Article at a glance:

Competitive advantage from better interactions

• Companies are looking for ways to improve the effectiveness of their top talent: workers who interact with others and draw on experience and judgment to solve the deepest business problems.
• What makes these workers valuable is their ability to work collaboratively, to leverage "relationship capital," and to improvise and improve new solutions within an environment that fosters trust and constant learning.
• To put these workers to best use, companies must change the way they organize, hatch their strategies, and manage their talent and IT.
• The levers that managers must pull to get this job done—flattening hierarchies and creating an environment for constant learning—are familiar. But it will be critical to understand exactly what a company must do to use these workers most effectively and how such efforts differ from other kinds of productivity programs.