In the past, family businesses were often viewed as the most common and oldest type of business; but on the other hand, they were considered boring and were underestimated. However, recent studies show that the best family businesses outperform traditional public companies when it comes to growth, profitability and financial stability. The takeover of big names like Volkswagen and Continental by family-owned businesses sets the tone for a new era.

A couple of decades ago, when the world was a simpler place, people who worked internationally simply moved from one culture or country to the next.

Today, all this has changed. Despite working with people from both multiple country and professional cultures, many people who work in the international arena may barely leave home. The ability to do this successfully from any starting point depends on people’s level of cultural intelligence.

This Tomorrow's Challenge is the third and last in a series on strategically engaging your organization. The first part, "Assessing your reality", highlighted the importance of starting a strategy process by building an aligned perspective of your company’s current reality. Without a shared perspective, leadership teams often have vastly different views and focus on solving different issues. Facing reality starts by looking at your organization from the outside-in, challenging fixed perspectives and strong internal held biases. The second part, "Challenging your ambition", looked at challenging the team’s assumptions of the company’s possibilities and the direction it is heading, in order to build a shared ambition for where the company should go. Without exploring the range of possible directions that a team can choose to lead an organization, leaders often act as if they are on a fixed path, managing (not leading) the organization based on historical patterns, not future opportunities.

For years, Western multinationals have had the belief, and perhaps felt relief as well, that while they might increasingly be unable to compete effectively on price, at least they have had greater innovative capacities than the rising "tiger" economies. Today, however, with the rising economies of the emerging markets, there is no way that the West can rest on its laurels. Beware of the claws and jaws - tigers can be innovative too!

Perhaps you are in a situation where revenues are falling, profits are also on the red path and you have a team that is blaming each other for who is responsible for this. You have tried to really work with this team on your own to come up with a decision about how to move forward, but with little success. An option here could be facilitation.

Over-confidence is a common trait in successful ambitious leaders. Success breeds confidence. But does confidence breed success? Some companies have paid a high price for the self-esteem of their top people.

The major disasters in the recent and ongoing credit meltdown, at banks like Citigroup, UBS, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers, can be traced back to the firm controlled by a dominant personality, a docile top team and boards with a glaring lack of financial expertise. Obviously, the blame can be shared: with regulators and rating agencies that didn't do their job properly, risk managers who didn't raise the red flag high enough, the Federal Reserve that threw money at the party, and the yes-men that made up a majority of those boards.

The economic turmoil in our world is rooted in the sub-prime crisis, which is characterized by contracted liquidity in global credit markets and banking systems. Why did the sub-prime crisis occur?

Global markets are the source of substantial cash flows. Your globalization strategy asks that you develop relationships with new and existing customers abroad. And the overall credibility of your company abroad requires management to be visible in places that count. This means you cannot simply sit at headquarters and just shuffle paper around. You have to give personal attention to customers, employees and other major constituencies abroad. But does the attention you spend abroad actually help your company’s bottom-line?

This Tomorrow's Challenge is the second in a series on innovation leadership. The first part, Promoting bottom-up innovation, looked at how to build a company culture that encourages and supports bottom-up innovation - the spontaneous innovation that comes from the ideas and entrepreneurship of a company's people. This article looks at the second, complementary innovation mode, top-down.

One of the great paradoxes of management is that the goal for little companies is to become a big company; and for big companies, the goal is always to become more entrepreneurial.

The question is how expertise shapes decision making and whether entrepreneurs make decisions differently from corporate executives.