Leasing new space is an event that can have major implications for any business. If a company leases space that ultimately turns out to be unsuitable for all its operations, or if the lease does not allow for expansion, the growth of the company can be unduly hindered. If too much space is leased, the company will end up wasting limited cash resources.

Lease documents can be sophisticated and complicated contracts. A great number of points beyond rent and square feet can directly and adversely affect a business tenant down the road. Conversely, a lease that provides a tenant with the right type of space and flexibility as the tenant's needs change can become an asset and provide a competitive advantage.

A prospective tenant might want to consider the following when entering into a lease.

Following the adoption of a collective bargaining agreement in 2005, National Hockey League GMs had one month to absorb the new rules and put a team together. How to best negotiate in an uncertain environment? Michael Wheeler advises looking to military science for winning strategies.

Leaders readily acknowledge that innovation is essential for their companies' success. And they recognize that energized employees are more likely to produce valuable innovations than those who have become passive or reactionary. However, they also struggle with the best way to drive enthusiasm and passion deep into a workforce. One often-overlooked opportunity for improvement lies in the daily conversations and meetings that either energize or de-energize employees. To help address these seemingly invisible interactions, the authors applied network analysis in 15 organizations and then conducted interviews in each organization to identify ways energy is created and diffused in employee networks that are so critical for innovation. This article discusses measures executives can take to improve the energy network to help keep innovation flowing to generate high performance.

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

---

Is one of the goals of your business-to-business advertising sales leads generation for your salespeople, representatives, distributors or resellers? Consider these proven B2B sales leads generation techniques gleaned from working with over 170 companies and some of the best marketers in the business.

Most companies fail to capture all of the opportunities for generating growth, profit, and competitive advantage through pricing. What's more, many companies do an especially poor job of managing pricing as they come out of an economic downturn. Pricing for the recovery is an opportunity they can't afford to miss. The authors discuss how companies can pull the appropriate pricing levers for the cost structures, competitive dynamics, and demand elasticities of their products at various points in the business cycle.

The organization chart can no longer help us understand what an organization does. What's needed in these dynamic times is a much richer diagram that gives us a more revealing picture of a more dynamic organization. That organization can be a hub, a web or a chain. It is critical that we understand each of these forms and how they work in a particular organization. Then, and only then, will we be able to understand how an organization really works.

Stuart Greenbaum gave a very interesting and important speech at the Financial Intermediation Research Society Meetings in Shanghai China. Fortunately for those of who did not go to China to attend the conference, the keynote address is available through SSRN. The abstract does not do the speech justice, so Jim Mahar (FinanceProfessor.com) provides some "visual bites" via some "look-ins":

The country must develop its financial system in order to keep pace with China.

The widely used Fed model leads too many analysts, portfolio managers and financial commentators down the wrong road. It often leads investors to believe that by comparing two numbers - earnings yields and bond yields - they can easily determine whether the stock market is mispriced. Even worse, some investors believe that such a simple comparison is the shortcut to abnormal returns.

In the paper "The Fed Model: The Bad, the Worse, and the Ugly," IESE fFnancial Management Professor Javier Estrada proclaims that the Fed model is flawed. To support his theoretical argument, he provides evidence from 20 countries that seriously questions the model's empirical merits.

This article offers solutions to the 10 problems reported most often in a Guerrilla Marketing survey.

It may be tempting to recruit all-stars and let 'em rip. Don't do it. Dream teams often become nightmares of dysfunction.

Terms can be mesmerizing, but companies get a rude awakening when leasing's real cost is revealed.

Economic and regulatory pressures, along with the need to stay competitive in the marketplace, have made business intelligence (BI) more important than ever for enterprise application users. BI gives users the ability to extract, consolidate, change, and analyze data in ways that are not possible in other approaches to enterprise applications. BI also allows users to exploit subsets of data within disparate organizational systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), finance, and human resources (HR) to combine various dimensions of organizational data in order to create a single view.

To build BI solutions within an organization, data warehousing, data integration, analytics, scorecards, and dashboards must also be considered. Each organization has its own use for some (or all) of these tools, depending on how it chooses to use the available tools. We'll look at the main BI components, and at the way BI tools can be applied within an organization.

The effective utilization of knowledge and learning requires both culture and technology. Explicit information and data can be easily codified, written down, and stored in a data base. For this type of business information we have the necessary skills and more than adequate tools. Yet, simple data is frequently not where competitive advantage is found. An organization's real edge in the marketplace is often found in complex, context-sensitive, knowledge which is difficult, if not often impossible to codify and store in ones and zeroes. This core knowledge is found in individuals, communities of interest and their connections. An organization's data is found in its computer systems, but a company's intelligence is found in its biological and social systems. Computer networks must support the people networks in today's fluid and adaptive organizations -- not the other way around.

Entrepreneur / CEO Will Herman offers advice about firing someone.

Will Herman takes a look at the issue of highly productive employees who aren't aligned with the corporate culture, utilizing a matrix popularized by Jack Welch.

To be successful, corporate leaders must keep customer requirements, process improvement activities, and employees aligned with organizational goals, and monitor this alignment on a regular basis. Measurement software can make the challenge manageable.

Basic, but useful, information about conducting exit inteviews.

An idiosyncratic economist preaches the innate morality of business.

For marketers, technologically sophisticated products and services pose a special problem-translating the technical talk that engineers love into the plain talk customers need and will act upon.

From the depths of my experience with bits, bytes, high-voltage devices and semi-toxic chemical compounds, we offer a few suggestions that will help you turn good science into compelling marketing copy.

Remember the days of Cold War espionage and intrigue, popularized in Bond films and John Le Carré novels? Well, times have changed geopolitically, but businesses have come to embrace the merits of "tradecraft": They want to gain market advantage through a better understanding of the competition. In the corporate world, tradecraft is called "competitive intelligence." A former CIA agent-turned-management expert tells how to make it work for your company.

A juice company is trying to decide between alternative marketing campaigns. One approach relates to the consumer as an individual. Another shows the individual surrounded by family. Which approach would be the most effective? Research by Jennifer Aaker, associate professor of marketing, helps illuminate such questions, suggesting that persuasion depends on the kinds of benefit promised, and whether consumers view themselves as either autonomous beings or members of an interdependent group.

Understanding your personal communication style -- and tailoring your messages to ensure that co-workers get the true meaning -- can help you avoid serious management problems.

The gap between the need to innovate and the tools for doing so leaves us with a problem: How can we move beyond the practices of today to invent the best practices of tomorrow? And where will we keep getting new ideas for organizational processes to adapt to a continually changing world? If we are to understand successful organizational practices, we must be able to recognize and represent the organizational practices we see. And to improve organizational practice in a particular situation, we must also be able to imagine alternative ways of accomplishing the same things. Finally, we need some way of judging which alternatives are likely to be useful or desirable in which situations.

This paper reports on the first five years of work in a project to address these problems by (1) developing methodologies and software tools for representing and codifying organizational processes at varying levels of abstraction and (2) collecting, organizing, and analyzing numerous examples of how different groups and companies perform similar functions. The result of this work is an on-line "process handbook" which can be used to help people: (1) redesign existing business processes, (2) invent new processes (especially those that take advantage of information technology), and (3) organize and share knowledge about organizational practices.

Do CEOs deserve "star" compensation? The idea that CEO pay is driven by the invisible hand of market forces is a myth from which chief executives have long benefited, say Harvard professors Lucian Bebchuk and Rakesh Khurana.