Stories by: Kathleen Melymuka

What if half the men in science, engineering and technology roles dropped out at midcareer? That would surely be perceived as a national crisis. Yet more than half the women in those fields leave -- most of them during their mid- to late 30s.

MMORPGs -- massively multiplayer online role-playing games -- like World of Warcraft, Eve and EverQuest may be the best simulators of tomorrow's business environment. So say Byron Reeves, Thomas W. Malone and Tony O'Driscoll in this month's Harvard Business Review. The authors found that these games closely mirror the evolving world of business: distributed decision-making, rapid response, ad hoc teams, and leadership through collaboration rather than authority.

Educators used to follow the auto industry because that's where all the lessons came from, says Bala Iyer. Then it was Microsoft. Now it's Google. In this month's Harvard Business Review, Iyer, an associate professor of technology operations and information management at Babson College, looked deep into Google's DNA to discern what makes it an innovation machine. Iyer talked with Kathleen Melymuka about what he and co-author Thomas H. Davenport discovered.

If you're under pressure to get more done, the worst thing you can do is work longer hours. That's the message in this month's Harvard Business Review, where Tony Schwartz says the key to productivity is managing your energy, not your time.

In the past decade, studies have shown that IT leads to increased corporate productivity, but until recently, no one had measured how it affects work at the individual desktop level.

"Most leaders are unaware of how bad they are," says John Hamm. "If they were doctors, people would die. If they were chefs, no one would eat the food."

Fear can be a powerful generator of upstanding conduct, say Stephen Wagner and Lee Dittmar. But business runs on discovering and creating value. In this month's Harvard Business Review, the authors discuss how smart companies are finding unexpected value in Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance. Wagner, who is the managing partner of the US Centre for Corporate Governance at Deloitte & Touche, and Dittmar, who leads the enterprise governance consulting practice at Deloitte Consulting, talked with Computerworld about how companies can use compliance to their advantage.

Many of the top business books of the year have focused on the role of IT in the global economy. Two of those -- The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade by Pietra Rivoli, and The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle -- approach the issues from distinct viewpoints. Both are finalists for The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year, to be awarded next week. The authors talked with Kathleen Melymuka by e-mail about IT and its place in this emerging world.

Boards of directors are growing increasingly nervous about their companies' dependence on IT, and with good reason. IT accounts for more than 50 percent of capital spending in some companies. But there are no standards for IT governance as there are for areas such as accounting and compensation. In a comprehensive article in this month's Harvard Business Review, Richard Nolan and F. Warren McFarlan lay out an IT governance plan. McFarlan, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, told Kathleen Melymuka how boards can get a grip on IT.

When IT project manager Destiny Moneysmith found out last year that she was about to get a personal coach, she was less than enthusiastic. "I was very skeptical," she recalls.

Shawn Mahoney guides business customers to the right information and helps them reel it in.