The author is among researchers at MIT’s Media Lab who have developed a new, as yet uncommercialized, mobile-phone application known as Serendipity that could facilitate greater workplace collaboration by enabling chance encounters among people who don’t — but should — know each other. He explains how the technology works and discusses a number of the potential business applications that could arise from its ability to study, track and perhaps predict the dynamics of a social network. He also discusses some of the privacy issues and necessary safeguards that would be germane to its use.

Many merging companies make the mistake of integrating too much, too soon. In certain cases, a more selective approach is the best way to realize the deal’s anticipated value. The authors recommend analyzing what the “investment thesis” was in the first place: Was it to acquire a company as part of “active investing,” to grow scope, to grow scale — or for a combination of those three reasons? The best way to integrate depends on that original goal, as demonstrated by numerous enterprises that have integrated successfully while using very different approaches.

Employees with deep motivation, strong commitment, unquestioned loyalty and widely shared values can have drawbacks. Much has been written about the upside of deep commitment, but employers need to be wary of workers who identify too much with the company. Overidentification, says the author, may lead to an ends-justifies-the-means outlook, unethical actions, substitution of personal needs for company goals and resentment when the company doesn’t meet employees’ expectations.

For multinationals, it is increasingly difficult to maintain competitive advantage on the basis of the traditional economies of scale and scope. Future advantage will go to enterprises that stimulate and support interunit collaboration to leverage their dispersed resources. The authors recognize that collaboration does not occur naturally. Extrapolating from successful efforts at BP in particular, they present specific management levers for reducing barriers to collaboration.

The information revolution is making consumer disaggregation vastly more efficient and profitable than aggregation, the traditional source of brand power. Today companies can gain advantage by reaching customer segments as small as one person — and many do. The author describes several detailed examples and shows how leading enterprises have rethought the consumer relationship, the channel relationship and the way the brand is managed.

Although large-scale risks garner media attention, it is the everyday, small-scale risks associated with a lack of transparency in countries’ legal, economic, regulatory and governance structures that can confound global investment and commerce. Executives planning such investment will benefit from this new research that identifies the causes of opacity and measures its effects in 48 countries.

Contrary to a common assumption, companies can use a variety of techniques to reduce costs, not just in the design phase, but throughout the product life cycle. The authors suggest that companies competing aggressively on costs could learn from Olympus Optical. In a field study, they observed how the company’s consumer-products division applies cost-management techniques in an integrated way, with the outputs of some techniques acting as inputs to others and leading to continuous cost reductions.

By understanding the variety and interconnectedness of supply-chain risks, managers can tailor balanced, effective risk-reduction strategies. The authors show how smart companies use “stress testing” to identify parts of the supply chain that might break in the event of a natural disaster, terrorist strike or other upheaval. They then explain a variety of ways that supply-chain partners can collaboratively prepare for and effectively manage risk.

The sale of branded products through unauthorized channels is a growing problem for suppliers. In many situations, gray-market sales seem to outstrip authorized sales, but it is hard to get solid data. A three-pronged approach described in terms of “sensing, speed and severity” can help companies fight back. The authors begin by explaining how to detect gray markets and then specify ways that companies can respond quickly and appropriately — before the problem escalates.

Entrepreneurs can learn to maintain discipline while pursuing an opportunity and manage — rather than ignore or avoid — the uncertainty inherent in new ventures. Some are using an iterative-experimentation model to handle the unknown. First, they formulate a hypothesis about an opportunity; second, they assemble the resources to test the theory; third, they design and run real-world experiments. The author offers examples of companies that are using the model to make better decisions.