Adapting to rapid structural change requires exploration, not contraction.

Organizations can’t begin to increase their understanding of what makes knowledge workers effective until they recognize the importance of such workers as a whole and how to differentiate among them as individuals. In this article, the authors explore five key issues that companies are struggling with and then develop a framework to help organizations think more clearly about how to improve the performance of their knowledge workers.

A fundamental management challenge, particularly in large, diversified global enterprises, is the tension between subunit autonomy and companywide cohesion. Because customers’ needs span internal boundaries and technology has changed the way innovation is managed, managers are recognizing the need to address the integration side of the tension. Several approaches are explored.

All organizations sense competitive pressure intuitively, but most, says the author, do not do a good job of managing it. That is, in part, because it is often difficult to see the overall pressure system — a complex, shifting pattern of overlapping contacts among rivals that continually alters the climate of an industry by changing the incentives for players to compete or even formally cooperate. This article illustrates how pressure systems can be mapped and controlled to a significant extent.

Must corporations’ thirst for growth and profits serve only to exacerbate the antiglobalization movement? On the contrary, the authors say, companies can generate growth and satisfy social and environmental stakeholders through a “great leap” to the base of the economic pyramid, where 4 billion people aspire to join the market economy for the first time. There companies will find the most exciting future growth markets, where they can best develop the technologies needed to address the social and environmental challenges associated with economic growth. The authors illustrate with examples of companies already profitably disrupting such industries as telecommunications, consumer electronics and energy production.

The authors find that leading companies are making regular, systematic, modular and targeted IT-infrastructure investments on the basis of overall strategic direction. To pinpoint best practices, they marshaled 10 years of data from 89 leading enterprises. Understanding the 70 IT-infrastructure services that emerge consistently from the research can help executives identify which investments will make sense for which strategic business initiative.

In this article, the authors make the case that corporate misdeeds are symptoms of a syndrome of selfishness that has taken hold of our business institutions, our societies and our minds. Drawing on history, literature, philosophy and management thinking, they argue that the syndrome is built on a series of half-truths — or fabrications — each of which has driven a debilitating wedge into society.

In this article, the authors develop the concept of the knowledge life cycle and show that new knowledge is born as something fairly nebulous and that it takes shape as it is tested, matures through application in a few settings, is diffused to a growing audience and eventually becomes widely understood and recognized as common practice. Finally, they describe the appropriate strategies for managing ideas at each stage of the cycle.