It's time to bridge the gap between marketing and IT, says John Mayo-Smith, EVP and CTO of interactive agency R/GA. After all, he writes, CMOs and CTOs are practically in the same line of work, thanks to the digital revolution. Mayo-Smith uses a "climate control" metaphor to describe what needs to happen to bridge current discrepancies in budgeting, goal setting and success metrics. He says that climate controls allow organizations to heal themselves "without expensive coping strategies and extra layers of management." Now that he's got your attention, Mayo-Smith elaborates on four steps toward making it happen. 1. …

Thousands of "looky-loos" come to IKEA Beijing -- or Yi Jia, as the store is called -- every weekend just to partake in such Western cultural rituals as enjoying the air conditioning, posing for snapshots and getting free soda refills, David Pierson reports. Some just nap on the comfy furniture. The store has been open for a decade, and its success "can be traced, in part, to how grounded it is in the capital's zeitgeist," Pierson writes. It's a bastion of cheap modern furniture at a time when more and more Chinese are becoming part of the middle class. …

The sale of Procter & Gamble's prescription-drug unit to Warner Chilcott means that the company is losing a business that contributes more than $2 billion a year in sales. But it is gaining $3.1 billion in cash that it intends to re-invest in its core businesses of laundry, home care and personal care products, David Holthaus reports. Prescription drugs can take years of R&D and regulatory battles before they come to market. P&G will now be able to focus on OTC products such as its Vicks cough and cold products, Crest and Oral-B oral care products, and Always and …

Yesterday we read about Paul Polman's push to make Unilever a customer-focused organization. This morning, Jay Galbraith, founder-president of Galbraith Management Consultants, says that making the decision to organize around the customer is not to be taken lightly. Many organizations that have gone that route experience "some real and often unexpected challenges." In the end, it's the CMO's job to see the job through, from "thought leadership" to leading the execution. One big problem is defining what you mean by customer centricity. Some companies think that they are customer-centric but aren't -- Hewlett-Packard's printer business, for example, has followed …

Steve Jobs is micromanaging the advertising and marketing strategy for the rumored launch of a new Apple touch-screen gadget, Yukari Iwatani Kane reports, to the consternation of employees who had gotten used to the idea of "a level of freedom over strategy and products while the CEO was on leave." A person familiar with the matter would give not details about the product or its launch date. Responding to a query from Iwatani Kane, Jobs emailed, in typical fashion, "Much of your information is incorrect." He did not provide specifics. Apple first filed a patent related to a …