Thousands of companies have jumped on the engagement bandwagon over the past decade. he core idea makes sense; that is, employees who enjoy their work and care about the company will be easier to retain, sell more products, work harder and even contribute more innovations to drive success.

In a competitive marketplace, there’s no shortage of CEOs who tout the quality of their workforce as a differentiating edge. A solid engagement initiative, rooted in regular measurement, corresponding training and actions, and strong communication with workers, puts some teeth behind those words, and can reinforce the image of a caring management among the folks who make it tick.

The topic resonates deeply with many CEOs. That gut-level faith is probably justified. Then again, no one really knows for sure if the money, time and effort being devoted to engagement really generate the kinds of returns CEOs envision.

A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.

Here, Edge reprints a New York Times op-ed piece about the 9/11 Commission written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb along with more of his thoughts on related topics.

Editor's Note: the op-ed piece is quite interesting but may strike some as not entirely relevant to the business world; if you feel that way, I recommend you do continue reading the discussion material which follows it as it will become more relevant...

The most widely used (and taught) protocols for strategic analysis – SWOT and Porter’s (1980) Five Force Framework for industry analysis – have been found wanting as stimuli to strategy creation or even as a basis for further strategy development. We approach this problem from a neurocognitive perspective. We find profound incompatibilities between the mental image representations evoked by these strategic analysis frameworks and the neural processes going on within the brain that comprise “thinking.” The analytical structure (or “propositional representation”) of these tool results in a mental dead end, the phenomenon known in psychology as “functional fixedness.” The difficulty lies with the inability of the brain to make out meaningful (i.e., strategy provoking) stimuli from the mental images (or “depictive representations”) generated by strategic analysis results. We propose decreasing dependence on these tools and further research employing brain-imaging technology to explore strategy protocols with richer mental representation potential for strategy creation. [Courtesy of Rob Millard]

Companies must govern IT as they govern their businesses: with different rules and metrics for different parts of the organization.

A successful deal may hinge on the ability to create trust — or uncover deception.

A single unexpected burst in traffic can overwhelm a website that isn't prepared. The only way to be prepared for a sudden traffic burst is to have an immense amount of server capacity and bandwidth on tap. Now a new breed of Web hosts has emerged. They offer more capacity when needed and use so-called grid hosting, a network of formerly standalone servers that work as a team.

It takes years for your company's best people to acquire their expertise -- but only seconds for them to leave. And when they go, they take their deep smarts -- or intuition -- with them. Here's how to make sure you keep wisdom in-house.

Enterprise software selection is a risky undertaking. Even after you've determined your requirements, the crucial software assessment and negotiation phases are potential minefields. Find out how you can reduce the risk involved in choosing a solution that meets your needs.

Enterprise software selection is a risky undertaking for any organization. Find out how you can reduce the risk with a best-practice approach to assessment, evaluation, and selection—and learn how to reduce the time and cost involved in choosing the right solution.

Maybe management theory is not hocus pocus after all.

Sophisticated VCs are used to having angel investors as early investors in your company. Your life will be made easier if you treat the angel investment as a real investment and document it legally as such.

In business, getting the active cooperation of two or more people you have no direct control over can be a daunting task. But, this is a common situation in cross-functional teams. People who fail to communicate informally with their colleagues and only address business issues behind the doors of formal meetings, may find it more difficult to obtain colleagues’ cooperation, as well as that of the other team members. In this working paper, Professor Gargiulo, INSEAD Professor of Organisational Behaviour, looks at the positive effect of informal ties between team leaders on their ability to get different team members to work together.

Accounting techniques like budgeting, sales projections and financial reporting are supposed to help prevent business failures by giving managers realistic plans to guide their actions and feedback on their progress. At least that's the theory. But when Gavin Cassar, a Wharton accounting professor, tested this idea, he found something troubling: Some accounting tools not only fail to help businesspeople, but may actually lead them astray. He analyzes these conclusions in two separate research papers.

Until recently, practically everything "free" was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You'd get one thing free if you bought another, or you'd get a product free only if you paid for a service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies - the shifting of costs from one product to another - but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast.

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy.

Here are seven tips on how to launch a successful Internet outfit without leaving your desk.

When it comes to analyzing and predicting the market penetration of new products, the Bass model has long been considered the standard benchmark. New research by Ashish Sood, an assistant professor of marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, and coauthors addresses a fundamental concern of managers everywhere: how fast consumers will adopt the new products that companies introduce. In their paper, "Functional Regression: A New Model for Predicting Market Penetration of New Products," which will soon be published in Marketing Science, the researchers show how their model integrates information about different countries, different markets and different products to predict several things, including the future penetration of a product or the years to take off.

Incremental innovations (small, safe changes to your firm's offerings) make up 85%-90% of companies' development portfolios. But "little i" projects rarely produce competitive advantage. For that, you need "Big I" innovations--offerings new to your organization or the world. Yes, they're risky. But avoid them, and you may strangle your company's growth.

Professor George S. Day recommends a solution: Increase the proportion of major innovations in your portfolio while carefully managing their risks. Two tools can help:

A risk matrix enables you to estimate each project's probability of success or failure based on how big a stretch it is for your firm. The less familiar the intended market and the product or technology, the higher the risk.

The R-W-W ("real," "win," "worth it") screen helps you evaluate projects' feasibility.

Verbal, visual, or cognitive cues can have very opposite effects when used on different groups of potential customers, say researchers Christian Wheeler and Jonah Berger.

This article provides an email service provider (ESP) checklist, a handy-dandy guide that you can use whether you're venturing into email for the first time or shopping around for a new provider.

The decisions new CEOs make during their first few months on the job have a decisive impact on whether they ultimately succeed or fail. The transition period is a time of opportunity, but also great vulnerability, especially when new leaders are expected to change their organizations in fundamental ways.

Based on research and experience working with senior executives in transition, the following eight fundamental principles can create momentum that will carry a new CEO through—and beyond—the transition period.

Today, the pressure is on to deliver on the demands of customers and investors—and to do it right now. More than ever, every business executive needs to be thinking carefully about how markets develop and how to sustain them, what customers and markets value, how to best serve these markets, and how to reallocate resources to succeed. As a company’s business model shifts to meet changing market requirements, its business strategy and IT infrastructure must be ready to shift as well.

Training prepares Managers to delegate, motivate, influence, coach, communicate, recognize and strategize. Often it does not prepare a Manager for the difficult employee who is resistant to most motivating, influencing, coaching, and recognition techniques. Here are a few examples of how to handle some difficult types.

When companies look for a manager, they should look for experience, right?

Well, maybe not. INSEAD professors Kishore Sengupta and Luk Van Wassenhove say their research has revealed what they call the ‘experience trap.’

“Conventional wisdom holds that as we do more things more often, we learn from experience and get better and better, and what we found in our research was that actually some of it may not be the case,” Sengupta says.

Failing to manage your company's talent needs, says Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli, "is the equivalent of failing to manage your supply chain." And yet the majority of employers have abysmal track records when it comes to the age-old problem of finding and retaining talent. In a book coming out in April titled, Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty, Cappelli offers a fundamentally different paradigm -- one that takes many of its lessons from just-in-time manufacturing -- for thinking about talent management.