Networks of relationships among employees are increasingly the means by which organizations create value and foster innovation. From ten years of research tracking top-performing leaders at over 60 companies, Professor Cross found that successful leaders manage informal networks to compensate for weaknesses in formal structures, and thus improve collaboration, knowledge-sharing and best practices. In doing so, they are less susceptible to the loss...

Not all customers are created equal. Ten percent of your customers often provide ninety percent of your profits. As Roger Siboni explains, the best usage of customer relationship management (CRM) is to enhance the experience for Profitable customers, to bring down costs by automating unProfitable ones, and to gain market share through customer retention and personalization at the point of sale. This requires an enterprise-wide commitment to sharing...

"Anyone--even you!--can learn how to harness the power of humor in business (and life), based on the popular class at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Many people understand humor's power intuitively. But when it comes to using it with intention, far fewer know how. As a result, humor is vastly underleveraged in most workplaces today, impacting our performance, relationships, and health, and contributing to a permanent and unsightly frown known...

The best are those who understand their people's opinions of them and what it's like to work for them. This is no easy task. People in power tend to focus on their own needs over the needs of others. They also believe they have a stronger positive influence over their people than they actually do. From peer-reviewed research and case studies, Professor Sutton found truly in-tune leaders share five hallmark characteristics. Program Highlights: The...