The notion of different types of learners and learning styles usually refer to "auditory," "visual" and "verbal." While these distinctions are valid, there is a different way to think about this: in terms of how people think about their goals.

The National Venture Capital Association offers a set of model legal documents for venture capital investments put together by a group of leading venture capital attorneys. The model venture capital financing documents consist of:
* Term Sheet
* Stock Purchase Agreement
* Certificate of Incorporation
* Investor Rights Agreement
* Voting Agreement
* Right of First Refusal and Co-Sale Agreement
* Management Rights Letter
* Indemnification Agreement

According to researchers at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, providing solutions and meeting customer needs may not always be congruous. In their new paper entitled, Rethinking Customer Solutions: From Product Bundles to Relational Processes, marketers Sundar Bharadwaj, Ajay Kohli, and Goizueta doctoral graduate Kapil Tuli, examine the disconnect between how suppliers and customers view a solution. This difference can impact how suppliers sell, develop, and provide for their customers. The research study is forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing.

You've been chosen (or drafted) to deliver a speech. Don't panic. This article covers everything from gathering materials to putting the final touches on your speech It includes two basic outlines that work well for both beginning and advanced speakers alike. [BNET Annotation]

In an era where business success hinges on the ability to quantify every process, executives still must prove the value of IT investments that deliver mostly soft benefits. CSC has created a four-step, systematic, repeatable method of evaluating technology investments.

Only 14 percent of senior executives say their companies do a good job dealing with poor performers, according to a survey by LeadershipIQ, a management training and research firm in Washington, D.C. Here's what to ask a poor performer on your payroll.

The office is a jungle. That's why intrepid employees need a field guide to help them spot and identify the most powerful creature in the workplace: the boss. Here are ten common examples of the species, along with care and feeding tips should you encounter a manager in the wild.

In this issue of Spotlight, Professor Henri-Claude de Bettignies speaks to editor Sarah Powell about the development of China as a world power and the opportunities and challenges this offers to western businesses.

Experience curve is the name applied in 1966 to overall cost behavior by The Boston Consulting Group. The name was selected to distinguish this phenomenon from the well known and well documented learning curve effect. The two are related, but quite different. Read on for background on the development of this concept.

Editor's Note: written in 1974...

Supply chain management (SCM) is an integral and expensive collaboration between warehouses, manufacturers, and consumers. Getting the parts in and the product out with minimal cost and maximum output is an ongoing dilemma. This article discusses the current SCM directions, strategies, and tactics, and how organizations can improve their processes.

Even as offshore outsourcing has matured, best practices have been few. Now two top academics reveal the principles that should guide CIOs.

In today's society, no organization, whether corporate, political, educational, sports or family related, can survive without teamwork. Is there any doubt about whether teamwork allows people to take on more and more complex tasks in a changing environment and get better results than an individual could when working alone? Tasks are interrelated and we need one another. However, we have all experienced situations where working as a team has not turned out the way we planned. What can be done to make teamwork effective? In the paper "Trabajo en equipo" ("Teamwork"), IESE Professor of Managing People in Organizations Pablo Cardona and IESE associate researcher Helen Wilkinson suggest delving into the talent and the position that each team member holds in order to form productive work groups.

Sometimes a valuable customer may be the person who never buys a thing. In a new research paper, Professor Sunil Gupta discusses how to assess the profitability of a customer in a networked setting-a "free" customer who nevertheless influences your bottom line.

Executives often treat cost reduction programs as one-time efforts to compensate for a bad quarter or a delayed product launch. These short-term programs tend to fizzle out quickly when leaders lose interest or a return to healthy sales growth frees them from cost constraints. But rising competitive pressures should compel companies to manage their overhead costs in a more rigorous and ongoing way that entails curbing internal demand before trying to improve the efficiency of overhead processes.

Jack Coffee asks why auditors, attorneys, securities analysts, investment bankers, and government regulators have failed to keep corporations on the straight and narrow.

As IP has assumed greater strategic prominence in the boardroom, so has IP due diligence in funding and M&A activity. Part of managing diligence compliance is knowing what to expect. Cheaters ace the test by getting the questions in advance. In IP diligence, that's not cheating - just common sense. Funders and acquirers usually focus on three primary areas. [Hat tip to Themanager.org]

All companies, from major multinationals to start-ups, face a common challenge: how to keep growing. These firms find it difficult to sustain growth because they become risk averse, opting for safer incremental product and service improvements instead of more rewarding, but riskier, major initiatives, according to a study by Wharton marketing professor George S. Day. Companies, Day says, need to better understand the risks inherent in different levels of innovation and achieve a balance between BIG I innovation and small i innovation.

There's no longer any real argument about whether enterprise systems add value. The eye-opener now is just how far those systems can catapult companies ahead of their competitors by giving them the distinctive capabilities that drive high performance.

How do you go about creating highly persuasive headlines? What sorts of things about headlines can you test? Here is a list of ways you can test your headlines, with examples.

The competitive environment makes market and customer intelligence extremely critical for any company. Yet many small to medium sized companies cannot afford to regularly conduct primary market research, and while secondary research can be helpful it isn't always on the topics the C-Suite are grappling with. What can a CEO or a company's leadership team do to affordably keep a pulse on the market and stay in tune with customer needs and wants? Create customer and technical advisory boards - CABs and TABs. These boards, which are comprised of outside experts, can provide the necessary insight company's need into broader issues and critical forces affecting the market.

How one VC Firm coddles its CEOs.

Attending networking events can be frustrating and ultimately a waste of time for many business owners and professionals. Here are three ways to make them pay off for you.

Choosing the right employees is one of the most important - and most difficult - decisions a manager makes. To help you spot the shiny needle in that haystack of resumes, BNET has assembled a guide to conducting job interviews. They've also investigated the recruiting techniques of Google, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines and others, revealed the seven questions you must ask, and compiled a list of common mistakes hiring managers make and how to avoid them.

A short introduction to the concepts involved in the BCG experience curve which holds that the cost of value added declines approximately 20-30 percent each time accumulated experience is doubled..

Editor's Note: written in 1974...

In the business world, there's a lot of talk about "fit." "He failed to 'fit' into the corporate culture," they might say, or "Yes, he 'fits' in well." Despite so much conservation, little is known about how national culture affects this buzzword. For example, will a Taiwanese employee 'fit' better into a certain work environment than, say, a German? In the award-winning paper "Satisfaction With Organizational Structuring: Does Fit Depend on Where One's From?" IESE Professor Yih-Teen Lee and Prof. John Antonakis explain why "power distance" makes it imperative that multinational firms take a close look at local values.