For five years, as I researched how certain companies provide consistently great service, I heard the same refrain: 'Our people are our most important asset.' Trouble was, I heard that just as often from companies with terrible service. Len Schlesinger
At the heart of any hiring process are interviews with and evaluations of job applicants. Here Gallup provides another twist: the company does no face-to-face interviews. Fast Company
If the idea of life themes and telephone job interviewing still seems a bit strange, or if you're looking for more evidence that this is a tool that delivers, consider the experience of the surgical group of the Stryker Corporation. Fast Company
Don't think of Barbara Kux as one of the rising stars in European business - although, at 39, and a high-ranking line manager at Nestle, she certainly is that. Think of her instead as a resilient field commander in the management revolution sweepi William Taylor
Imagine a 73-minute-long stand-up comedy shtick on the subject of diversity, delivered by Truman Capote on speed, and you've got Morris Massey's 'Flashpoint.' Laura Winig
Who's that man walking through the street markets of Ecuador, trying to make $50 loans? It's Michael Chu, a former executive of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., the world's most powerful leveraged buyout operator. Fast Company
He built the world's first biodegradable factory. Now, armed with laptops and attitude, Gunter Pauli and his green team plan to outmaneuver Procter & Gamble and the detergent giants. Fast Company
It's one of those 'interesting-in-theory-but-impossible-in-practice' aspects of globalization: If you do business in 50 countries, whose ethical standards do you follow? Richard Rapaport
TED likes to think of itself as an Idea Summit, a gathering that one reporter/participant calls 'smart, overstimulated, and uncoordinated; the nutty professor in its own world of ideas.' Nina J. Easton
Harvard business school professor Michael E. Porter has made his career studying competitive advantage - how to create it, how to sustain it - starting with individual companies, then vaulting to entire nations. Fast Company
In the old economy, the organizing principle was specialization. Discrete departments. Separate functions. Independent projects. In the New Economy, it's hybridization. Inter-departmental meetings. Cross-functional teams. Integrated systems. Fast Company
For the most important management book for the 1990s, try fiction from the 1940s: Hermann Hesse's Nobel Prize-winning novel, The Glass Bead Game. Paul Saffo
Last summer's convulsions over money and political reform in Japan tore apart the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and brought down the government. Ronald Brownstein
