business will be forced to make radical changes. In fact, there is a blossoming industry of consultants and advisors who are equipped to help companies execute and survive these inevitable upheavals. But the authors propose that there is a better way to ensure that your company doesn't get ripped apart by radical change: Make sure it never needs it. What CEOs don't realize, say the authors, is that they could prevent their businesses from confronting the risks of wholesale change if they knew enough to identify and make smaller changes before too much friction builds up inside the company. Leaders and their management teams must be alert to -- and willing to confront -- early signs that the company's internal culture is not consistent with how it used to be, or how the leadership thinks of it. Making preemptive moves is never easy, because the signs are subtle and do not show up in traditional financial metrics. Shoring up a company's sagging identity is almost never a financial priority on par with, say, buying a new piece of equipment. The authors explain which indicators CEOs should monitor and take seriously (turnover rates, for example, or changes in the profile of new hires) so that they can make rational decisions as they are warranted, rather than waiting until panic sets in and countless changes are unavoidable. Such incremental shifting poses its own challenges: It's hard to convince others to join the movement when the culture in question looks healthy, but doing so will spare the company from the tough task in the future of having to reinvent itself. Given the choice, wouldn't most leaders prefer a low-level struggle with change rather than a fierce smackdown?

Competing in China is the only option for multinationals that want to build or preserve their global position.

Does vertical integration make sense, particularly when an industry is moving offshore to regions of cheaper labor?

Why are some employees adept at getting the information they need while others struggle to locate the right in-house experts?

Scholars of various kinds long have documented the great degree to which people are influenced by similar others. Indeed, the opinions, experiences and behaviors of friends, neighbors and coworkers can provide an invaluable gold mine of persuasive resources. But even savvy executives can fail to appreciate the full power of peer influence -- or they might neglect to anticipate its unintended consequences. Consider, for example, managers who are responsible for shaping or enforcing policy within an organization. They will frequently call attention to a problem behavior, such as supply room theft, by depicting it as regrettably frequent. Although such admonitions might be well-intentioned, the communicators have missed something critically important: Within the lament of "Look at all the people who are doing this undesirable thing" lurks the powerful and undercutting disclosure "Look at all the people who are doing it." And in trying to alert people to the growing occurrence of a problem -- which could be anything from expense account padding to safety violations -- managers can inadvertently make it worse. After the Internal Revenue Service announced that it was going to strengthen the penalties for tax evasion because so many citizens were cheating on their returns, tax fraud actually increased in the following year. But that's not the only type of mistake that managers regularly make. Indeed, a more subtle problem occurs when they fail to recognize how peer influence is affecting their own decisions. Such situations can be particularly dangerous, leading people to do exactly what they shouldn't, all because they inadvertently have listened to the wrong voices. Thus, when trying to solve a problem, managers should resist the tendency (and the conventional wisdom) to start by casting the widest net possible and then later discounting information that isn't relevant. The potential pitfall of that approach is that it inserts the filtering process too late, after any irrelevant data might have already had a subconscious impact on a person's decision making.

Why do some subsidiaries become isolated — and does it matter?

International arrangements require more formal mechanisms.

Higher quality and niche marketing are not always the answer.