As China continues to make progress towards a market economy, businesses around the world are ramping up their efforts to tap into the country's huge marketplace of 1.3 billion consumers. Despite concerns over such issues as intellectual property protection, corruption, the banking system and overregulation, executives from a number of U.S. companies are pushing ahead to invest in the Chinese economy through alliances, joint ventures, the venture capital market and other initiatives. K@W offers this special section which includes seven articles on these themes.

That's one way to encourage innovation in your workforce. But to be successfully innovative-to find new efficiencies and develop new products and services-organizations need to take a more systematic approach. Here's how to set the best ideas free.

Tom Kelly is using the Web to reinvent training inside the world's most Internet-centric big company. Here's what he's learned about e-learning -- and how it's changing the style and the substance of training at Cisco Systems.

Here is a collection of 7 files centered on the topic of Employee Commitment & Retention. A couple of these files are useless (e.g. the press release and the overview), but the white paper is quite good (and the presentation a nice complement, though naturally repetitive). Of course, there is some natural self-serving sales efforts sprinkled throughout the white paper, but the good material makes it worthwhile nonetheless.

"A new company called Liquid Engines Inc. can't do much about death, but corporate taxes are another matter.

At a time when technology start-ups are rare and technological innovation even rarer, this Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company plans to launch an entire suite of products designed to help companies manage financial performance. The first product, out later this month, is tax-planning software that can, Liquid Engines claims, fully analyze in 5 to 10 minutes the kinds of mind-numbing tax situations that typically keep teams of consultants busy for weeks - situations involving perhaps scores of business units operating across dozens of states, each with hundreds of unique tax regulations.

Relying on a powerful econometric modeling technique called hedonics, the software can cope with any number of financial constraints and variables and zero in on the optimal solution to virtually any corporate tax-planning problem, claims CEO Joe Fantuzzi."

Editor's Note: this article starts mid-way down the page (it's the second of two articles in CFO's July techwatch section).

Note: Darwin Magazine is now dead. Some articles are moving to CIO. I will try to update the links when I have time...

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Simple: Don't take consultants' words as gospel and follow these seven golden rules.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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Everyone has their own idea of what makes a good leader. But while leadership has long been linked to corporate success, many see it now as a critical boardroom element if public faith in the integrity of business is to be restored. What should business leaders do? Do we expect too much from them? How does academic research help form new models? What style is appropriate at this stage in the cycle? Will 21st century leadership be different from what has gone before? Is there a distinct European approach?

These and other questions are addressed in this edition of EBF by a distinguished panel of business people, advisers, academics and other experts, starting with Deanne den Hartog, Professor at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, who skilfully reviews the literature and what scholars are currently preoccupied with, followed by a powerful condemnation of the 'celebrity' CEO by the leading international authority Warren Bennis. Two highly respected voices of business - Nani Beccalli, CEO of GE Europe and Daniel Vasella, chairman and chief executive of Novartis - then offer their observations on what's required of those at the top, after which Meredith Belbin, widely known for his influential work on team roles, finds inspiration in insects for a typically stimulating contribution.

Academic writers then provide a variety of insights - Andrew Kakabadse, Professor at Cranfield, on leadership 'fit', Hans Hinterhuber, Professor at the University of Innsbruck on family firms, and Heike Bruch and Wolfgang Jenewein, both from the University of St Gallen, on the need for willpower - while Owain Franks of PricewaterhouseCoopers reflects on the key question of succession. The debate concludes with three contributions on the role of executive education by Instituto de Empresa's Dean Ángel Cabrera, Insead Professor Herminia Ibarra and Marshall Young, Vice-President of Templeton College, Oxford.

How did a small Seattle company turn itself into a global synonym for java and joe? The answer, we believe, lies with an ingredient as central to Starbucks's business as the premium coffee beans it roasts: Relationships.

Starbucks is not the only company that firmly believes that an emphasis on relationships should be more than simply management rhetoric. Nor is it the only company that has profitably put this belief into practice. Our research indicates that relationships are indeed central to the sustained, superior performance of many of the world's most successful companies. In late 2001, researchers at Booz Allen Hamilton and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management surveyed 113 executives at a representative sample of Fortune 1000 companies and found that winning companies define and deploy relationships in a consistent, specific, multifaceted manner. Although some companies will dub any concluded business deal a relationship, top-performing companies focus extraordinary, enterprise-wide energy on moving beyond a transactional mind-set as they develop trust-based, mutually beneficial, and long-term associations, specifically with four key constituencies: customers, suppliers, alliance partners, and their own employees. Starbucks, we believe, exemplifies this new model of the relationship-centric organization.

Research commissioned by Europe's leading venture capitalist 3i and conducted by the Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU) shows that despite the difficult economic climate, cutting back on R&D damages long-term growth prospects.

The statistical analysis conducted by the EIU looked at different elements of R&D in 29 OECD countries between 1993 to 2001. In particular, the research analysed the relationship between GDP growth and gross domestic expenditure on R&D, business enterprise expenditure on R&D and numbers of resident patent applications. Key findings of the research include:
- A massive 48% of the variations in GDP growth in the US are attributable to innovation spending
- However, only 17% of the European Union's variations in GDP growth can be attributed to R&D investment
- Countries with higher levels of R&D expenditure such as the Nordics, Japan and the US have higher correlations of R&D to GDP growth
- Technology and biotech investments as a share of total VC funding in the US were 13.5% and 70% respectively higher in 2002 compared with 1998 figures, proving that innovative companies can still gain funding

Understand how change migrates from one group to the next, and you will dramatically increase your chances of success.

see also "Planning Change Management Communication" at
http://www.managerwise.com/cgi-bin/frames.cgi?page=kbank/kb361.html&zone=kbank

New applications and business drivers are fueling renewed interest in document-imaging systems.

High-end knowledge workers are a lot like artists: They crave autonomy, resist routine and embrace risk. But that doesn't mean that companies can't do anything to improve their performance. Here are five principles for enhancing the innovation and creativity of this critical group of employees.

The leader's job is not to control an organization, but to employ self-organization.

If leaders want to connect with all of their staff, they need to combine three styles of effective communication: emotional, factual, and symbolic. Here's how to leverage all three.

Note: CEO Refresher articles are no longer free...

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The skills, competencies, aptitudes, values, decision making approaches, strengths, daily roles and job descriptions are radically different for the two separate categories of "leaders" and "leaders of leaders."

There are six stories that executives need to know how to tell to motivate.

Global account management is a new organizational form designed to better serve global customers. While there are some similarities with national and key account management programs, the real value comes from understanding the customer from a global perspective. A global account management often adds a layer of organizational structure to facilitate the better management of company's resources to serve a select set of global accounts. To afford this additional expense, the system must be driven by the mantra of identifying new value creation opportunities. These opportunities will be beyond the traditional supply chain rationalizations and global price discounts. Value will come from an expert knowledge of the customer's industry, the KSF's in that industry, an understanding of possible industry fault lines and the strategy of the customer to win in that industry. When vendors can identify and create value that support a customer's strategy, the global account management program is more likely to be successful.

The last thing you need is a do-nothing headline that takes your marketing strategy down with it.

Find out for yourself the precise psychological reasons why headlines entice us.

Personal and professional issues for those planning to ride the telecommuting wave.

Retirement generally conjures up images of golf courses and swimming pools, card games and cocktails. But for many people, particularly top-level executives and CEOs, these images are nothing short of a nightmare. In this new Working Paper, Professor Kets de Vries looks at the dark side of retirement, and outlines how individuals and organizations can help ease the process of letting go.

Eight management practices distinguish the 5% of companies that consistently outperform the market.

Editor's Note: see related article, "4+2 = Sustained Business Success" at
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=3578&t=strategy

Some folks do have all the luck -- and psychologist Richard Wiseman can teach you how to be one of the lucky few.

When it comes to measuring the impact of marketing campaigns, almost all evaluations are still based on some type of attitudinal analysis. This approach assumes that attitudes and opinions lead directly to desired behaviors. There's only one problem: No one has ever proven that "changing attitudes" actually contributes to a bottom line impact.A study of the measurements of the success of marketing activities.

B players are the heart and soul of top organizations, says HBS professor Thomas J. DeLong. Here's why-and what you can do to manage B players better.

The challenge of improving job performance becomes even greater in tough economic times. The solution: an approach to performance improvement that focuses on those workforces vital to business success and financial results.