Suppliers of consumer packaged goods are facing an increasingly challenging situation as they work to fulfill orders from their retail partners' distribution facilities. Traditionally these suppliers have generated forecasts of a given retailer's orders using records of that retailer's past...

Great companies — like great products and great nations — have always endured a four-stage life cycle: emergence, growth, maturity, and decline. Faster clockspeeds — enabled by compressed technology cycles and accelerated by new knowledge-sharing routines such as crowdsourcing — are...