In an age of bloggers and social networks, you no longer control the conversation about your company. So you must recalibrate the way you see your marketing, branding and corporate communications.

By adopting a narrow therapeutic focus and responding to specific customer needs, two companies have achieved high performance in this otherwise beleaguered industry.

The high-performance businesses in this industry are diversified, innovative and entrepreneurial—and often found in the public sector.

As India modernizes, the successful companies—Indian and multinational alike—will be those that offer customized, innovative products and services that meet the diverse needs of the country’s emerging young middle class.

Global business reality has been fundamentally and permanently altered by economic and financial disruption. The nature and degree of the transformation will vary across industries. But as they consider their response, all executives must master five dimensions of change.

Over the past two decades, outsourcing has dramatically changed the way companies create and distribute value. From its origins as a hardware operations play, the practice has moved first to applications and software, and then to higher-level business processes and services. The next wave of change will take outsourcing into unexplored territory: strategic value and innovation.

Businesses that thoughtfully examine and measure the time customers spend with them, and then either reduce the time costs or enhance the time value of their offerings, can gain an advantage that will continue when the economy recovers.

The new business environment will favor those companies able to execute strategy faster, with more flexibility and adaptability, and move their companies ahead briskly.

For most CIOs, the usual pattern during economic downturns is to slash budgets and focus available spending and resources on maintaining availability, security and application functionality. But that’s not how the high performers do it.

In the post-crisis industry landscape, success in retail and commercial banking will be redefined by transparency, simplicity and renewed customer-centricity.

The communications industry does not always get much bang for its R&D buck. But new research shows a correlation between companies that meet or exceed their new-product launch plans and those that are more effective at open innovation—establishing relationships with third parties and specialized providers in an open development environment.