Businesses hoping to survive over the long term will have to remake themselves into better competitors at least once along the way. These efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, reengineering, rightsizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds, to name a few. In almost every case, the goal has been to cope with a new, more challenging market by changing the way business is conducted. In this article, John Kotter outlines the eight largest errors that can doom these efforts.

Marc Pfitzer, Valerie Bockstette, and Mike Stamp, of FSG, a nonprofit consulting firm that specializes in helping organizations develop solutions to challenging social issues, report on how companies that deliver both social benefit and business value rely on five mutually reinforcing elements.

Alex Rawson and Ewan Duncan, partners in McKinsey’s Seattle office, and Conor Jones, a partner in its Dublin office, write about why it’s the customer’s end-to-end journey that is most important – not touchpoints.

Nick Lovegrove, a director emeritus of McKinsey, a senior director of the Albright Stonebridge Group, and a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, and Matthew Thomas, executive director of the InterSector Project, chairman of Young Canadians in Finance, and a member of the World Economic Forum community, write about why we need executives who can easily move among the business, government, and social spheres.

Chris Zook and James Allen, partners at the global consulting firm Bain & Company, report on how leveraging a simple formula allows companies to create new and more lasting differentiation.