Since Peter Drucker heralded the beginning of the knowledge era more than 15 years ago, companies have invested a good deal of time, focus and money trying to improve knowledge-worker productivity, with largely disappointing results. Three leading knowledge-management thinkers — Michael Hammer, Dorothy Leonard and Tom Davenport — suggest the solution lies in better processes, wider experimentation and closer examination of how human beings actually learn.

The authors contend that contemporary management education does a disservice by standardizing content, focusing on business functions (rather than on managing practices) and training specialists (rather than general managers). Working with several major international universities, the authors have developed seven tenets to improve MBA programs by grounding them in practical experience, shared insight and thoughtful reflection.

Even the best companies let their customers down sometimes, and many disappoint frequently. The authors lay much of the blame for this on companies’ obsession with uniqueness and differentiation. According to their analysis, companies are too quick to dismiss “category benefits” as a source of advantage. They explain why companies such as Toyota, Cemex, Orange, Medtronic and Sony are successful because they are simply better at offering what customers really want.

Kellogg’s profit margins and the stature of its brands both declined throughout the 1990s. A wake-up call came in 1999 when the venerable company lost market leadership. The author describes how it embarked upon an ambitious and, for the food industry, novel strategy, emphasizing profit and value over volume and employing compensation and organization strategies to help cascade the change through the company and re-establish its innovativeness, profitability and reputation.

By sourcing and integrating knowledge from dispersed geographic locations, companies can generate more innovations of higher value and lower cost.

Traditional models for developing and managing corporate portfolios are based on financial frameworks, business synergies, or leveraging core competencies into related businesses. Drawing from geopolitics, the author offers an alternative, the sphere of influence model, which focuses on how the strategic intent of each part of the portfolio supports the overall strategy of the company. He provides a framework for designing a sphere of influence and illustrates with the examples of Microsoft, Anheuser-Busch, Nokia, Harley Davidson and Cemex.

A company's ability to execute today's strategy while developing tomorrow's arises from the context within which its employees operate.

The health care crisis in the United States has become a business crisis, as exploding costs put increasing pressure on companies’ bottom lines. The authors argue that companies should go on the offensive, both to reduce costs and to seek improvements in the quality of care, by partnering with employees and providers. Many companies, from giants like Johnson & Johnson and Textron to manufacturers with only a few hundred employees, are having success with this approach.

Managers increasingly find themselves belonging to and responsible for teams charged with running themselves. A study of 300 self-managing teams at a large manufacturing plant show that the essential skills for leaders of such groups all involve facilitation: the ability to scout information, to move back and forth between the team and the broader organization to build relationships, and to empower team members.

Every company lives in fear of competitors that offer seemingly similar products for much lower prices. Dealing with such discounters is no simple matter, as Hewlett-Packard, May Department Stores, Salomon Brothers and others have discovered. Nevertheless, various strategies — ignoring or blocking the competitor, strengthening your value proposition or even strategic retreat — can help slow or even stop the low-end competitor without destroying the industry’s profit margins.

Many companies have struggled to design IT systems, databases and content repositories that provide their employees with easily accessible and relevant information. The authors urge organizations to emulate the strategies of Google, eBay and Amazon.com, whose core competence is based upon making it easy for customers to find what they want — quickly, accurately and usefully.

A decade ago, multinational companies seemed poised to dominate in China. Today that picture has changed. Whereas IBM, HP and Compaq had quickly won more than 50% of the personal computer market, for example, Chinese company Legend Group Ltd. is now the number one supplier. Research in 10 industries over the last 10 years reveals a pitched battle of competencies between multinational and local players and points to five strategies that can help multinationals regain the edge.

Today’s almost mythical notion of the hero-leader demands that vision be a pre-eminent executive trait. Time and time again, if a corporate leader is successful, his or her vision is cited as the cause and lauded as the foundation of the leader’s greatness. Vision, however, is only one component of the strategic management process, and [...]