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Issue 74, Spring 2014

Cover story

In this issue

America’s Real Manufacturing Advantage, Align with Your Star Employees, Rita Gunther McGrath on the End of Competitive Advantage, and More
  • Operations & Manufacturing

    America’s Real Manufacturing Advantage

    by Helmuth Ludwig and Eric Spiegel
    A new wave of software innovation is about to transform industry — and give the United States the chance for a lasting edge.
  • America’s Manufacturing Advantage—In Pictures

    A slideshow view of the rebounding industrial sector in the United States.
  • Organizations & People

    Align with Your Star Employees

    by Susan Cramm
    When you connect the development of your top talent with the needs of your organization, everyone wins—and your best people stay. To assess how well you’re retaining your top talent, take our interactive quiz.
  • Are You Doing Enough to Retain Your Top Talent?

    Leaders who excel at retaining star employees help their most valuable contributors understand their capabilities and career goals, and improve their performance. Are you that kind of leader? Take our quiz to find out.
  • Organizations & People

    How to Break the Cycle of CIO Turnover

    by Richard Bhanap, Nicolai Bieber, and Martin Roets
    Companies benefit from strong IT leaders. The trick is developing and retaining them.

Leading Ideas

Essays

Books in Brief

  • Working Together Apart

    by Jon Gertner
    Scott Berkun’s chronicle of his stint as a team leader at WordPress.com offers insights for companies with distributed structures.
  • The Big Promise of Open Data

    by Nancy Scola
    Nancy Scola reviews Joel Gurin’s Open Data Now, the first book to detail the rich business opportunities in open data and the challenges in capturing them. 
  • The Lion versus the Fox

    by David K. Hurst
    David Hurst reviews Professor Lawrence Freedman’s magisterial new history of strategy, which underscores the discipline’s central elements and limits.
  • The Trouble with Sunspots

    by George S. Oldfield
    A personality-driven history of economic forecasting by business historian Walter Friedman points up the limitations of the prediction business, then and now.

Recent Research

  • The Vicious Cycle of CEO Pet Projects

    by Matt Palmquist
    Incoming leaders follow a predictable pattern of disinvesting from their predecessor’s flops and eventually investing just as unwisely.
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