Videoconferencing is rapidly emerging as an important way for executives to communicate with their employees, upper management and customers. Those executives who want to significantly improve their effectiveness must understand this new medium—and master its dynamics.

While the digital era presents significant opportunities, it also poses serious threats for companies that remain mired in an analog mindset. The winners will be those that leverage what is unique about the digital experience: the ability to develop relationships with customers from the earliest points in the buying cycle.

In a dramatic shift in power from seller to buyer, the same technology that gives shoppers unprecedented choice for meeting a multitude of demands also keeps those demands in constant flux. With increasingly fickle and footloose customers searching for instant gratification, how can today’s brick-and-mortar retailers remain relevant?

Customers continue to demand greater value at ever-lower prices. But for many companies, the ability to produce savings through more traditional cost-cutting measures is nearly exhausted. The solution: Combine cost-cutting initiatives with design and development activities, using cost-driven product and service innovations to create new streams of profitable growth.

Successful innovators do not all follow the same strategy. What matters most is deciding what kind of innovator you are—an R&D-driven leader, or a follower gaining the necessary know-how by acquisition or partnering—then putting all your resources behind that decision.

A company’s approach to data protection and privacy should be more than legally compliant. It must be a core part of both the organization’s business value proposition and its culture, as well as global in scope. Here’s how it’s done.

As business leaders look for the best places to locate operations, raise capital, and source talent and ideas, prudence demands that they invest wisely throughout the world. To be successful with their geographic strategy, however, they must build a portfolio that reflects a sophisticated understanding of five underlying fundamentals.

In their efforts to make government more accessible and transparent, public-sector managers across the globe are rushing to adopt the latest Web-based technologies. But establishing stronger connections with citizens requires a giant step beyond the technology itself and a focus on generating real, lasting public value.

Outsourcing has succeeded because of its ability to reduce risk, drive standardization, increase productivity, and improve reliability and predictability—in other words, its ability to industrialize an ever-increasing range of business activities. Having honed its skills in the IT function, industrialization is now redefining the outsourcing of services and business processes.