When an activity turns into a buzzword, the odds are high that managers will stop thinking consciously about the behavior they’re trying to elicit and the best way to set expectations clearly. When it comes to the messy, human realities of management, a dose of straight talk — and clear thinking — can go a long way.

OPINION: The proliferation of sanctioned information intermediaries will increase the productivity of interorganizational tasks and processes and spur the next surge in global growth.

No enterprise can out-innovate all potential competitors, suppliers and external knowledge sources. Knowledge frontiers are moving too fast. In almost every major discipline, up to 90% of relevant knowledge has appeared in the last 15 years. Terabytes of data (each approximating Shakespeare’s collected works) pour into every discipline’s or industry’s database daily.
This requires a transformation [...]

The authors’ work with 500 executives reveals that few managers believe their information infrastructure is able to handle the pressures from deregulation, globalization, ubiquitous connectivity and the convergence of industries and technologies. To encourage senior managers and IT managers to use information systems in ways that facilitate strategic change, the authors create an applications-portfolio scorecard, which helps managers assess information infrastructure on the basis of six key considerations before making investments.

Why do your customers choose to buy from you rather than from your competition? The authors surveyed more than 1,500 senior executives in a vast range of industries and most cited the crucial importance of customer interaction. As the main drivers of customer choice, the executives named cost-oriented factors such as convenience, ease of doing business, product support and risk-oriented factors such as trust, confidence and the strength of relationships. The authors illustrate five different strategies that some companies are using to build a sustainable advantage through their approach to customers.

In 1996, the Web-browser “wars” involved three important companies of the early Internet era: Netscape, Microsoft and America Online. Contending that all negotiations can be examined in terms of a core of common elements, the author provides thumbnail sketches of these particular players and briefly describes the dramatic process dynamics. He then draws a series of broader negotiation lessons suggested by this experience.

The idea that e-commerce would lead to disintermediation has turned out to be largely wrong. The Web transforms but does not eliminate the advantages of the middleman’s central lookout position. The authors show how new kinds of intermediaries are helping smart companies realize the promise of the Web. They offer nine ways that intermediaries traditionally add value and explain that three will change, three will survive in a new form, and three present growth opportunities.

In a series of large-scale studies to identify the most pressing leadership-development challenges in more than 40 global companies, the author found that storytelling by a company’s senior executives is a powerful way of developing new leaders. He explains the five ingredients of effective stories, provides a case study and outlines how to implement a storytelling leadership program.

The product-development process is often seen as an undependable “black box” that rarely produces results that exceed business expectations. With an approach called “net present value, risk-adjusted,” the author offers an operational framework of quantitative tools that can be integrated into existing stage-gate methodologies to create a risk-adjusted NPV that considers the impacts of product portfolio, user needs, and technical and marketing risks.

In times of adversity, many organizations miss the opportunity to rethink their business model to optimize their positioning for the recovery ahead. 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.