We tend to assume that great leaders must make difficult choices between two or more conflicting outcomes. In an interview study with 26 CEOs of top American and European companies (incl. IKEA, Campbell Soups, Nokia, Hamp;M), we find that instead of choosing between conflicting outcomes such as...

Current literature argues that firms should have strong ties to customers to benefit from increased customer retention and loyalty. Strong ties, however, have also been shown to prevent innovation, suggesting that firms should also develop weak ties to other customer groups. This paper focuses...

Research has improved our understanding of the managerial challenges inherent in exploratory intermediation. For instance knowledge brokers help to solve well-defined problems based on existing competences. But what if the relevant actor networks are not known, if there is no clear common...

The complexity of public-private partnership (PPP) projects ensures that risks could emerge and spread in unpredictable ways if they are not well identified and managed. The emergence of PPP projects has brought major changes in the construction industry, the most notable being in procurement...

Over the past years, forward-looking CEOs have adopted a higher-ambition approach to strategy and leadership. These “higher-ambition CEOs” are driven by a sense of purpose that goes beyond achieving financial success. They aspire to build organizations that succeed in the marketplace by...

Organizations underperform and sometimes fail because their leaders are unable to learn the unvarnished truth from relevant stakeholders about how the design and behavior of the organization is misaligned with its goals and strategy. The Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) was designed to enable...

The complexity of public-private partnership (PPP) projects ensures that risks could emerge and spread in unpredictable ways if they are not well identified and managed. The emergence of PPP projects has brought major changes in the construction industry, the most notable being in procurement...

In 2012 U.S. corporations spent $164.2 billion on training and education. Overwhelming evidence and experience shows, however, that most companies are unable to transfer employee learning into changes in individual and organization behavior or improved financial performance. Put simply,...