Ingram Micro's 2012 acquisition of BrightPoint and decision to build a cloud platform have helped the company expand into software as a service, says Felix Wong, chief country executive for Australia and New Zealand. "A growing part of our business is very much around educating, enabling, and providing knowledge into the part of the business community that needs it, which is really the small medium part of the marketplace," Wong says.

Amazon is considering further extension into the grocery space with a new chain that will likely be separate from Whole Foods Market, according to employee reports. The new stores would be designed around pickup and delivery with a smaller selection of fresh items.

Distributors should consider replacing outdated enterprise resource planning systems "one piece at a time," with product information management systems often being a good place to start, writes Joe Bennett of Unilog.

B2B companies can improve data security by clearly defining security expectations before employees are given access to sensitive data, writes Gero Decker. Business process management can improve operational efficiency, while a culture of responsibility helps employees take data security seriously, Decker writes.

Ruth Hoffmann describes the best business-to-business marketing strategies for today's marketers, including using text and video display ads to reach large audiences and identifying the right channels to drive traffic for inbound marketing. She notes that content marketing influences purchase decision-makers and that paid social tactics should be carefully targeted to avoid wasted budgets.

Business-to-business marketers must adopt more sophisticated data-driven tactics than A/B testing, which relies too much on subjective choices of what to measure, Dan Gingiss writes. "Decisions can now be made based on real, in-market data -- not intuition," he writes.

The best strategic leaders go beyond problem-solving and seek long-term change, write Jeffrey Schwartz, Josie Thomson and Art Kleiner, who outline seven stages of such growth. "The habits developed over a lifetime, and not just at work, combine to help build a sense of your true self, the identity you seek to realize, because it is closest to who you want to be in spirit," they write.

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