Businesses with the best product-development track records stand apart from their less-successful peers in three crucial ways.

Listening to real time conversations for opportunities, leads, and reputation management is now a standard marketing item on the to-do list.

While there are services that provide this kind of tracking for a fee, there are a number of tools that any do-it-yourselfer can employ to capture much of what’s being said about their brands, people, products, and industries in real time.

Whether you have just been promoted to manager or are joining a new department, you need to be able to adapt smoothly to your new position. We have developed a list of proven tips and strategies to make it through the transition successfully.

Every small business leader faces the challenge of building and managing a team. Finding the right folks is half the battle. After you find them, it is your responsibility to manage the team. Great management happens on both a "micro" level and a "macro" level.

Ben Horowitz believes companies should strive to hire people with the right kind of ambition. Here he aims to clarify why you should care about senior managers having the right kind of ambition and give some tips on how to screen for them in an interview.

The few organizations that adeptly tap human potential and build the value of people equity focus on three critical factors: alignment,capabilities, and engagement. In such “ACE” organizations, the rewards in terms of retention, customer satisfaction, and financial success are well worth the investment.

Today’s business environment often demands complex, high-risk change efforts such as aggressive cost reduction, ambitious revenue enhancement, or bet-the-future turnaround programs. But the traditional project management office (PMO) is better suited to running departmental projects on time and on budget than to managing complex, interconnected, cross-enterprise efforts. What’s needed is an SIO—a strategic initiative office that focuses on organizational alignment and value delivery. The authors explore which circumstances merit an SIO and offer guiding principles for success.

As the Initial Public Offering (IPO) market gains momentum, more organizations are evaluating the option of becoming a publicly traded company, and the processes associated with an IPO. Going public certainly represents a significant event and major achievement for any company. With all of its rewards, however, an IPO can be complicated, time-consuming, and involve a high degree of risk. The process requires an extraordinary level of management knowledge, skill, and commitment.

This publication will assist you through the IPO process by providing practical, working knowledge of the IPO stages. Comprehensive in scope, it addresses both pre- and post-IPO considerations, so you remain well informed and prepared at every stage. Along with key information on the requirements and regulations of a successful offering, this publication also includes helpful tools, such as a timetable for going public, a sample due diligence checklist, and a discussion of the different securities exchange listing requirements.

Peter Drucker was the most renowned management thinker of the 20th century, but his greatest insights came not from his considerable knowledge, but from his ignorance. In this excerpt from his new book A Class with Drucker, William A. Cohen, a longtime protégé of Drucker, recounts how the “father of modern management” once illustrated to his students the value of ignorance.

High performance requires a keen understanding of not only a company’s appetite for risk but also its capacity to manage that risk effectively. Companies that walk that fine line between the two can better protect themselves and pursue new marketplace opportunities.

As long as an organization is enjoying healthy growth, management can do no wrong. But when tectonics shift and growth begins to stall, internal rifts can become apparent. People choose sides, challenge each other, question long-held assumptions, and begin to doubt strategies and tactics that used to be sacrosanct. Such internal discord can paralyze efforts to mount an effective recovery.

We have examined the data from two comprehensive nationwide studies, analyzed the histories of many stalled companies, and talked to executives at every level of organizations, both successful and not so successful. As a result, we’ve reached the conclusion that a lack of consensus is the number-one internal problem facing stalled-growth companies.

Most executives can readily agree: Organizational success hinges on effective execution, and effective execution is a matter of ability and agility. Can an organization quickly convert strategy into action, and can it deal effectively with discontinuous change in its competitive environment? This study finds that structural changes are half as effective as those focused on decision-making and information yet more often used.

In reviews of leadership writings and research, Bob Sutton kept bumping into an old and popular distinction that has always bugged him: leading versus managing. Rather than rejecting the distinction between leadership and management, he says that the best leaders do something that might properly be called a mix of leadership and management. At a minimum, they lead in a way that constantly takes into account the importance of management.

When organizational transformations succeed, managers typically pay attention to “people issues,” especially fostering collaboration among leaders and employees and building capabilities.

Much-needed guidance on making companies more employee-centered, adaptive, and capable.

Trust your gut instincts—but only when four tests have been met.

Recently, Bob Sutton posted a list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. Now he's following up by delving into each one of them. This post is about the third belief: "Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day."

Reputational intelligence requires:

* Understanding the clear distinctions between brand and reputation;
* An existing or developing positive corporate culture;
* Rigorous application of business tools such as research to track distinct aspects of your reputation; and
* Continuous commitment by the board and C-level executives to treat the company’s reputation as the high-value asset it is and manage it proactively.

Organization design can provide effective and practical resolution of many stubborn strategy and business-execution issues. If a redesign is to work, executives need to recognize that all three elements of design—structure, individual capabilities, and roles and collaboration—are essential. Indeed, there is a dynamic interplay among them. When structure, individual capabilities, and roles and collaboration are in alignment—and tightly linked with a company’s strategy and sources of competitive advantage—an organization is geared for performance.

One of the most lucrative assets companies own could be the data they possess. The challenge is turning it into relevant, usable information. Analytics can be a powerful tool in this effort. Accenture profiles a five-step model for putting analytics at the center of corporate decision making.

Leaders are increasingly finding themselves in situations where they need help from subordinates, and in which subordinates are asking for help in areas where leaders are not experts. To manage either situation effectively, a leader will have to develop a degree of humility and specific process skills. Readers will learn how to achieve those difficult goals in this article by the dean of organizational behavior.

Recently, Bob Sutton posted a list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. Now he's following up by delving into each one of them. This post is about the second belief: "My success — and that of my people — depends largely on my being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods."

Robert Sutton has come to conclude that all the technique and behavior coaching in the world won't make a boss great if that boss doesn't also have a certain mindset. His readings of peer-reviewed studies, plus his more idiosyncratic experience studying and consulting to managers in many settings, have led him to identify some key beliefs that are held by the best bosses — and rejected, or more often simply never even thought about, by the worst bosses. Here they are, presented as a neat dozen.

Conventional wisdom: startups don't have the time or dollars to invest in training. Training is only for big companies who can afford it, both cash- and time-wise. Ben Horowitz picks a fight with this conventional wisdom by describing why and how even startups should invest in training. No company operates so flawlessly that the right training at the right time doesn't make a huge, measurable difference.

Businesses collect mountains of data and spend vast sums storing and protecting them. Yet excess data carry a steep price tag for storage, maintenance, and protection, and incalculable potential costs in terms of liability. Similarly, most companies guard their intellectual property at great expense. Yet many efforts to safeguard intellection property are ineffectual or even counterproductive – depressing the value of that which they hope to protect.