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. A few of these endeavors have been very successful.

When customers evaluate a product or service, they weigh its perceived value against the asking price. Marketers have generally focused much of their time and energy on managing the price side of that equation, since raising prices can immediately boost profits. But that’s the easy part: Pricing usually consists of managing a relatively small set of numbers, and pricing analytics and tactics are highly evolved.

When a sports team finishes a game, they usually don’t gather up their gear and immediately leave the court, rink, field or locker room. The players and coaches take a few minutes for a post-game meeting - a ritual that’s just as important as the pre-game warm-up.

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.

Over the course of a couple of decades, meditation has migrated from Himalayan hilltops and Japanese Zendos to corporate boardrooms and corridors of power, including Google, Apple, Aetna, the Pentagon, and the US House of Representatives.

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.

Steve Jobs insisted that every item on a meeting agenda have a designated person responsible for that task and any follow-up work that happened. He called that person the DRI - the Directly Responsible Individual. He knew the public accountability would ensure that a project or task would actually get done, and he wanted to set clear, organized instructions for his team to follow.

Conflict wreaks havoc on our brains. We are groomed by evolution to protect ourselves whenever we sense a threat.

My coaching clients have hard jobs with big responsibilities that generate lots of stress, and many of their spouses and partners have similarly demanding careers. And yet one of the most challenging experiences in their day doesn’t occur at work, but in the first 15 minutes after they arrive home and greet each other.