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CONTENT Here are five choice articles from the business press to start off your workweek. I'm pointing you to articles about preparing for a crisis that your customers will have, learning leadership, growing from your roots, and valuing and doing innovation in the corporate world.

From the Atlanta Journal Constitution: Staying one step ahead of storms
"Folks around company headquarters sometimes call him 'disaster boy.' But they mean it as a compliment. Corky Martin is technically known as the 'Divisional Merchandise Manager/Hardware Department' for Atlanta-based Home Depot, the nation’s largest home-improvement retailer with 1,978 big-box stores, 300,000 employees and annual sales north of $70 billion."

Wally's Comments: Every business has recurring situations where your customers have crises that you can help them overcome. With good preparation of your own and a playbook of what to do when, you can become the supplier/helper that your customers remember.

From the NY Times: Stepping Out of the Sandbox"
Interview with Deborah Dunsire, M.D., president and chief executive of Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company."

Wally's Comments: This is part of the Times' excellent "Corner Office" series of interviews with CEOs about how they lead and how they learned to lead that way. The column is worth a visit every week. This one is an example of what they're like. Kudos to Adam Bryant for the excellent work he does with the interviews.

From the Economist: Missionary man
"David Neeleman thinks Brazil is just as good a place to do business as America"

Wally's Comments: You may remember that David Neeleman said that he was done with the airline business when he left JetBlue a year or so ago. But now he's looking to improve regional airline service in Brazil where he grew up and where he also served as a Mormon missionary.

From Knowledge at Wharton: How 'Go/No Go' Thinking Can Stop Innovation Dead in its Tracks
"A day does not go by without someone in the business media waxing eloquent about the pace of change, the increasing turbulence of technology, or the massive pressures of global competition. Writers and broadcasters go on and on about the increasing uncertainty this brings about, and all this uncertainty is generally couched as threatening. This foreshadowing is astonishing when you consider that boundless opportunities for big-win investments can lurk within uncertainty -- uncertain yes, but with huge upside potential nonetheless. We asked ourselves what causes firms and managers to generally regard uncertainty as a negative, when in fact opportunities for unusual prosperity lie in being able to exploit that very uncertainty. As we looked into the reasons why managers do not forge prosperity out of uncertain investments, we decided that it is really not their fault! We found that managers have not been given the right tools for investing in uncertain times. They are in the grips of a "Go/No Go vise," using tools for investment analysis that were created for more stable times."

Wally's Comments: Many times the difference between an opportunity and a problem is how you think about it. The Wharton researchers have taken that a step further. They think that if you have the wrong evaluation and measurement tools you may miss innovations that can be game-changing. They've got some research to back that up.

From Business Week: A Radical Rethink of R& D
"It's a new world of collaboration across companies and nations. IBM is launching a major new experiment, while Microsoft keeps dreaming big. The question is whether anyone can come up with the breakthroughs to create millions of new jobs. "

Wally's Comments: Speaking of innovation, it's on the cover of Business Week this week where the focus is on a "new kind of innovation," innovation across corporate boundaries. There have been lots of rumblings on this front.A. G. Lafley set Proctor and Gamble firmly on a course to bring in outside innovations. And Cisco has long pursued an "Acquisition and Development" strategy as opposed to the standard R and D.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.