To stimulate growth in today's marketing environment, companies must identify and prioritize opportunities at points where proliferating segments, channels, and product categories intersect.

Corporate alliances account for nearly 33% of many companies' revenue and value. Yet these alliances' failure rate hovers at 60%-70%. To bolster success rates, companies need to apply five counterintuitive practices.

A 114-point checklist of actions you can take to immediately increase the link popularity of your Web site.

An introduction and elevator pitch are critical to getting a meeting. You should also provide a "ten-slide" deck that tells a compelling story about your team, product, traction, and plans.

You probably lend your customers more money than you realize. Have you checked lately?

Michael Regester talks about managing situations that may turn into crises and handling crises once they occur.

Beware conventional wisdom about how to boost your innovation capacity. Another firm's best innovation practice could become your worst nightmare. Think of innovation as a value chain comprising three phases: idea generation, conversion, and diffusion. Then tailor your practices to your company's needs.

HBS Professor Andrew McAfee blogs about social networking software (SNS) like Facebook and its direct applicability within companies. Notably, he discusses the work of Mark Granovetter, a sociologist who wrote "The Strength of Weak Ties" (SWT) in 1973, a seminal article which argues that weak ties might actually be the more important ones for innovation and knowledge sharing.

The digital interactive transformation in marketing is not unfolding, as many thought it would, on the model of direct marketing. That model anticipated that digital media using rich profiling data would intrude marketing messaging more deeply and more precisely into consumer lives than broadcast media had been able to do. But the technology that threatened intrusion is delivering seclusion. The transformation is unfolding on a model of consumer collaboration, in which consumers use digital media that lie beyond the control of marketers to communicate among one another, responding to marketing's intrusions by disseminating counterargument, information sharing, rebuttal, parody, reproach and, though more rarely, fandom. Globally the media of collaboration range from consumer review sites like Epinions and Trip Advisor, to collaborative networking sites like Bebo, Facebook, Orkut and Meetup, to trading sites like Craigslist and EBay, and user-generated content sites like YouTube, Cyworld, and blogs. This paper reviews five emerging paradigms governing marketing in the environment of these new media. It concludes that while meaning-making remains the central purpose of marketing communication, the shift from broadcasting to interaction within digital communities is moving the locus of control over meanings from marketer to consumer and rewarding more participatory, more sincere, and less directive marketing styles.

Editor's Note: very interesting paper and quite readable, not full of academic jargon...

Multinational corporate leaders managing in the fragmented marketplace must be knowledgeable about the world's various political systems to nimbly adapt their companies to the preferences of governments, regulators, and global policymakers where they operate. The field of international relations offers five views of the structure of the global political environment: New Realism, Hegemony, Institutionalism, Liberalism, and Postmodern Anarchy. Each is accurate in its own way, each suggests a different strategic approach to international expansion, and each fits best with a different set of companies.

Entrepreneurs love to grumble about the roadblocks and delays created by bureaucrats. Government officials, they say, are slow, bumbling and concerned only about sticking to the rules and clocking out at 4:55 p.m. But in a study of global entrepreneurship, Raffi Amit and Mauro Guillen, both Wharton management professors, have found that a simple, if smart, bureaucratic initiative mattered critically in determining a country's level of entrepreneurship.

Businessmen grouse about them, but the best ones have financial skills that corporations badly need.

Editor's Note: this is an interesting read even though (or perhaps because?) it was written in 1985...

The sweet notion that making a company environmentally friendly can be not just cost-effective but profitable is going up in smoke. Meet the man wielding the torch.

Recognition of the strategic importance of Project Management (PM) in the corporate world is rapidly accelerating. One reason for this acceleration may be strong belief by business leaders that aligning project management with business strategy can significantly enhance the achievement of organizational goals, strategies, and performance. This paper addresses three aspects of an under-researched topic in the strategic management literature, aligning project management with business strategy. [BNET Annotation]

Think sales managers are the only ones who worry about forecasting? A simulation tool helps students grasp the complexity of managing sales organizations.

A SlideShare presentation covering a wide variety of pricing issues.

Your rankings don't just depend on how good your site is. They depend on the quality of your competitors' sites as well. As a result, keeping an eye on your competition should be a regular part of every webmaster's tactical plan. Use these 25 tools to get the lowdown on their sites.

The days, weeks, or months between taking the job and assuming power are precious. Put them to good use.

Our whole lives are motivated by an internal sense of worth, measured by "rewards" - both internal and external. We're each addicted to our own reward system. It stains every action we take. The same applies to the buying process, and to your website.

How does a leader get the troops- soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen-to commit themselves to a mission? Aristotle offers a mix of empirical and normative observations in the Rhetoric that apply wonderfully.

ABSTRACT: Post-M&A organizational cultural change is a traumatic experience for organizational members. It generates resistance and contributes to M&A failure. Nevertheless, the literature on managing post-M&A cultural change is scarce and largely focused on overcoming the debilitating impact of inter-organizational cultural differences on communication. We argue that focus on cultural differences is important but not sufficient for a successful management strategy. Other factors, such as how company members perceive the outcomes of cultural changes, should be taken into account. We explore how acquired companies' members justify their attitudes towards post-acquisition cultural changes. Following our findings, we provide recommendations for the guidance of cultural change in acquired companies by the acquirers' managers. We develop our arguments by building a conceptual framework using the existing literature. The framework is subsequently examined and developed further through three interview-based case studies, one of which we present in detail.

What is the point of research carried out in business schools?

Dick Costolo offers advice on who to hire early in the life of your company.

It is perhaps the core question in the ongoing debate over corporate governance: Does the corporation exist for the benefit of shareholders, or does it have other, equally important stakeholders, such as employees, customers and suppliers? A new study by Wharton finance professor Franklin Allen and two colleagues does not claim to provide a definitive answer, but it does show the various benefits of the stakeholder approach. It also demonstrates that the issue is not as settled as some researchers and business people in the United States, United Kingdom and other shareholder-oriented nations might think.

Like many great inventions, management practices have a shelf life. In his new book, renowned management guru Gary Hamel explains how to jettison the weak ones and embrace the ones that work.