The role of attitude and its importance in decision-making are becoming more apparent to the business leader/practitioner. He/she knows that the right attitude can provide tremendous financial gains, along with the catalyst for the development of a learning organization, and will result in the thinking, feelings, and actions of a positive business environment. However, the perceived power of measuring workplace attitude has not as yet been realized because it needs to be packaged in a measurable format that is acceptable to business practitioners. This article offers an approach.

How do companies learn to learn? Maurizio Zollo, Associate Professor of Strategy and Management at INSEAD, and Sidney G. Winter, Professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, investigate this topic in a working paper. The authors identify three consistent catalysts building and reshaping organizational routines: how an organisation builds experience, how it articulates knowledge and how it codes that knowledge into task-specific tools. The combination of the three mechanisms result in the development of expertise specific to the manipulation and improvement of routines, what scholars call "dynamic capabilities."

Despite best intentions and anti-discrimination programs, we still hire people just like us.

Companies are beginning to look beyond traditional metrics like price-earnings ratio to assess their effectiveness at generating growth through innovation. Determining a company's future-value premium provides a simple but effective way for management to diagnose and understand the complexities of market expectations, as well as the investment community's confidence in the company's long-term outlook.

Abstract: Although observers of human behavior have long been aware that people regularly struggle with internal conflict when deciding whether to behave responsibly or indulge in impulsivity, psychologists and economists did not begin to empirically investigate this type of want/should conflict until recently. In this paper, we review and synthesize the latest research on want/should conflict, focusing our attention on the findings from an empirical literature on the topic that has blossomed over the last 15 years. We then turn to a discussion of how individuals and policy makers can use what has been learned about want/should conflict to help decision makers select far-sighted options.

The quest for cool is never-ending. Accountants rev up their Harleys to the dismay of hard-core bikers. Soccer moms trade in minivans for hipper Land Rovers. Yellow rubber wristbands appear instantly, then just as quickly disappear. There is a fine line between cool and not-so-cool -- a topic explored in a new paper, Where Consumers Diverge from Others: Identity Signaling and Product Domains, by Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger and co-author Chip Heath from Stanford. The researchers look at how consumers use products to signal membership in social groups, but swiftly abandon those same products when the original message is diluted as other groups co-opt the trend.

To the beginner investor and most noninvestors, it seems as though the Federal Reserve System acts in a cloak-and-dagger manner. Eight times a year, the Federal Open Market Committee issues its determination for policy on the federal funds rate, and this tends to be the most covered and visible action that comes out of the Fed. But as recent events show, there is more that the Fed can and will do to impact the markets and our lives. This article covers five things every investor must know about the Fed and why. [Hat Tip to FinanceProfessor.com]

A well designed pay program must attract and retain high caliber executives. Meeting this challenge has become more intense and complex since stock options began to fall out of favor. These authors, specialists in executive compensation, put forward alternative programs that can complement, or possibly replace, options. If adopted, they can force organizations and their boards to understand different measures of performance.

Most of us who manage people have had difficult subordinates. Often the greater their ability, the more irritating or disruptive they may be to the work of your organization. But you can't succeed without them, so how can you influence their behavior? Drawn from the book Influence Without Authority, this article examines the factors that affect your ability to influence subordinates, some practical approaches to consider using in your work situations and reviews two case examples that put these concepts to work.

"I've never been Commander in Chief, but I've been a CEO. I understand a few things about leadership at the top. I've figured out nine points-not ten. I call them the 'Nine Cs of Leadership'" - says an excerpt from former Chrysler Chairman and CEO Lee Iacocca's Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is one of the most widespread asset pricing models in the financial world, but did you know that its results are not so reliable? According to Professor Pablo Fernández and researcher José Maria Carabias, both of IESE, it is possible to obtain an "à la carte" Beta coefficient. Should we thus blindly entrust the results of our investments to this method? The article "El peligro de utilizar Betas calculadas" ("The Danger of Using Estimated Beta Coefficients") calls into question the all-powerful CAPM, or at least the systematic nature by which many apply it.

Leaders face unprecedented challenges when embarking on large-scale transformation, whether it's entering new markets or recovering from industry turmoil. Here are 10 tried-and-true tactics and common sense practices from authors with decades of experience helping companies implement organizational change.

If you've ever toyed with the idea of going back to school to get your MBA, BNET's newest blog -- Back to B-School -- is for you. You'll learn how to get into business school and what to expect once you get there, but it's more than just academics. It's also about creating the right balance between work, home and school. It's about getting your MBA without losing your job or sanity.

Why do some shopping malls, retail stores, popular magazines, and even Internet portals seem to purposefully make it hard for consumers to find what they want? HBS professor Andrei Hagiu and Bruno Jullien challenge the conventional wisdom that intermediaries create value by reducing search and transaction costs. Their paper sheds light on the economic motivations that in some contexts may lead intermediaries to make it harder for consumers and third-party sellers to find each other.

If you're in the middle of a homepage design review, here's a handy checklist of eight improvements worth testing based on MarketingSherpa research and Case Studies.

For improving performance and gaining competitive advantage, offshoring and the latest advances in technology seem to grab all the headlines. Yet building a sustainable advantage requires much more. Employees whose jobs can't be automated-any company's high-value decision makers-hold the key to boosting productivity, so making them more effective can create an edge that competitors won't replicate easily.

Wharton marketing professor Leonard Lodish admits he is somewhat to blame for the erosion in brand pricing power that has hit many consumer-goods companies -- but not entirely to blame. In 1993, as store-level scanning data started to become widely available, Lodish coauthored an article outlining its power to gauge the effect of price promotions on revenue. But he also warned that these tools were not the only determinant of brand power. In a new paper, Lodish and co-author Carl F. Mela show how widespread adoption of easy-to-harness, short-term measures has altered consumer behavior and made it harder for brand managers to compete.

The opportunity to help others improve their performance arises frequently for individuals at all organizational levels. When these situations call for confronting poor performance, however, those in the position to give potential feedback often lack a clear, concise, and professional way to communicate. This challenge confronts virtually everyone-CEO's and independent contributors alike.

In the global competition for talent, some companies may view the endgame as a matter of adding the right individuals. But the key to winning on talent is multiplication, not addition. Companies that build this critical capability will generate superior effort, creativity and results from their workforces.

While there is an innovator's dilemma, there is also an innovator's purpose. Less well known, an innovator's purpose drives innovators to see beyond current convention, counters the natural risk aversion that large companies have to innovation, and mobilizes employees to accomplish their goal. As this author writes, purpose-driven innovation is the only way to change the rules of the game for lasting advantage.

SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is a popular framework for developing a marketing strategy. Although SWOT is promoted as a useful technique in numerous marketing texts, it is not universally praised: One expert said that he preferred to think of SWOT as a "Significant Waste of Time."

The problem with SWOT is more serious than just wasting time. Because it mixes idea generation with evaluation, it is likely to reduce the range of strategies that are considered. In addition, people who use SWOT might conclude that they have done an adequate job of planning and ignore such sensible things as defining the firm's objectives or calculating ROI for alternate strategies.

One of the most critical things a startup founder must do is develop a top-notch executive team. This is a topic that could fill a whole book, but in this post, Marc Andreessen provides specific guidelines on how to hire, manage, promote, and fire executives in a startup based on his personal observations and experiences.

Editor's Note: another great post from Andreessen...

Usually, when an IT project fails, management is the last to know. But eventually, like a fish left too long in the refrigerator, the failure becomes all too obvious. When the situation reaches that point, your only option is the IT equivalent of pulling everything out of the refrigerator and scrubbing it out with baking soda.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Conventional wisdom to the contrary, project management is getting better. More projects are succeeding, fewer projects are failing outright, and projects are returning more of the IT dollar invested.

Still, only about one-third of all projects are complete successes. Often, the difference between success and failure is spotting the critical early warning signs that a project is in trouble. Here's a quick look at some of the earliest symptoms that all is not right with your "fish"-and what you can do about it before you have to break out the baking soda.

When an idea takes off, its success, in hindsight, seems obvious. Why didn't you think of salsa chips shaped like little scoops? Yet, too many attempts at innovation fail. Often, the problem is a backward-looking process. Companies invest too much in marginal improvements and too little for products consumers have never dreamed of. The authors present a rigorous, four-step approach that focuses on distilling a company's institutionalized knowledge of consumer insight and bringing together focused teams to implement it.

This ChangeThis manifesto brings our attention to the 'Seven Sins of Solutions', the traditional ways of thinking that prevent us from divining the most accurate-and elegant-of solutions to any problem solving situation.