Companies have everything to gain from forging a strong link between regulation and strategy. By shifting their approach to regulation from confrontation or passive compliance to a proactive and informed dialogue with external stakeholders, they can help construct more balanced regulatory frameworks and ensure a better outcome for the organization.

How to set up shop or sell your wares in this enormous, fast-changing market.

Practitioners and academics have argued that an engaged workforce can create competitive advantage. These authors say that it is imperative for leaders to identify the level of engagement in their organization and implement behavioural strategies that will facilitate full engagement. In clear terms, they describe how leaders can do that.

Supply-chain risk management is intimately connected to protecting earnings and shareholder value. By better understanding the financial consequences of supply chain vulnerabilities, companies can develop proactive, predictive approaches that focus on developing ongoing business resilience, not just recovery from disasters or other disruptions.

There's an often-quoted saying: The only thing certain about a forecast is that it is always wrong. And yet, companies spend a great deal of time and resources trying to predict as accurately as possible the future demand of their supply chains. In spite of this significant investment, many steps and participants fail to make the forecast any better-and some only serve to make it worse. It's time for companies to stop wasting their time and money and start eliminating forecasting activities that fail to add value.

Of all the outside firms that entrepreneurs employ, PR firms probably have the toughest time getting--and staying--in their clients' good graces. Some companies feel they aren't getting as much media play as they deserve, while others think they're garnering the wrong kind of attention. Meanwhile, the cost-benefit analysis for public relations is pretty hard to calculate. We thought it would be interesting to get a sense of what PR people think about the companies they work for. So we asked Geri Denterlein, the founder and CEO of Denterlein Worldwide, a Boston-based PR agency, to write a letter to her clients explaining how her company can work with them to be more successful. We also asked her to dish on what client habits are, well, annoying. Here's her letter.

All transitions are tricky. When planning one, here's what to avoid at all costs.

You know the type: coworkers who never have anything positive to say, whether at the weekly staff meeting or in the cafeteria line. They can suck the energy from a brainstorming session with a few choice comments. Their negativity can contaminate even good news. "We engage in emotional contagion," says Wharton management professor Sigal Barsade. "Emotions travel from person to person like a virus." Barsade is the co-author of a new paper that looks at the impact of employees' moods, emotions, and overall dispositions on job performance.

Editor's Note: this article doesn't say much that is surprising or particularly actionable, but perhaps the orignal paper does (I haven't read that)...

Why do highly intelligent and capable business leaders, backed by an army of talent and a flood of information, make so many extremely expensive mistakes? This article looks at the role of mental models in decision making and forecasting and suggests effective and efficient methods for improving.

A series of blog posts on what should be in a board reporting package.

The Fall 2006 issue of Rotman magazine contains 120 pages of varying quality articles and other information. I personally recommend reading the following:
- Identity and the Economics of Organizations by George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton
- Loyalty Myths by Timothy Keiningham,Terry Vavra, Lerzan Aksoy and Henri Wallard
- The Big Picture:Tom Stewart
- The Trust Development Process by Mark Weber, Deepak Malhotra and Keith Murnighan

Determining a company's true costs and profitability has always been difficult, although advancements such as activity-based costing (ABC) have helped. Professor Robert Kaplan and Acorn Systems' Steven Anderson offer a simplified system based on time-driven ABC that leverages existing enterprise resource planning systems.

Segmentation is a critical aspect of corporate strategy. It is essential in visualizing the competitive arena and analyzing the preferred strategic emphasis. The goal is to find a way to convert differences from competitors into a cost differential that can be maintained.

Editor's Note: written in 1974...

To deliver a knock-out pitch, an entrepreneur should have an understanding of how a potential investor's mental model works, and frame their presentation squarely within it. This allows them to anticipate the questions that are likely to be asked. Although these mental models can vary from individual to individual, there are some basic fundamentals that apply across the board. The first step is to understand whether you're a 1, 2, or 3 type of business.

Even seasoned startup personnel frequently misunderstand the ins and outs of their options. This series of blog posts are intended for help employees and other people that own startup stock options. Topics to be covered include:
* How options are granted
* Vesting schedules
* Liquidation events
* Buyback rights
* Option prices & how they are set
* Early Exercise
* Multiple grants
* Repricing & Dilution
* Alternative Minimum Tax Impacts

What happens when demand myths, faulty forecasts, and financing traps converge.

An effective advisory board, properly composed and structured, can provide non-binding but informed guidance and serve as a tremendous ally in the quest for superior corporate governance. This author, a lawyer with significant experience on boards of directors, offers a helpful blueprint for establishing an effective advisory board.

As business becomes increasingly global and large numbers of international mergers and acquisitions continue to take place, you may soon find yourself having to negotiate with people from cultures very different from your own.

Most acquirers tend to overpay because they overestimate the value they will add to the target and execute poorly in delivering promised benefits This article discusses how Boards of Directors, CEOs, CFOs and Corporate Strategists can use EVA-based valuation and performance management techniques to improve their company's chances of success in M&A and other major investments.

It takes less time than you think for a clean team to make valuable contributions to the integration of businesses.

Human beings are creatures of habit. Many of our actions are repetitive and require little conscious thought or effort. However, according to a new study, by predicting our behavior we can actually reinforce good habits and break bad ones. The study by INSEAD Assistant Professor of Marketing Pierre Chandon and four US-based Marketing professors is called 'When Does the Past Repeat Itself? The Role of Self-Prediction and Norms.'

Here's a simple formula for creating content that effectively communicates your point, especially if the subject matter is novel or complex. This strategy can also dramatically reduce the time it takes you to put together tutorials, white papers, or presentations of any sort.

The key is to cover all the bases when it comes to the different learning styles of the audience.

Tales of groundbreaking innovation sound a lot alike. Like action-adventure movies, they have a predictable structure. Some ordinary guys, without money or power, triumph via a brilliant insight and scrappy groundwork. But what if those stories mislead us about what it takes to generate great ideas?

Swivel is a place where curious people explore all kinds of data. In particular, we're talking about those three things:
* The use of farms of powerful computers and algorithms at the Swivel data centers to transform a lonely grid of numbers and letters into hundreds - sometimes thousands - of graphs that can be explored and compared with any other public data in Swivel
* Ratings and comments and publishing shortcuts for bloggers, so folks can share ideas, talk about insights and understand data together
* Transforming the sometimes tedious task of reading someone else's spreadsheet into a fun experience of clicking through a Web site full of images, graphs and color.

Use Swivel to work with your own data or check out some of the interesting data posted publicly by other Swivel users.

Editor's Note: Swivel is free if you make your data public but there is a fee for private usage.

Group work is the name of the game in many companies. The thinking is that workers will learn more and help each other when they are put into groups composed of people with a variety of expertise. But does this always happen? Some recent research suggests that it may not ... at least not always.