Whether they are selling clothes in a mall or books on a website, retailers have to walk a fine line. They must offer help to customers who want assistance, while taking pains not to intrude on their privacy.

Why so many entrepreneurs have trouble delegating.

You are responsible for traveling employees' safety. It's good to tell them what not to do. It's better to teach them how to be alert and anticipate and avoid trouble.

Performance anatomy is perhaps the most elusive characteristic of all great companies. But with its distinctive perspective on the interaction between leadership and strategy, people development, IT enablement, performance measurement and innovation, it is critical to defining a high-performance business.

There are four benchmarks for predicting the success of your product or service, according to this view from Strategy and Innovation. Here's how a few well-known products tested out.

A survey of the UK investment community shows that today's regulatory reporting model is failing to make visible some of the most basic building blocks of good financial reporting.

Here's how growth companies do it.

In two separate talks at Wharton recently, Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Pete Peterson, chairman of The Blackstone Group, lamented what they see as the sorry state of the U.S. economy, and then presented their views on how to fix it. Not surprisingly, the answers offered by Stiglitz, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Clinton, and Peterson, former Secretary of Commerce under President Nixon, have little in common, although both fault the Bush administration for failing to adequately address some of the country's toughest issues, ranging from Social Security reform and budget deficits to persistent unemployment and economic inequality.

Editor's Note: this is a bit topical, but some of the points made are about fundamentals of economics; also, NOW with Bill Moyers, a PBS program, interviewed Pete Peterson - you can read the transcript at
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_peterson.html

Working in tandem, buyers and suppliers can find better ways to cut costs and increase innovation.

Utility computing aims to transform IT into a pay-as-you go service. That sounds far simpler than it is.

By 2007, the dollar power of Hispanics is predicted to rise to $926.1 billion. The Hispanic community clearly holds a great deal of economic clout, which certainly explains why marketers are vying for its attention.

Unfortunately, many marketing campaigns are ineffective. Here are the top three reasons.

A collection of entrepreneurship-related articles from Capital Ideas. Includes:
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Entrepreneurs: Will They Stay or Will They Go?
Research by Stanislav D. Dobrev

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The Implications of Optimism
Research by Augustin Landier

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Bargaining Power
Research by Steven N. Kaplan and Per Strömberg

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The Sophisticated Venture Capitalist
Research by Steven N. Kaplan and Per Strömberg

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Private Equity Performance
Research by Steven N. Kaplan

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The Returns to Entrepreneurial Investment
Research by Tobias J. Moskowitz

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When Smaller is Better
Research by Raghuram Rajan

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Tax Benefits in Acquisitions of Privately Held Corporations
Research by Merle Erickson

Can CEO style become company culture? Have we overlooked the tell-tale signs that warn us in advance of substantial, incremental, and even discontinuous organizational change?

This article, although written in 1990, is quite interesting. Ostensibly, it takes a close look at the often unforeseen costs of downsizing and suggests a radically different approach (reshaping). While it does this in some sense, I found it most interesting for its analysis of middle management and the trends surrounding this layer of the organization.

Many of today's largest companies are at junctures where there is opportunity to leave behind long-held assumptions about scale and market position. High-performance companies achieve their extraordinary success by balancing management's concentration on gaining scale with a proportional focus on the mastery of distinctive capabilities and the creation of a high-performance anatomy. The scale-driven perspective is not without merit; it is simply incomplete.

Microsoft Excel allows users to create their own user-defined functions. These functions can be used just like any built-in function already available in Excel. Here's how you create one.

You can use deadlines to your strategic advantage in negotiations-but so can your opponent. Here's how to make the most of time pressure. From Negotiation.

Editor's Note: I found the arguments made in this article quite unconvincing...what do you think?

Companies on the front lines of the phishing wars share tactics for making their sites spoof-proof and protecting online transactions.

A changed competitive landscape calls for a different business model.

From keeping it up to keeping it safe to just plain keeping it, E-mail now warrants an actual strategy.

A top of the line corporate jet can cost a company up to $35 million. But a new study shows that when chief executive officers trade in first-class commercial tickets for private planes, the cost to shareholders can be far greater.

Editor's Note: I am not sure what, if any value, this article offers but I must admit it was an interesting read...

Communications and transportation networks improved so dramatically over the last few decades, that even faraway regions and nations around the globe are now within the reach of a mere Internet connection. As a result, companies have jumped into international markets and outsourced their manufacturing and procurement operations to cheaper overseas manufacturers and suppliers, while some have established subsidiaries around the world. The Internet-based e-business promises to further shrink the world into a "global village" as people research, source, and procure products globally via the ubiquitous Web, buy and sell these via various e-commerce sites, storefronts, and marketplaces, and manage international supply chains with collaborative software and trading exchanges.

However, this kind of e-business has yet to surmount the challenge of global trade compliance and the diverse needs of international customers and trading partners. Simply put, many supply chain management (SCM), let alone enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors lack strong international trade logistics (ITL) and global trade management (GTM) capabilities. Namely, while technology may be rendering a world that appears a lot smaller, the very same real-life world has become a lot more complicated in the process, as many barriers exist to conducting international business over the Internet and most businesses are not yet prepared for that.

How blue staters and red staters can learn to communicate and do business.

Global competition, supply-chain partnerships, knowledge management, and 24/7 operations are among the trends driving changes in business processes and business structures. As information and decision-making power filter deeper into the organization, traditional command-and-control, hierarchical structures are giving way to new, matrix formats. CIOs who look beyond the technologies to the culture changes they bring can lead their companies through the transition. Editor-in-chief Brian Gillooly invited a handful of today's most respected and influential thinkers to participate in a roundtable discussion on the changing role of power in the world of business technology. What follows is an edited transcript of his lively conversation with Erik Brynjolfsson, the George and Sandi Schussel professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the Center for eBusiness at MIT; Tom Davenport, a fellow at the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business who also holds of the president's chair in information technology and management at Babson College; and Geoffrey Moore, venture partner at Mohr, Davidow Ventures. Due to last-minute scheduling conflicts, Michael Hammer, president of Hammer and Co., was unable to attend the roundtable. He talked with Gillooly separately, however.

Britain had it all - brains, ideas, and inventions like radar and pencillin - but the U.S. brought the best to the market. The lesson is sobering: Native brilliance needs a national backup drive.