He is an expert on leadership, strategy, and organizational issues in firms. His recent work explores leadership and strategic challenges for building high growth organizations in turbulent markets. Some of his prior work has focused on the enablers and implications of within-firm and inter-firm collaboration. He has looked at both when and how firms should leverage greater connectivity within and across their boundaries to enhance performance.

In a forthcoming book, Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Organization (January, 2010, Harvard Business Press), he explores how “resilient” companies—those that prosper both in good times and bad—drive growth and increase profitability by immersing themselves in the lives of their customers. Based on more than a decade of research in a range of industries including manufacturing, retail, professional services, media, information technology, and healthcare, the book uncovers the path to resilience by showing companies how to break down internal barriers that impede action, build bridges across divisions, and create a network of collaborators.  His previous book, Managing Network Resources: Alliances, Affiliations, and other Relational Assets (Oxford University Press, 2007), examines the implications of firms’ growing portfolio of inter-firm connections. He demonstrates how firms increasingly are scaling back what they consider to be their core activities, and at the same time expanding their array of offerings to customers by entering into a web of collaborations. He discusses some of his most influential and most often cited findings that a firm's portfolio of connections can be a powerful catalyst that shapes the future trajectory of its partnerships by serving as a valuable referral network that can provide information about future ties and also engenders trust that impacts the governance structure used to formalize ties. He has also co-edited a number of other books that focus on the dynamics of competition in emerging technology-intensive industries.