For people with the mindset and motivation to create entrepreneurial change there is still the question of how they can operate to be successful within their company environment, since each company's culture, goals and its set of opportunities are different. That is to say, what types of opportunities do they look for, where do they look for them and how do they move these opportunities forward? In my work with entrepreneurial leaders I have found there are various ways in which they focus their energy and skills and these can be grouped into 4 basic types.

Accenture research suggests that market leaders climb to the top of their segments by building incredibly strong bonds with their customers. They've done so by mastering the skills and capabilities that form the core of marketing--especially those identified as having a significant impact on loyalty-and by recognizing that responsibility for marketing is shared across the organization.

Accenture also discovered that there are five key factors that account for exactly half of a typical company's ability to win customer loyalty (with the other half comprising nonmarketing factors such as customer inertia, market maturity, geography and industry structure). These five factors are:
• Developing and delivering the branded customer experience
• Creating and shaping demand
• Translating foresight and insight into marketing productivity
• Harnessing talent and technology
• Driving marketing to meet performance objectives

While all five of these marketing factors make measurable contributions to winning loyalty, the most important are the two customer-facing factors: developing and delivering a branded customer experience and creating and shaping demand.

The conventional wisdom says that China is the biggest story of our time. Now, as India goes through a similar process characterized by historically high rates of growth and further integration into the global economy, it appears that the path it follows will influence the global economy and business environment. Perhaps, then, India is the next big story.

Global business leaders believe that they must have a strategy for both countries. China and India, despite their massive populations and growing importance, are quite different. Their economic structures, sources of growth, areas of competitive advantage and the impact they have will remain different in the coming years. The question, then, for global companies is what to do in each country. China is commonly viewed as the place to produce or procure goods, while India is seen as the place to procure business and information technology services. Yet in the future, this discrete division of labor might not be so clear or even relevant.

This study offers some thoughts on the future direction of India and China, the risks and opportunities of doing business in each country and the likely impact they will have on global business.

It is a truism that firms can increase their profitability by motivating managers. However, research surprisingly reveals that increased pay and lower risk aversion are not necessarily motivating factors. So what are the major motivational drivers within organisations, and how can Human Resources identify and use them? In their working paper, "Managerial Motivation Dynamics and Incentives," Ayse Kocabiyikoglu and Ioana Popescu investigate the drivers of managerial motivation, focusing on decisions taken by managers in response to a performance-based contract.

Global players aren't in China just to pursue growth. They are also there to compete head-on with the Chinese. But the biggest challenges multinationals encounter in China are often self-generated, because they fail to commit themselves fully to the effort. To keep from getting sidelined, China-bound companies must prepare to do business outside the big cities, make sure the home organization is motivated to support the China strategy, and invest aggressively in the quality and quantity of the people they send.

Every guerrilla destined for marketing victories knows very well that if you have ten hours to spend creating a marketing weapon, you should spend nine of them creating the headline. It's the first impression you make, often the only impression, and the rest of your marketing weapon will live or die by the quality of that headline. Here are 20 hints to help you create winning ones.

In the study "What Do Laboratory Experiments Tell Us About the Real World?" University of Chicago professors Steven D. Levitt and John A. List address the challenges of interpreting experimental work in economics by constructing a model to help shed light on experimental results that likely are generalizable. While the basic strategy underlying lab experiments in the physical sciences and economics is similar, the fact that economists study human behavior raises fundamental questions about the ability to extrapolate experimental findings beyond the lab.

Strategy means so many things to so many people that it is difficult to have a meaningful conversation about strategy unless you define your terms.

The evidence of women's success in the corporate world is plentiful. But two professors from the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis wondered whether women's evident prowess in business is something that most people generally recognize when making investment decisions. Their conclusion: perceptions of female business leaders aren't keeping up with reality.

One of the world's most recognized and respected authorities on intellectual capital offers his observations on how to manage and value one of the most challenging and dynamic issues facing business leaders today, intangible assets. Lev is a frequent witness in litigation involving intellectual capital, and a frequent and vocal critic of traditional accounting. He is also the leading exponent of a new, knowledge-based approach to accounting.

An enterprise value map can help decision-makers visualize which business processes are most critical to competitiveness and profitability, and where IT is most likely to create or destroy value. It can also improve communication between IT and business leaders by describing IT activities in terms that business people can readily understand.

Classifying employees by their role in the success of your business rather than by their function can improve the effectiveness of recruiting, staff development, and deployment.

Resistance to change is one of the most powerful drivers of human behavior, and the key to dealing with it effectively is to understand both its physical and emotional components.

Of all the people you work with, who would you least like to be stranded alone with on a desert island? While your worst nightmare is an unlikely scenario, problem people are permanent workplace fixtures, leaving you nowhere to run. Learning some emotional survival skills can help ease the pain of close encounters you can't avoid.

A dispassionate analysis of a brand can uncover opportunities for a company to expand into new profit zones. It also can reveal signs that the brand is becoming irrelevant to changing customer priorities.

Dramatic stock market gyrations during and since the 1990s have encouraged advocates of behavioral-finance theories, which hold that market values can systematically deviate from economic fundamentals. Evidence shows, however, that such events are limited and that market values eventually return to fundamental levels.

Depending on the pricing problem the company is trying to solve, there might be different pricing processes and software categories, such as:
* price execution
* price enforcement
* price visibility
* price optimization
* pricing management

Each product, operation, and activity should be justified every two or three years, wrote Peter F. Drucker in 1963. But that's a hard step for managers to take.

arket segmentation has become a popular topic in marketing, marketing research and strategic planning. Market segmentation allows sellers to identify unique segments in the market so that they can tailor product features, services, distribution, pricing, and marketing communication messages specifically to each segment. Segmentation research allows sellers of products and services to quantify the sizes and potential economic/volumetric opportunities of the segments, describe the composition of each segment, and evaluate alternative segment-level marketing strategies. This document will discuss how segmentation can increase the effectiveness of a company's marketing and communication efforts. Its purpose is to explain the uses of market segmentation and the basic steps for executing segmentation research. [BNET Annotation]

I have often had entrepreneurs tell me with great confidence that they either do or do not want to set up their venture as a Subchapter S corporation. Equally often when I ask them why they want to take that course of action I find they don't really understand what is involved.

Would you like to be able to scan your company's financial operations spreadsheet and instantly see which departments are over budget or behind schedule or which accounts receivable are past due? There's an easy way to do that in Excel, which can automatically flag cells that meet most any condition you establish. You can set the cells to display different formatting flags-colors, font styles, shading, patterns, underlining-with each custom format identifying a specific financial condition. Here's how.

The same advice on differentiating and learning faster than your competition that is often given to companies, is equally applicable to us as individuals. In this interesting piece, Stephen Shapiro explores how to unleash your inner innovator to differentiate yourself and to find new ways of adding value to your organization.

Editor's Note: a very interesting read, especially the bit about NASA testing children for creativity...

Why is there a resurgence of interest among today's business and organizational leaders in the ancient art of storytelling at a time when electronic communications might seem to make it obsolete? Human beings have been communicating with each other through storytelling since we lived in caves and sat around campfires exchanging tales. What is new today about the art of telling stories is the purposeful use of narrative to achieve a practical outcome with an individual, a community, or an organization. Four of the world's leading thinkers on knowledge management explore how storytelling will become the key ingredient to managing communications, education, training, and innovation in the 21st century.

Editor's Note: the material ranges from entertaining to useful to academic and esoteric...and the introduction is much more than a typcial introduction. It is also a lot of reading...

FinanceProfessor.com has a post discussing how useful the new FMA Online site is, specifically referencing a video by Professor Cliff Smith of the University of Rochester. Includes relevant links.

Booz Allen Hamilton research reveals that a third of those who outsource fail to achieve the expected benefits. Is that outcome inevitable? Absolutely not, if companies pay close attention to outsourcing governance.