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Even when global players are increasingly dominating an industry, smaller competitors can win in local markets by paying attention to the different needs and expectations of their customers. The top‐down standardization of strategy adopted by many multinational consumer product companies can fail badly if these differences are ignored. Consumer needs and desires are not necessarily consistent across different market segments. Competitors can often exploit these differences to great advantage, particularly if some core competencies, like distribution or market intelligence, can be brought to bear. The old adage “Think global, act local” still applies in many industries. This SuÄrez Company beer case study demonstrates the impact that local market knowledge and positioning can have on a product’s success. Nimble local or regional players may dethrone even the largest of multi‐national or global competitors who often fail to recognize or embrace cultural differences and unique market conditions. These same multinationals may derive global benefits by re‐integrating local market experience into their broader positioning, as Coors is doing now.

Noel Tichy, who ran GE’s Leadership Development Center, is currently director of the Global Leadership Program at the University of Michigan’s Business School. His teaching model posits that CEO’s must be intimately involved in teaching their teams’ leaders. The basic premise is that companies are successful to the extent that they have leaders at all levels of the organization. Any institution that invests in the development of leaders at all levels is going to get ahead of its competition. It is a principal job of the leader to help develop the next generation of leaders. Unfortunately, many leading companies do not build good leadership pipelines because their leaders do not do the teaching of their own managers. An essential element for a leader to develop the next generation is to present a teachable point of view about how he/she believes they should run the organization. Also needed is a clear idea of what your want to teach them: ideas, product services, distribution channels, customer segments, and values. Leadership is about focusing on human capital as the organization’s most important asset. Unfortunately, many companies make only 10 percent of the investment they should make on development of their people and most of it is spent in the wrong ways. A better approach is to make 80 percent of the development investment be on‐the‐job life experiences. The other 20 percent can be potentially leveraged with very high impact development experiences. If you sit around and read business school cases for three weeks, you’re getting about 20 percent of what you could if you engaged people in action learning real projects. Developing leaders requires a rethinking of the leadership pipeline. You look for those career points where you can leverage the 80% with high impact development, and then you have to build teaching into every single management process.

Ask an expert to describe an innovation system that enables companies to successfully advance valuable technologies that fit their current business model – and those that do not fit it.

Strategy & Leadership interviewed Henry Chesbrough author of Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (Harvard Business School Press, 2003). His book is based on numerous research projects he conducted.

He developed an open innovation model based on the observation that great inventions can come from both inside and outside the company and should then be commercialized both using the current business model and with alternative business models.

Case studies are needed. Tools are needed for bringing the customer into the open innovation process.

Corporate leaders should review and consider the open innovation model as one approach in their search for new growth businesses.

Open innovation is a radical approach to business growth that is being pioneered by a number of cutting edge firms.

This masterclass seeks to identify the leaders others should emulate, what’s are best practices, how did the acclaimed exemplars get to be leaders, and what can we learn from their stories?

The author, a veteran practitioner and long-time observer of the evolution of strategic management regularly scans the business idea marketplace to identify any breakthroughs in the perennial quest for insights into the field of leadership.

Forget leadership – it’s strategy that matters. Companies excel when they adopt good strategies and implement them efficiently. The role of the leader is diminishing, and leadership has little utility as an organizing principle.

Look realistically at attempts to show how some CEOs shaped the future of their firms. Stories of success and failure typically exaggerate the impact of leadership style and management practices on performance. They focus on the singularities – the few extraordinary successes– and ignore the many events that failed to happen. We all fall prey to this affective fallacy when we extoll certain individuals – and then overweight their contribution to the success of their organizations.

We need to refocus our attention on strategy. Successful leadership ultimately comes down to good strategy and good fortune. We have little control over the vicissitudes of the macro-environment, but firms that adopt the right strategy will do better over the long term.

Though your action team may be composed of your company's executive tigers, don't try to run it with a whip and a chair. As 3M found, it takes a non‐traditional management approach to make teamwork work.

The purpose of this paper is to present an interview between Strategy & Leadership with the veteran observer and outspoken critic of corporate follies, Henry Mintzberg, Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, about the state of management and management education.

The questions are asked by Robert J. Allio, who has been both a senior academic and executive at Fortune 500 companies.

Professor Mintzberg comments on troubling trends in leadership and managing, the lack of effective management, inappropriate management education, the impossibility of teaching leadership, the process of creating strategy, the current management crisis and the dangers of shareholder value management.

As an alternative approach to leadership education, McGill University has developed the International Masters in Practicing Management (www.impm.org). In this program practicing managers share experiences with their peers.

Mintzberg blasts a variety of targets: “US corporations are seriously sick.”