Organizations undertaking change initiatives must engage employees. Paying the person instead of the job and using variable pay and stock are perhaps the most powerful changes an organization can make in moving its reward system toward one that supports performance and change. These authors describe the reward systems and motivational tools that will move employees to support the organization's change initiatives.

Spreadsheet analysis is a very visual technique to help improve business operations and profitability. In this Editor's Note Professor Rick Hesse discusses how far we've come in the 25 years since spreadsheets were introduced.

Stars don't shine alone. As Harvard Business School's Boris Groysberg and Linda-Eling Lee reveal in new research, it is imperative that top performers as well as their managers take into account the quality of colleagues. Groysberg and Lee explain the implications for star mobility and retention in this Q&A.

Rand Fishkin has been doing an inordinate amount of online shopping recently and feels uniquely qualified to share a few e-commerce site design tips - 17 tips, actually.

There's a lot of talk these days about the lack of independent directors on corporate boards. But it's not just a big-company issue. There should be at least one outsider on your board, too. Here's what to ask to get the right person in the chair.

Return on capital is the benchmark for comparing performance between businesses. But new math is needed when a company's capital intensity is low.

There's only one type of marketing message that gets through to prospects, and it has nothing to do with abstract benefits.

According to the results of a recent APQC study, finance organizations, no matter what their size, are still spending almost two-thirds of their time on transaction processing, to the detriment of more strategic functions such as decision support and management. The study concluded, in part, that the respondents who are able to spend the most time in these critical areas are able to do so because they've reduced their transaction costs; one way they've done that is by implementing a single instance of ERP software and a common chart of accounts. Read more results from this survey of financial officers in this paper. [BNET Annotation]

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

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Taking the time upfront to establish rapport and understanding on both sides can help maintain team effectiveness and remedy potential conflicts before misunderstandings ensue.

Pam Slim provides a great list of things to do prior to making a presentation. If you make speeches, presentations, or pitches, read this.

This white paper argues that winning salespeople are made, not born. It teases out the ONE common trait that sales gurus such as Ken Stine, Jeff Gitomer, and Jack & Suzy Welch have identified as being critical to sales success: The ability of product reps to adjust their behavior to meet their customers' needs.

Think Small. This slogan launched the Volkswagen Beetle back when Americans drove tanks with fins and it might well be the slogan of small business today. Small businesses often look a bit insignificant next to the Hummers of the Fortune 500, but like the Beetle, small business actually has economics on its side: it's the bugs of the business world that are creating the most jobs. Faculty from Emory University and its Goizueta Business School explore the strengths and challenges of small business in the U.S.

Seth Godin blogs about whether business books work or are they an utter waste of time.

Editor's Note: the blog post itself is fine, but if the topic interests you will will find quite a number of related trackback posts to further your reading...

Today we live in a business culture that abuses the art and science of public speaking. We power up our PCs and present dull presentations to audiences who want to be inspired but never get fulfilled. Schwertly believes an effective presentation can change the world.

Incorporating corporate social responsibility into all strategic decisions is, arguably, one of the most difficult challenges a manager faces. Professor Tima Bansal discusses a research project that investigated how Canadian businesses manage that challenge.

Effectively fielding questions from the press can really help your organization boost its public image, while failing to cooperate can sometimes be disastrous. Before the journalists come calling, develop a strategy for how you will handle media inquires.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter was perhaps the most powerful thinker ever on innovation, entrepreneurship, and capitalism. He was also one of the most unusual personalities of the 20th century, as Harvard Business School professor emeritus Thomas K. McCraw shows in a new biography. Read our interview and book excerpt.

Marc Andreessen summarizes and provides a copy of a 2007 paper in the Financial Analysts Journal by Tom Arnold, John Earl, and David North:

"Headlines from featured stories in Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes were collected for a 20-year period to determine whether positive stories are associated with superior future performance and negative stories are associated with inferior future performance for the featured company. "Superior" and "inferior" were determined in comparison with an index or another company in the same industry and of the same size.

Statistical testing implied that positive stories generally indicate the end of superior performance and negative news generally indicates the end of poor performance."

By the time a company calls in its legal team, it's probably too late. The best corporations prepare an IP protection plan to keep their knowledge safe from the outset.

Some self-help groups save lives, and some just drift apart. What makes a personal network click?

Guy Kawasaki provides a list of tips to get the attention of a venture capitalist.

Less than a generation ago, the procurement function's leader was typically a director who reported to a vice president who reported to a member of the executive team. Today, supply management has a seat in the executive suite and sees its responsibility and accountability constantly increasing.

To explore the future of supply management, the Center for Advanced Procurement and Supply (CAPS) Research, the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) and A.T. Kearney first collaborated on research nearly a decade ago-1998's The Future of Purchasing and Supply: A Five- and Ten-Year Forecast.

To test and enhance our understanding of these changes and the effect they will have, A.T. Kearney has once again joined forces with CAPS Research and ISM to update and expand our research into future trends for supply management.

The FLIRT model views the Crowdsourcing / Collective Customer Collaboration phenomenon from the perspective of a company considering intensive collaboration with customer collectives and aims to identify the different actors on the field as well as their roles in the collective creation process. Furthermore, it suggests a set of elements (the FLIRT ring) that have to be considered and established in order to achieve desired action in the community.

Posting jobs on the Web is easy. It's sifting through hundreds of resumés that's a pain.

One of the most eminent authorities in the field of valuation is Tom Copeland, not least because of the fact that he is the co-author of the standard work in the field of valuation. Professor Copeland is the most appropriate person to ask which subjects are currently under discussion in the field of finance and financing. Are fundamental changes taking place or are the developments merely a temporary fad? The developments we are thinking about in this respect are value-based management, corporate governance, discussions about the basic valuation model, the modification of discounted cash flow model and the modification of the capital costs for smaller companies, as well as the separation of elements of financial risk and business risk in order to give them a separate valuation. Professor Tom Copeland is also the man who can best judge whether new valuation theories, such as the application of option theory on valuation and other financial decisions, will continue to be a subject that is confined to financial scientists or whether there is a possibility that they will break through to the everyday life of financial management. These are subjects that will be discussed with Professor Copeland.