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As the global economy starts to perk up, interest in mergers and acquisitions is once again building. Now is the time to confront the paradox at the heart of M&A. Although study after study has shown that most deals destroy value for the acquirer’s shareholders, why do companies proceed with M&A deals? Why does hope triumph over experience? Because, if certain fundamental rules are followed, M&A can create substantial value for the acquirer’s shareholders. This article shows that every industry has acquisitive exemplars and describes how they extract value from acquisitions for their shareholders. Acquisitive exemplars view M&A as a means to a strategic end, rather than an end in itself. They adopt five decision biases: Set the balance between organic and M&A‐led growth in your corporate agenda, according to the maturity and dynamics of your industry. Challenge the level of acquisitiveness in your business unit’s agendas, and make sure they are aligned with the dynamics of the industry. If the growth strategy needs to be biased toward acquisition, challenge your business at the both corporate and business unit level on the nature of these acquisitions. Develop the key M&A capabilities needed for success in your industry or market segment. Develop a fully accountable process and appoint fully accountable people to integrate your M&A decisions with strategy formulation and performance monitoring.

This article aims to introduce a more comprehensive approach to generating customer insights that can improve almost any organization's ability to drive profitable, customer‐focused growth.

Examining data on the disparity between “what customers say” and “what they do” can uncover major business opportunities. For example, data that tracked hundreds of physicians' prescribing behaviors over time was matched with a survey that asked them to rate each of various drugs along certain dimensions. A statistical model was built to determine which product attributes, when rated favorably for one drug, were most predictive of prescribing behavior.

The article finds that the 3‐D approach requires companies to segment based on an integrated view of their customers. This reveals true cause and effect – how changes in a company's offer or communications lead to changes in customer behavior, and what affect these have on company profitability.

Managers can use the 3‐D integrated perspective to help evaluate strategic options by addressing the economic trade‐offs between customers' likely responses to a change and the cost of the change.

Companies that focus on customer behavior, particularly what it is about their and their competitors' products and services that cause customers to switch from one to the other, develop clearer pictures of the economic drivers of customers and customer segments, and dedicate their attitudinal research to interpreting and improving their understanding of how to influence customer behavior. The resulting insights enable managers to spot and target opportunities for profitable growth that are invisible to other companies and help them more effectively prioritize where, how and in what to invest.

Ever‐rising marketing budgets are becoming an explosive issue. On advertising alone, companies spend fortunes: Nestlé, $11 billion; Unilever, $8 billion; General Motors, $4.7 billion; Procter & Gamble, $3.8 billion; Sony, $3.4 billion; and Coca‐Cola, $1.7 billion. With no end in sight to escalating marketing outlays, many executives are asking two questions: “Is our company spending the right amount on marketing?” and “Are we spending it in the right places and on the right activities?” To get more bang for your buck, the authors suggest setting aside the first question and focusing on the second.

In this article, the authors explore the limitations of current approaches to setting marketing budgets and then outline five factors that should drive how companies allocate their marketing budgets, namely: the profitability that new revenue from a business unit or product would generate; the responsiveness of customers to marketing; the revenue growth potential of a market; the marketing responses of competitors; and the degree to which a particular type of investment builds longer‐term growth in addition to near‐term impact.

The new approach described in this article produces four main benefits: It provides a more objective, factual basis for determining annual marketing budgets; it improves the quality of discussions and decisions around marketing allocations; it can be applied at all levels throughout the organization; and it can identify the new marketing capabilities a company needs.

The article offers a new, simpler approach to thinking about marketing allocation that helps big companies shift their marketing budget debate from “how many dollars to spend altogether?” to “where to spend those dollars?” While companies should continue their quest to answer the first question with rigor, until they get there, answering the second question can create substantial value.

To explore the challenges associated with organic growth, outline three requirements for growing faster than the competition and evaluate the recent trend toward the establishment of a new executive position: “chief growth officer.”

The article is based on an organic growth study examining the performance of 107 “non‐acquisitive” companies (those with no major acquisitions between 1996 and 2000). It then looked more closely at companies identified as “growth leaders” to isolate the best practices that set them apart from their peers.

Research into corporate performance over the long term indicates that organic growth is the most important driver of value in the capital markets. Yet sustained organic growth is difficult to achieve. The article identifies common organizational barriers to growth and reveals three best practices of companies that consistently achieve organic growth faster than competitors. These three practices are: a more disciplined approach to growth, better organizational capabilities for driving growth and a more supportive culture. Finally, the article reviews the performance of companies that have appointed chief growth officers as a means to kick‐start growth.

This paper addresses an issue at the top of nearly every corporate agenda – organic growth. It also delivers a key message to companies looking to achieve their growth objectives by creating a new CGO position: strong, value‐enhancing revenue increases require wholesale changes in behaviors, capabilities and culture, not just a new box on the organizational chart.

Investigates whether leadership styles, particularly relating to the use of power and the sharing of goal information, differ between men and women in autocratic situations and whether such potential leadership model differences affect decision effectiveness. Reviews relevant research, and describes a subject‐blind experiment designed to favour an autocratic approach, involving 40 teams of US graduate business school students, who were given a limited time to complete a problem‐solving exercise using written correspondence as the only communication method. Finds that greater task‐information sharing behaviour existed where both leaders were female, and, surprisingly, that problem‐solving effectiveness was greater where the leader used a participative leadership style. Reveals no evidence that subordinates evaluated the competence of male and female leaders differently, but suggests that subordinates are happier to initiate correspondence where the leader is of the same gender. Discusses the implications of the findings, concluding that leadership styles are situation‐ rather than people‐based, and acknowledges certain limitations of the study.

Young people drinking to extreme drunkenness is a source of concern for policy makers and health promoters. There are a variety of community groups who appear to respond to the alcohol-related problems. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the working practices and relationships among local community groups as part of the pre-intervention context-assessment process.

Drawing on the narratives of nine community workers and ten venue managers the authors examine the community level approach to inform the choice of interventions to reduce risky drinking practices and community wide alcohol-related harm.

There was considerable agreement across the community workers and venue managers about the nature of risk for young people in the night time economy (NTE). Two central themes of “perceived risk” and “management of risk” emerged from the data. Further, the community workers and venue managers identified different high-risk locations and strategies to improve their ability meet the needs of young people experiencing risk in the NTE. The local authorities, community organisations and night time operators adopted a broad proactive and connected approach to develop a coherent strategy to achieve new measures of safety in the NTE.

Applying the social ecological model to provide a framework for the understanding of the social, environmental and political factors that influence alcohol use in young people.