This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. Companies have focused so much on downsizing to contain costs that they've largely neglected a looming threat to their competitiveness: a severe shortage of talented workers. The general population is aging and with it, the labor pool. People are living longer, hea...

Health care in the United States--and in most other developed countries--is ailing. Medical treatment has made astonishing advances, but the packaging and delivery of health care are often inefficient, ineffective, and user unfriendly. Problems ranging from costs to medical errors beg for ingenious solutions--and, indeed, there have been enormous investments in innovation. But too many efforts fail. To find out why, it's necessary to break down t...

This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. Of all the risks of doing business in China, the greatest is the threat posed by environmental degradation. And yet it's barely discussed in corporate boardrooms. This is a serious mistake. Multinationals may be more concerned with intellectual property rights viol...

Day-to-day management is challenging enough for CEOs. How do they manage for the long term as well? We posed that question to four top executives of global companies. According to Maurice Levy, chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe, building the future is really about building the present and keeping close to the front line--those who deal with your customers and markets. He also attributes his company's success in large part to knowing when to tak...

For the foreseeable future, governments will take a keen interest in how executives manage. In the U.S., industries and sectors representing more than a third of the nation's economy - including financial services, automobiles, health care, and telecom - are being reshaped. But don't expect a return of old-style regulation, which would stifle innovation. Government will coax businesses rather than curb them by offering incentives for desirable co...

Codes of conduct have long been a feature of corporate life. Today, they are arguably a legal necessity--at least for public companies with a presence in the United States. But the issue goes beyond U.S. legal and regulatory requirements. Sparked by corruption and excess of various types, dozens of industry, government, investor, and multisector groups worldwide have proposed codes and guidelines to govern corporate behavior. These initiatives re...

Persistent demand from people who have been denied the blessings of parenthood has created an assisted-reproduction market that stretches around the globe and encompasses hundreds of thousands of people. In the United States alone, nearly 41,000 children were born via in vitro fertilization (IVF) in 2001. Roughly 6,000 came from donated eggs, and almost 600 were carried by surrogate mothers. U.S. legislators have been reluctant to regulate this m...

This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. Companies have focused so much on downsizing to contain costs that they've largely neglected a looming threat to their competitiveness: a severe shortage of talented workers. The general population is aging and with it, the labor pool. People are living longer, hea...

The growing market in credits for greenhouse gas emission put into effect by the Kyoto Protocol will have an increasingly dramatic impact on firms' income statements as well as their balance sheets.

There's no question that most American industries have become more concentrated. Economists are trying to understand whether this is necessarily a bad thing for competition. The short answer: It's complicated. Innovation superstars like Google have created winner-take-most markets largely by exploiting network effects, not through predatory behavior. However, research from the wider economy (including the tech sector) uncovers classic signs of un...