"The Global Entrepreneur"

There is a new trend in entrepreneurship-start ups that are born global in order to address global opportunities and access start up resources from around the world. But global start-ups face three generic challenges. First are the barriers created not just by physical distance, but by "psychic" distance as well-differences in culture, language, education systems, religion, and economic development levels. Second are the challenges of context-that is, the different nations' political, regulatory, judicial, tax, and labor environments. Third, like all new ventures, global start-ups must find a way to compete with bigger incumbents while using far fewer resources.

This article describes the four key skills global entrepreneurs must develop to tackle those challenges and succeed: They must clearly articulate their reasons for going global, learn to build alliances with more powerful partners, excel at international supply chain management, and create a multinational culture within their organization. This article shows how start-ups can thrive by using distance to gain competitive advantage.

"The Tactics of Strategic Opportunism"

One of the fundamental dilemmas of leadership has always been how to balance and blend the tactics of addressing unforeseen opportunities and challenges, on the one hand, with the need for strategic discipline that is firmly focused on long term vision. "Strategic opportunism" is a novel synthesis of these two dimensions, and is composed of many thinking habits and actions that a leader can learn.

"How Senior Managers Think"

A two-year study of top executives shows that senior executives do not closely follow the classical rational model by making choices among alternative courses of action. Nor do they necessarily select one decision at a time to address. Most successful senior managers have overriding concerns rather than precise goals and objectives, and they think more often about how to do things than what is being accomplished. They also rely heavily on a mix of intuition and disciplined analysis in their decision-making and incorporate their action on a problem into their diagnosis of it.

This article discusses some of the implications of these findings on how managers can exercise and use the skills that senior management positions call for.