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Across the Board interviews Richard Foster, co-author of the book, "Creative Destruction", who offers up some interesting analysis and advice for companies to stay at the top of their game.

Advocates of corporate social responsibility think their time has come, but there are still cynics on all sides. ATB looks at the rise of this phenomenon and the hurdles it still has to face.

Find a wide selection of interviews with business luminaries in our Interviews Section

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Charles Elson, director of the University of Delaware's Center for Corporate Governance, is much in demand these days. Here, he talks about pay for performance, why a lot of directors won't be returning next year, and how sniffing out fraud is like looking for ants.

In virtually every sphere, says Andrew Hacker, women and men are moving further apart.

Executive pay is often not linked to performance, says Lucian Bebchuk, who knows precisely what's needed to bring it into line.

Jack Coffee asks why auditors, attorneys, securities analysts, investment bankers, and government regulators have failed to keep corporations on the straight and narrow.

Few management thinkers can lay claim to having made a difference in the way managers think. C.K. Prahalad is one of them. In Competing for the Future, C.K. (as he is called by everyone) and his longtime collaborator Gary Hamel made such phrases as "strategic architecture" and, most particularly, "core competencies" common management parlance.

As Prahalad, 63, was instrumental in changing the way managers think about strategy, so in his latest book he bids to become an important factor in the way they think about developing markets. In The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Pearson), Prahalad resists the classic view of the poor as "wards of the state." Instead, he calls for "inclusive capitalism" that would include the billions of people who live on $2 a day.

This is a market? These are consumers? This is a growth opportunity? Yes, yes, and yes, Prahalad maintains. His latest book's first half presents his rationale and approach for dealing with the bottom of the pyramid; the latter half offers a dozen detailed case histories that document how to do it.

Prahalad is the Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan Business School in Ann Arbor. Besides teaching, he consults widely for multinational corporations on both strategy and the subject of his latest book. Across the Board editor A.J. Vogl interviewed Prahalad when he recently visited New York.

MBA programs, says Henry Mintzberg, are producing not managers but functionaries. That doesn't bode well for either business or society.

Bill George, like many critics, thinks that many of today's leaders have failed us. But he has gone beyond criticism to develop a way of thinking about leadership-and what it means to be a leader today-that may be in tune with our times and the generation of leaders to come.

Editor's Note: I'm not personally a big fan of the whole authentic leadership concept pushed most prominently by Bill George - for a lot of reasons. Still, many people are so if you're one of them or you just want to know more about him/it then read on...