IESE Insight. Issue 1. Second quarter 2009

The launch edition of the IESE Insight review offers four visions to help managers deal with situations of uncertainty in business. Santiago Álvarez de Mon (IESE) explores the keys to embracing uncertainty, helping managers to increase their ethical capital. Rita McGrath (Columbia) presents a portfolio of opportunities that managers can employ to create conditions for internally generated growth. George Westerman (MIT) and Richard Hunter (Gartner Inc.) articulate a common language for building capabilities that increase the returns from IT risk management investments. And Manel Baucells (IESE) and Martin Weber (University of Mannheim) explain how psychological biases manifest themselves in decision making, so that you can keep them in check and make better decisions in situations of uncertainty. The magazine also includes six practical ideas from Gabriel Bitran (MIT), Juan Carlos Ferrer (Pontificia Universidad Católica) and Paulo Rocha e Oliveira (IESE) to improve the service encounter, which will greatly impact customer satisfaction and ultimately profitability; and an article in which Julia Prats and Remei Agulles (IESE) debunk the notion of the entrepreneur as a natural-born genius and instead propose a proper framework for classifying entrepreneurial competencies, which they say can be learned and developed through specific techniques and habits. A real-life case study on Boca Juniors will get readers thinking about how to turn around a flagging soccer club and see that it stays on the ball in sporting, marketing and economic terms. And Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys Technologies in India, discusses innovation, offshoring and social responsibility.