An interactive diagnostic test can show you how focused your company’s activities are — with sometimes surprising results.

Business strategy is at an evolutionary crossroads. It’s time to resolve the long-standing tension between the inherent identity of your organization and the fleeting nature of your competitive advantage.

To change an organization from within, it helps to understand four basic circulatory systems, analogous to the channels of communication in a living body.

Art Kleiner, author of The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management, uncovers an effective and ongoing way to create employee alignment and accountability in Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions, by Gary B. Cohen.

In recovering from a crisis, ethical business practice and high performance aren’t opposed.

Scenarios are imaginative pictures of potential futures, but the future they picture is just a means to an end. These conversations, at once free-flowing and rigorously constrained, are designed to help a group of people trick themselves to see past their own blind spots. Confronting the future with rigor tends to leave most people energized and enthusiastic about facing their future--even if the future looks grim. The steps, methods, and "scenario lingo" are easy to learn and use (sometimes deceptively so); they're practically jargon-free, especially by the standards of usual management practice.

According to this influential long-wave theorist, the world is due for a technological and economic boom that truly lifts all boats. When? That's up to us.

Once, companies thought it would be hard to build partnerships with environmental groups. In fact, that proved to be easy: DuPont and McDonald's have maintained close working relationships with the Environmental Defense Fund (now called Environmental Defense) for almost 20 years. The truly hard part turns out to be forging and maintaining relationships with other companies, especially competitors. In fact, there is a direct clash between the collaboration needed for genuine environmental impact and the control over information that is needed to maintain a competitive advantage. The Materials Pooling Project's slow start is a result of these warring imperatives, and thus has something to teach any executive who wonders why his or her company's environmental initiatives - or, indeed, any supply chain initiative - are failing to gain traction.

The Toyota Production System has revolutionized industry. James Womack and Daniel Jones believe it can transform the world.

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has found a way to enrich the poor.

NYU Professor Baruch Lev finds vast value in intangible assets.

Diverse workplaces require emotional maturity, and that means confronting "rankism."

There's more to wealth creation than financial value. Think what rainmaking, reputation, and relationships can do for you and your company.

Heralded as the corporation's savior, BPR was later condemned as a heartless, failed management fad. But perhaps evangelists like Michael Hammer needed to go even farther.

As the pace of change in business accelerates, the legacy of Pierre Wack, the father of scenario planning, is more relevant than ever.

Ahead of the customer stand at least seven other people you'd better satisfy-or else.

Editor's Note: a look at the author's Core Group Theory of Power.

Dr. Trompenaars, a 48-year-old Amsterdam-based consultant of French and Dutch descent, and Dr. Hampden-Turner, a 65-year-old British writer with a long history of social science research in America, are the two most prominent figures focusing on cultural diversity in business today. Their "dilemma theory," as they call it, argues that we can never grow to become great business leaders until we actively strive to embrace the behaviors and attitudes that feel most uncomfortable to us. The most effective management practices, they say, are those that gently force engineers, managers, and employees to embrace the unthinkable.

It's likely your org chart doesn't tell you where the real power lies in your company. A small number of people make the big decisions. Are you in with the in crowd?

"I have come to think that there are basically three universal factors that influence corporate culture. I have never seen an organization operate without them, but their characteristics vary dramatically from place to place. If you understand all three in a particular organization, you truly understand how to reinforce what the organization is doing right, or change its direction."

Editor's Note: you may want to skip over the Enron talk on page one and go straight to the good stuff on pages 2-4.

A small Ozarks manufacturer has a message for big companies: Open-book management can increase productivity and release entrepreneurial spirit.

If you're a senior executive or a strategic planner, then articulating a noble purpose may seem like a powerful way to energize the people in your organization to break away from your pack of competitors. And it may seem like a way to attract a more committed, more passionate, and more capable group of employees-people, like teachers, actors, artists, and nurses, who dedicate themselves to lifelong goals. Even conventional businesspeople, in a full-steam-ahead economy, are drawn to companies that promise them the opportunity to do something meaningful. But nobility is not something to tackle lightly. For mainstream companies and start-ups alike, it is a difficult path-and once entered publicly, it cannot be easily abandoned.

The management scholar put 1,435 good companies through a rigorous performance analysis and discovered only 11 became great. Here's why.

Companies can analyze, engineer, and elevate their own human networks, says the pioneering social scientist.

Editor's Note: This article discusses the concept of network analysis, a useful but as-yet underutilized management tool (one that doesn't even appear on Bain's management tools survey).

This article examines the feud between two management gurus - Bob Kaplan and Tom Johnson. Together, the two developed and introduced the world to Activity Based Accounting and later the Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan). While Kaplan still is preaching these concepts, Johnson has gone on to argue that the troubles that mainstream companies get into are due to the misuse of measurement. Thus, their quarrel, which has lasted more than 10 years, is at heart a fundamental disagreement about the source of business success. Does it accrue to those who drive their businesses with numerical targets and performance measures, as Professor Kaplan asserts? Or to those who believe, as Professor Johnson argues, that management through measurement is fundamentally dangerous?

The sum of operational, executive, and engineering cultures is greater than the corporate whole.

Editor's Note: offers an interesting summary look at the theories of MIT OD professor Edgar Schein (three cultures) and sociologist Neil Fligstein (evolving historical corporate cultures that match the external environment)