"Managers yearn for clear, unequivocal messages, but that is no longer what they receive. They are deluged by reports and books on creating the global organization, at the same time as they are still asking what that means. When it comes to the huge international corporations detailed in case study after case study, our knowledge is extensive but highly fragmented. What do we really know and understand about GE? There is a feeling that companies such as GE and Toyota possess something, but no one can quite encapsulate the entire message. There is no one great management book – though Peter Drucker came pretty close to providing it. What one commentator pompously labeled ‘the over-arching meta-narrative’ is usually notable by its absence. Management continues to defy the theorists who would like to guide it into a corner and nail it down. It continues to escape. It carries on slipping though our fingers."

Look closely and you will find a smart idea at the heart of any successful, smart brand. However, the days of building a mega brand based on one smart idea appear long gone…

There was a time when a New York Times photo essay titled ‘From Bangladesh to the Boroughs’ would have been an account of migrants escaping abysmal poverty in their homeland to build a prosperous future in the USA. But in November 2009, a story of that title was about a reverse flow—the activities of Grameen America’s first 1500 small, collateral-free loans for poor women in the New York City area.

Management is a relatively young discipline, but it is uniquely poised in the world of knowledge by virtue of being driven exclusively by ideas.

Ideas matter. In a practical discipline like management, their influence can make them uniquely beneficial or uniquely dangerous.

Vijay Govindrajan expounds upon the concept of “reverse innovation”—the strategy of innovating in emerging markets and then marketing these innovations in developed markets as alternative ideas.

Most new ventures, largely driven by poorly conceived business plans based on untested assumptions fail. However, there is a better way to launch new ideas—by discovering a business model that really works: a Plan B, which grows out of the original idea, builds on it, and once in place, enables the business to grow rapidly and prosper.