William C. Taylor, Alan Webber

Two questions demand the attention of leaders. The first is familiar: What keeps you up at night? What are the problems that nag at you? The second is less familiar, but even more important: What gets you up in the morning? What keeps you and your people more committed than ever, more engaged than ever, more excited than ever, particularly as the environment around you … [ Read more ]

Three Rules for These Times

Shouldn’t business and business schools be looking at their practices and precepts with the same critical eye as the economics profession? Three questions, culled from Alan Webber’s book, Rules of Thumb, can help propel the thinking on these issues in the right direction.

Will Companies Ever Learn?

Judy Rosenblum has dealt with all of the obstacles that keep companies from getting smarter. Here is her 10-point curriculum for getting smart about learning.

How to Get Them to Show You the Money

Leigh Steinberg, the most powerful agent in sports, tells free agents in the business world how to negotiate great deals – and how to deal with their fear of negotiation.

Are You a Star at Work?

In other fields, there’s very little doubt over what it takes to be a star. But do you know what it takes to be one at work? Robert E. Kelley has the answer.

How You Can Help Them

Marketing expert Don Peppers asks — and four cutting-edge organizations answer — the four most important questions to help you deliver great service to your customers.

Trust in the Future

When it comes to brand management, Kevin Roberts says that only two things are wrong: brands and management. Today, says Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi PLC, brands are history. Looking forward, companies need to establish their products and services first as “trustmarks” and then, upping the ante even higher, as “lovemarks.”

What Great Brands Do

Scott Bedbury knows brands. The man who gave the world ‘Just Do It’ and Frappuccino shares his eight-point program to turn anything — from sneakers to coffee to You — into a great brand.

Why Can’t We Get Anything Done?

Stanford B-school professor Jeffrey Pfeffer has a question: If we’re so smart, why can’t we get anything done? Here are 16 rules to help you make things happen in your organization.

Danger:Toxic Company

The problem isn’t that loyalty is dead or that careers are history. The real problem, argues Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer, is that so many companies are toxic — and that they get exactly what they deserve.

New Math for a New Economy

What’s wrong with the 500-year-old way in which all companies keep their books? Just about everything, says Baruch Lev, who has proposed a new method for determining the value of the intangible assets that are at the heart of the new economy.

Learning for a Change

10 yrs ago, Peter Senge introduced the idea of the “learning organization.” In this interview he updates that idea focusing on obstacles to change and discusses the current “company as a machine” mentality and the more realistic “companies as living organisms” model. Other topics discussed include: initiate change by starting small; change through personal growth; definition of leadership; self-reinforcing factors and 10 “challenges … [ Read more ]