Leading in Times of Uncertainty

Welcome to the launch edition of IESE Insight review!

Our cover dossier presents four articles to help managers deal with situations of business uncertainty from different areas of general management:

• Santiago Alvarez de Mon (IESE) explores the keys to embracing uncertainty, helping managers to increase their ethical capital.
• Rita McGrath (Columbia) presents a portfolio of opportunities that managers can employ to create conditions for internally generated growth.
• George Westerman (MIT) & Richard Hunter (Gartner) articulate a common language for building capabilities that increase the returns from IT risk management investments.
• Manel Baucells (IESE) & Martin Weber (University of Mannheim) explain how psychological biases manifest themselves in decision-making, so that you can keep them in check and make better decisions in situations of uncertainty.

Also in this magazine:

• Gabriel Bitran (MIT), Juan Carlos Ferrer (Pontificia Universidad Católica) & Paulo Rocha e Oliveira (IESE) share practical ideas to improve the service encounter, which will greatly impact customer satisfaction and ultimately profitability.
• Julia Prats & Remei Agulles (IESE) debunk the notion of the entrepreneur as a natural-born genius and instead propose a proper framework for classifying entrepreneurial competencies, which they say can be learned and developed through specific techniques and habits.

Our case discussion on Argentina’s Boca Juniors will get readers thinking about how to turn around a flagging soccer club and see that it stays on the ball in sporting, marketing and economic terms.

Plus: Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys Technologies in India, discusses innovation, offshoring and social responsibility.