There is growing evidence of a set of 10 high-value marketing processes that the marketing function of 21st-century-leading enterprises will have to master. The specific processes that will prove to be most valuable to an enterprise will vary, depending on the development stage of the marketing function, as well as the enterprise's business model or vertical market. Listed in order of increasing sophistication and, hence, required mastery, these marketing processes are:
1. Marketing operations management
2. Marketing visibility, accountability and value measurement
3. Customer and market insight generation
4. Customer-value-based segmentation
5. Portfolio and capacity-based resource allocation
6. Product development and introduction
7. Customer-needs-based trigger identification
8. Orchestrated customization
9. Orchestrated cross-channel dialogues
10. Customer-value-based network management

When U.S. and Chinese businesspeople sit at the negotiating table, frustration is often the result. This Harvard Business Review excerpt summarizes the historical and cultural disconnects.

If elite sports teams practice their teamwork, why don't businesses? They must.

NASA's mission control room serves as the inspiration for A.T. Kearney's organizational approach to managing multiple business-unit companies: the Visible Process Organization (VPO) Framework.

The VPO builds on a company's existing organizational structure and creates a new unit similar to the mission control room. The framework is designed to bring together key players in key businesses for decision-making and, at the same time, allow each business to remain independent. This means the VPO Framework can be applied to all existing management and organizational approaches. There is no need to change the entire organizational structure.

As this paper describes, the VPO Framework enables continuous incorporation of the latest information, manages complex systems, and ensures easy access to expertise and required resources. Additionally, it fosters communication, promotes trust and team building, and deepens the understanding of cross-functional challenges.

It appears that the old aphorism, "people are our most important asset," is actually true. Compelling evidence suggests that organizational success comes more from managing people effectively than from attaining large size, operating in a high-growth industry, or becoming lean and mean through downsizing -- which, after all, puts many of your most important assets on the street for the competition to employ. But while many leaders believe that putting people first makes strategic sense, all too few of their organizations do it.

Even as many Latin American countries continue to face tough times both economically and politically, Chile chugs along with a strong currency, falling unemployment and a stock market that is up nearly 50% since the beginning of the year. What is behind's Chile's success, and can this country of 15 million people sustain its already numerous advantages?

A stock split occurs when a company changes the number of shares it has outstanding. For example, suppose the firm had 1 million shares outstanding and then announced a 2:1 split. The firm would now have 2 million shares outstanding. It is not surprising that the stock price drops after the split, but what continues to leave researchers puzzled is why there is a stock price change on the announcement of the split. For years practitioners have suggested that by making the stock price lower the shares are affordable to a greater number of investors and hence there is greater liquidity and therefore a higher stock price. Other theories include that the news of the split signals better times ahead and subsequently it signals higher future dividends. Dhar, Goetzmann, and Zhu use a cool data set to show that true to theory, more individual investors appear to own (and trade) the stock after the split. However, this is not completely good news. They also find the post-split shares trade more, have higher serial correlations, and move more with the market indices. All in all the results strengthen arguments for both a clientele effect and also the view that splits may make the stock trade less efficiently. [FinanceProfessor.com Annotation]

Businesses that outsource gain powerful new control over business performance according to a multinational survey conducted by Accenture. A full 86 percent of executives realize control gains over business results-most within the first year of outsourcing.

Successful outsourcing of your business processes begins close to home.

For most companies, the sources of R&D waste are due to deficiencies in the way R&D operations relate to the market-not to how R&D groups work internally. This article outlines six areas of waste and how to address them. It demonstrates that the responsibility for getting more out of R&D goes beyond R&D itself and significantly involves Marketing Departments. The alignment of the two groups is critical to overall business success.

This article aims to provide the reader with a very basic understanding of what can be a very complex subject, Game Theory. The article does not aim to delve into the depths of Game Theory's mathematical realm, but rather to provide the reader with an introduction to Game Theory and a guide to its uses in business strategy.

In this article, we detail the differences between conventional enterprise risk management and enterprise resilience, and explain why a keen understanding of the distinction is essential today, when the boundaries of every major corporation have expanded, increasing a company's vulnerabilities and its potential for competitive advantage. We also identify how senior executives can assess their organization's resilience profile and risk management approach. And we explain how corporate managers can align risk mitigation strategies with the most significant earnings-driver risks, and close dangerous gaps in their company's resilience profile.

New research disproves some long-held assumptions about what works best when it comes to teamwork.

Could Wall Street become the vanguard of environmental activism?

Punishing a problem employee leaves you with . . . a punished problem employee. Is there a better way?

Few companies know the true cost of their assets - from property, plant and equipment to intellectual capital. Some don't even know what they own or where major assets are located. Here are suggestions that can help stop the insanity.

Market efficiency is a tough thing to beat. Go ahead, find an anomaly and then have it torn to bits in future papers. Lesmond, Schill, and Zhou come to the defense of market efficiency and find that the reported profits from momentum investing are minimally overstated and possibly non-existent because of the higher than normal transactions costs involved with the necessary trading. For example while previous papers (example Jegadeesh and Titman 1991) account for transactions costs, they only use the average cost of trading. This paper reports that where momentum investing seems to be profitable is concentrated in stocks with higher than average transactions costs. Thus after they make adjustments for transaction costs, the abnormal returns disappear. [FinanceProfessor.com Annotation]

It stands to reason that dysfunctional leaders would create dysfunctional organizations. Yet, as Professor Manfred Kets de Vries suggests, there is little research on the dark side of leaders, the "Darth Vader" aspect that is at the core of so many organizational downfalls. In this Working Paper, he looks at specific personality dysfunctions alongside organizational dysfunctions, illustrating how the two, more often than not, are inextricably linked.

Brands allow you to clearly define and communicate what you stand for, whether you're the "lowest-cost provider," the "most innovative," the "best total solution," the "preferred choice" or what have you.

But you've got to decide what your brand stands for, and communicate that value proposition effectively and repeatedly. It's not good enough to just run a quality business-you've got to let everyone know what sets you apart from the pack.

When negotiating compensation, women often sell themselves short. Some practical advice on claiming the power to lead in this interview with HBS professor Kathleen L. McGinn and Harvard's Hannah Riley Bowles.

Led by an unlikely activist, Robert A.G. Monks, the years-long push for shareholders' rights is suddenly gaining steam. Is CEO clout in the boardroom seriously at risk?

Business schools in Europe appear to be focusing more on managing their reputation and identity than on disputing the rankings. This is a wise strategy.

This report provides decision-makers in business and environmental nonprofits with the practical tools required to launch or improve effective partnerships. Designed as a compendium of best practices and key learnings, this report targets practitioners who recognize the enormous potential of nonprofit-industry partnerships but need a framework for approaching structured collaboration and a compact, handy reference to aid implementation. Our objective is to outline critical success factors and offer actionable tools in a user-friendly yet rigorous guidebook for practitioners.

The similar economic position of parents and children is partly determined by how well parents teach their children to save.

What drives great companies? In an environment of unprecedented complexity, traditional explanations and prescriptions are no longer adequate. To become a high-performance business today requires an entirely new framework of understanding-and a new set of practical, solutions-oriented capabilities.