Management - Leadership

Leaders trying to transform company culture can learn from an unexpected source: addiction treatment programs. Changing individual behavior is the key - and many of the tenets used by 12-step groups can give managers insight into that difficult challenge and how to overcome it.

Growing an exclusive brand by moving down market can be tricky: Such efforts often dilute the symbolic value for core customers. However, research counters the notion that downward extensions always tarnish the brand. Under certain conditions, noncore consumers can actually intensify a brand's prestige. Imagine that brands are like countries.

Companies that invest heavily in R&D are often torn between emerging technologies, wondering which will win in the market and is therefore the one to develop. Conventional wisdom suggests that they pay dearly for getting it wrong.

Jennifer Mueller of the University of San Diego, Jeff Loewenstein of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Jennifer Deal of the Center for Creative Leadership studied a company that was considering dozens of new product ideas.

The CEOs of US companies are compensated exceedingly well. A recent analysis by the AFL-CIO found that the heads of S&P 500 companies are paid 331 times as much, on average, as production and nonsupervisory employees. This article presents a graph detailing the growth in executive compensation, which took off in the 1990s.

Charan calls for eliminating the position of the chief human resource officer and splitting the Department of Human Resources into two strands. One strand - we might call it HR-A (for administration) - would primarily manage compensation and benefits.

Companies shouldn't make it so hard for people to discern their narratives. They need to communicate a clear and consistent story, and offer data points over time that demonstrate progress toward their vision. Today, companies can no longer assume that inconsistencies in their stories will go unnoticed.

Ozon CEO Maelle Gavet left the Boston Consulting Group to join Ozon in part because she had once been an entrepreneur and missed the excitement - but mostly because she saw the company's potential to become the Amazon of Russia.

Corporate America began to really take notice of the looming retirement crisis in the wake of the dot-com crash, when companies in major industries went bankrupt in large part because of their inability to meet their pension obligations.

The gap between marketers' aspirations and what their organizations can accomplish creates intense pressure to reshape how marketing is done.