From the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership Web site, an insightful piece by famed leadership writer Walter Ulmer offers general thoughts on a variety of leadership topics.

Current approaches to business education are based on an identifiable model of knowledge creation,representation and dissemination - a model that cannot bridge what political scientist T.Homer Dixon calls ‘the ingenuity gap' - the gap between the problem-solving means of the past and the problems of the immediate future. A new model is needed - one that stresses optimization over correctness, integration over specialization and adaptive views of rationality over foundational views thereof.

A long list of constraints stands in the way of the kind of successful innovation necessary for high performance. Attempting to micromanage away the problem isn't the solution, however. Instead, company leaders must actively choose a philosophy of innovation that helps everyone in the organization understand how to get beyond the obstacles to success.

Pricing may well be the weakest link in the value chain. It has such potential to accelerate revenue and profit growth, yet it is so clearly under-managed at consumer and business-to-business companies alike. There are opportunities for improvement in five areas of pricing strategy.

If it's not if you win but how you play the game, then playing - or working - with humour and an upbeat, positive attitude is surely the right way to play. Besides, these are the teams that usually win.

Over the last decade, companies have made great strides in retooling their innovation engines. Leaner and faster, they can get products from concept to customer in record time. But even a Ferrari does not know where to drive. While there are still plenty of opportunities to enhance execution, inspiration and insight are increasingly the critical challenges for innovation executives. But improving these capabilities demands different, more outward-looking techniques. This viewpoint introduces thinking on a new approach to ideation and development that can be called Intelligent Innovation.

Many organizations suffer a disconnect between strategy formulation and its execution. The answer? HBS professor Robert S. Kaplan and colleague Andrew Pateman argue for the creation of a new corporate office.

Ever wonder why soap retails for $1.99 instead of $2.00? Behind this prevalent feature of retail gimmickry lies some sound psychology.

A good marketing plan needs a great deal of information gathered from many sources. It is used to develop marketing strategy and tactics to reach a specific set of objectives and goals. The process is not necessarily difficult, but it does require organization. This is especially true if you are not developing this plan by oneself and are depending on others to assist one or to accomplish parts of the plan. This is frequently the case both in the classroom and in the business world. Therefore, it is important before you start to "Plan for planning". This document will give an overview of the entire marketing planning process, including who is going to do what and when each task is scheduled for completion. [BNET Annotation]

An expert on customers explains why appealing to simple human emotion beats neuromarketing in the race to revenue. And he has the pictures to prove it.

Abstract: This Article addresses a curious gap in the theory of intellectual property. One of the central dogmas in both the legal and economic literatures is that patents, copyrights and trademarks constitute separate forms of protection, each serving different purposes and designed to operate independently of the others. By challenging this dogma, however, this Article shows that certain combinations of intellectual property protection give rise to important synergies. When a patentee can develop brand loyalty among its customers, the existence of trademark protection allows her to extend its protection even after her patent expires, and thereby earn higher profits than would be possible without such leverage. Paradoxically, our model reveals that this patent/trademark leverage is actually efficiency-enhancing: it gives patentees an incentive to price less monopolistically than they would if their protection terminated upon the expiration of the patent. Importantly, this is not a purely theoretical result: several case studies demonstrate that firms actually do combine patent and trademark protection in much the way we describe. We show that the same synergies are at work when trade-secrecy is combined with trademark protection.

Editor's Note: I must admit I didn't actually read this 73-page article, but the abstract seems promising for those with a strong interest in this subject.

It's been called "selling the invisible"-delivering intangible services as a core "product" offering.

Invisibility (intangibility), inseparability, variability, and perishability are four factors that distinguish services marketing from product marketing. These characteristics affect the way clients behave during the buying process and the way organizations must interact with them.

People tend to think of diversity as simply demographic, a matter of color, gender, or age. However, groups can be disparate in many ways. Diversity is also based on informational differences, reflecting a person's education and experience, as well as on values or goals that can influence what one perceives to be the mission of something as small as a single meeting or as large as a whole company. Diversity among employees can create better performance when it comes to out-of-the-ordinary creative tasks such as product development or cracking new markets, and managers have been trying to increase diversity to achieve the benefits of innovation and fresh ideas. Margaret Neale, Gregory Northcraft and Karen Jehn studied the effects of each kind of diversity on group performance.

Television advertisements, public presentations, business negotiations, the opening arguments in a courtroom... persuasive communication is critical in many contexts. But how can speeches move people and mobilize masses? Where does the power of words come from? The answer is not so much in what it is said, but in how it is said, or rhetoric. The term rhetoric embraces all public speaking and interpersonal communication that seeks to persuade its audience. In his article "A Rhetorical Approach to Communication," Brian O'Connor Leggett takes a look at its history and presents Aristotle's rhetorical triad of ethos, pathos and logos, which formed the basis of communication training and written and oral discourse for over 2,000 years.

Do you let ego and basic survival instincts dictate your workplace behavior? Are co-workers playing destructive power games that undermine your efforts? Being territorial isn't always all bad, but if taken too far, it can work against you in today's collaborative team environment.

Tom Peters offers a list of not-always-obvious tips that reminds us that every relationship is a sales relationship.

Developing high potentials to take on key senior leadership roles is complex and challenging for organizations - beginning with how to define "high potential." Most organizations can identify, with varying degrees of formality, their short list of likely future senior leaders. But, by definition, the characteristics of these high potentials are illusive. How do you recognize promise, or know it when you see it? This paper describes about the research which has been done for identifying, assessing, and selecting high potentials.

What type of employee becomes a whistleblower? What type of company culture promotes whistleblowers? How should the company respond once a whistleblower steps forward? Can a silent employee be just as damaging as an employee who speaks out? These are relevant questions with serious consequences in today's business climate.

With reliable data hard to come by, creating a winning marketing formula for China can be a head-scratching exercise.

Editor's Note: this is the first article in a special report on China. I also recommend the article, "It's Not What You Know..." and the PDF "Not All Markets Are Created Equal"

Most people agree that globalization and the introduction of a market economy have the power to do enormous good. But for many in the developing world, they have not brought the promised economic benefits - and in many cases, they have made things much worse. Three key players in the globalization debates - 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences Joseph Stiglitz, renowned philanthropist and president and chairman of Soros Fund Management George Soros, and World Bank Vice President for Europe J.F. Rischard - discuss what has gone wrong, and how we might go about fixing it.

For all the uniqueness, there seem to be certain values held in common by all high-performance companies. That's the conclusion of Dr. Robert Lefton, co-founder of Psychological Associates in Clayton.

Since its founding in 1958, Psychological Associates has used behavioral science to provide business solutions. It has worked with most of the Fortune 500 companies as well as many small and midsize organizations. Lefton says the high-performers among these have all shared five values: openness and candor, collaboration, common shared goals, involvement and feedback.

It is now generally acknowledged that most boards need more directors who are truly independent. But the very fact that new directors are independent implies that they are, unwittingly and to a certain extent, uninformed about the company and its business. Which is why the quality of the information they get from the company must be very high.

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

It's been long known that preview pane and the blocked-images feature in email clients are problematic for marketers. The majority of email readers are using both the preview pane and the default blocked-images functions to decide whether to open emails and block unwanted downloads.

Companies that do not take steps to address these findings with their email design and format will be doing a disservice to their subscribers.

The success of an innovative new business may depend on forgetting what makes the core business tick.