Best of HBS Working Knowledge 2009 — HBS Working Knowledge.  This is an excellent overview of top 10 articles and working papers from the Harvard Business Review.

TOP 10 ARTICLES OF 2009

1. Understanding Users of Social Networks
   Many business leaders are mystified about how to reach potential customers on social networks such as Facebook. HBS professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski provides a fresh look into the interpersonal dynamics of these sites and offers guidance for approaching these tantalizing markets.
2. Social Network Marketing: What Works?
   Purchase decisions are influenced differently in social networks than in the brick-and-mortar world, says Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta. The key: Marketers should tap into the networking aspect of sites such as Facebook.
3. Uncompromising Leadership in Tough Times
   As companies batten down the hatches, we need leaders who don’t compromise on standards and values that are essential in flush times. Fortunately, such leaders do exist. Their insights can help other organizations weather the current crisis, says HBS professor emeritus Michael Beer. Q&A.
4. Sharpening Your Skills: Managing Teams
   The ability to lead teams is fast becoming a critical skill for all managers in the 21st century. Here are four HBS Working Knowledge stories from the archives that address everything from how teams learn to turning individual performers into team players. Questions asked include: How does a team leader win the confidence of the group? What’s the best method for developing team goals? How can individual performers be developed into team players? How do teams learn?

This excellent article in the November 2009 Harvard Business Review by Thomas Davenport provides some usable insights benefits and cautions for various approaches to making decisions.  Davenport’s web site has variety of videos and references as well.

• In many organizations, decisions are left up to individuals and the process for making them receives little if any scrutiny. The recent plague of poor financial decisions is one result.
• Smart organizations can help their managers improve decision making in four steps: by identifying and prioritizing the decisions that must be made; examining the factors involved in each; designing roles, processes, systems, and behavior to improve decisions; and institutionalizing the new approach through training, refined data analysis, and outcome assessment.
• Chevron, the Educational Testing Service, and The Stanley Works are three organizations that have overhauled decision-making processes with great success. This article will help like-minded companies give decisions the attention they deserve.etter Dec

Understanding Users of Social Networks — HBS Working Knowledge.

This provides excellent insght on both the US Army and Google.

How the Army Prepared Me to Work at Google

11:24 AM Tuesday June 16, 2009

by Doug Raymond

Upon learning of my military background, one of my Google team members exclaimed, “You don’t seem like an Army guy! It must be so different for you here”. His assumption was that an ex-military officer would be more comfortable barking orders to a line of soldiers standing at attention than debating product features with a software development team. Well, he was right in some regards. Google is a very different environment from the tank platoon I led at the beginning of my Army career. We’ve got better food, a more relaxed dress code, and a very flat organizational structure. However, the leadership qualities that make an Army officer and a leader of an innovative organization successful have a lot in common. What I and many of my fellow ex-military leaders at Google have found is that military leadership experience has prepared us well to succeed in a fast-moving, innovative environment.

via How the Army Prepared Me to Work at Google – Frontline Leadership – HarvardBusiness.org.