In May 2015 prominent leaders in St. Louis were celebrating the launch of the Contractor Loan Fund (CLF), a $10 million revolving loan fund meant to help area minority and women-owned construction contractors grow their businesses. John Dubinsky, the leader behind the advancement of this project, aimed to decrease the region's longstanding economic and social inequalities. Despite successfully scoping out the project, recruiting a team, fundraising, and launching the fund, Dubinsky was still worried about the process by which they would cultivate the growth of minority and women-owned construction contractors.
Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, co-founders of India's largest e-commerce company, Flipkart, were reviewing the foregoing Facebook post, which had gone viral and received more than 20,000 likes. A third-party seller listed a pair of women's sandals on Flipkart's website at 799 Indian rupees and offered it on promotion at 399. However, upon close examination of the product's display photo, consumers noticed a 399 price tag printed on the strap. Consistent with stated goals of transparency and building trusted relationships with customers, the Bansals immediately drafted an apology and terminated the seller's agreement with Flipkart.
It's August 2014 and John Chambers is expected to announce his retirement after 17 years as CEO of global technology giant Cisco Systems. Under Chambers's leadership, Cisco has grown from $2.2 billion in annual revenues and under 4,000 employees to revenues of $46 billion and more than 66,000 employees. With Chambers's retirement imminent, Cisco's board of directors must design a detailed succession process that will allow a smooth transfer of power. What type of selection process should the board members use? Which qualities should they look for in potential candidates? Who should the board select for their shortlist of final candidates? In addition to exploring the history of Cisco, its current market position, and profiles of potential candidates, the case provides an overview of different types of succession planning processes.
Several experts had drawn attention to a peculiar problem existing in public-sector banks in India. There seemed to be two distinct generations: experienced employees who would be superannuated in the next four to five years; and newer employees who had come on board in the last four to five years. Though these young employees were academically sound, they lacked competence acquired through experience and thus were hesitant in taking on responsibilities. The older generation was slowly withdrawing. Management at Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) knew that in order to improve motivation and encourage higher productivity, the company had to trigger change and transform the mindsets of its employees.<br><br>Harnessing the energies of young members of the marketing team, IOB ran a unique campaign involving all employees called Rang De Basanti. Initial results were encouraging. However, two problems continued to arise: the underperformance of one particular region and the problem of keeping up the momentum and sustaining the change.
Built into a pension fund's calculations was a 7% expected return, but in this world of debt, deficits, and quantitative easing (and negative interest rates!), could such a return be counted on? Or was it necessary to reduce the fund's expected returns assumptions? And whether or not assumptions on expected returns were changed, should the fund's global asset allocation be altered? This case provides an opportunity for students to form, in the context of an analysis of the global macroeconomic environment, five-year expected returns for major asset classes.
In 2010, the assistant general manager and head of strategic development at Lebanon's BLC Bank attended the annual summit of the Global Banking Alliance for Women, a leading organization of financial institutions that drove the creation of women's wealth worldwide. On her return to Beirut, she encouraged her bank to capitalize on the inclusion of women as a relevant differentiator from both a business and societal perspective. The result of research into the economic, demographic and social needs of the country was the launch in 2012 of the "We Initiative", a unique and comprehensive program dedicated to the economic empowerment of women in the Middle East and North Africa region. By 2015, the program's success not only served the bank's economic bottom line but also benefited the Lebanese economy and community as a whole and exemplified the bank's sense of responsibility to its society.
For the co-founder and CEO of Booster Juice, Canada's largest chain of juice and smoothie bars, international expansion was integral to the firm's strategy, especially as the Canadian market matured. However, working with business cultures and practices in different countries was a major challenge. Booster Juice had been opening three stores per month through the end of 2013, and the CEO was re-examining Booster Juice's international operations, including those in India, where Booster Juice had 18 stores. The CEO was contemplating considerable expansion in the Indian market, which had great potential but presented many challenges. He wanted to open many more stores in India, but existing stores showed merely average performance. Could India provide the sustained market growth that the CEO desired? What would be the perfect approach to India's complex market?
In 2015, Uber is building what may be the largest point-to-point transportation network of its kind; it is literally changing the way the world moves. But unlike traditional transportation logistics companies like FedEx, Uber has an incredibly lightweight infrastructure: It owns no vehicles, employs no drivers, and pays no vehicle maintenance costs. Instead, its network relies on peer-to-peer coordination between drivers and passengers, enabled by sophisticated software and a clever reputation system. But despite its remarkable early success, Uber is an extremely polarizing company. Its business model is highly disruptive, and while disruptive innovation can be a good thing, it is also true that disruptive companies tend to break things. This is certainly true for Uber, and is one of the key tensions in the case: Uber's innovative business model is outpacing many of the laws regulating its industry, and while it is going to take the regulatory system some time to catch up, Uber doesn't appear to be willing to wait.
The Weather Company (TWC) was innovating by leveraging its big data on weather to create new consumer products. Weather was the original big data problem and over the years, TWC has capitalized on this data with its engaging TV coverage on The Weather Channel, as well as its popular website and mobile app. Recently, looking for new uses for its weather data, the company decided to build weather-related apps targeting outdoor enthusiasts. To crowd-source ideas for these apps, TWC invited all employees to a company-wide "hackathon" where they were asked to create a mobile app prototype for a segment of this population. At the end of the three-day event, everyone demonstrated their prototypes and the company executives decided to pursue OutSider, a mobile app for runners. Like most media sites, TWC employed an advertising-based revenue model. While TWC had millions of TV viewers and website visitors, it had limited information about them. However, with the profile information offered up by runners when they registered to use the OutSider app, as well as the data gathered by the smartphone sensors, TWC was poised to charge a premium for the vendor advertisements placed within the app. As well as illustrating the significance of leveraging data assets to create new products and services, the case also provides an example of the intersection of mobile and big data. When asked to name an innovative company, TWC would most likely not be top-of-mind for most individuals, yet the 30-year-old company was very entrepreneurial in its approach to consumer mobile app development. In addition to outlining TWC's ideation process, the case describes the composition of the mobile app development team, the implementation of agile software development methods, and its use of modern big data technologies.
Many software products in the market today handle big data and conduct advanced analytics. One of these is Statistical Analysis System (SAS), a popular software program especially in advanced analytics and data management. Many organizations, both federal and private, organize their databases in SAS format. The main hurdle which limits the number of SAS users, besides the high cost of its one-year only licenses, is a much steeper learning curve than is typical for other software such as STATA and Eviews. Students are often amazed by how simple it is to generate these statistics from raw data in SAS and are further motivated to learn SAS. This teaching material uses an application-oriented approach, with solving practical questions as the main takeaway.
A new generation of adaptive robots are creating new efficiencies for manufacturers and changing how companies build things, including factory floors themselves. And the robots are far more collaborative than their predecessors, enhancing engagement and job satisfaction among their human colleagues. New research headed by MIT's Julie Shah highlights the advantages of the new robots, showing that they have made manufacturing automation a less extreme commitment than it once was and offering a glimpse into the gains that will come when the new machines are paired with high performers. This reprint contains three additional Idea Watch articles. "Exploiting the 'Mobile Internet Gap'" is a visual representation of the rapid growth of digital private equity investment in countries where lots of people have cell phones but few of those phones have internet access--yet. "Do Regulators Go Easier on Socially Responsible Firms?" describes research showing that investing in CSR may be rewarded with leniency by regulators in the event of bribery violations. "'Inoculate' Buyers Against Disappointment" examines research demonstrating that instilling positive feelings about a company and then mildly challenging those feelings can shore up customer satisfaction if service breakdowns occur.
Before she joined Analysis Group, the author worked at a small economic consulting firm that--like most other firms in the industry--closely tracked and measured the profitability of each office and each practice area. That approach, she observed, created a lot of internal competition and divisiveness. In addition, the compensation model was formula-based and data-driven, largely determined by who was selling new business. Analysis Group uses a much different model: It determines partners' compensation without relying on formulas; it doesn't obsess over false precision about who sold what business; and pay isn't strictly a function of billable hours. Instead, extensive, informed discussion of each person's contributions to the firm leads to a decision about what pay seems fair. For one thing, Samuelson writes, in a professional services firm it's not always clear who deserves credit for a specific action. She is convinced that the firm's unconventional model is one of the reasons its culture is so strong.
What's the true test of a leader's worth? At HBR, we believe it's the results he or she produces over the long run. To see who measured up, we analyzed the performance of the CEOs in the S&P Global 1200 over their entire tenures and ranked them from best to worst. In this issue, we reveal who made the top 100. In our analysis, we tracked the shareholder returns each CEO generated, starting from day one on the job, along with the change in each company's market capitalization. We adjusted the returns for each industry and country, to offset any increase that was attributable merely to being in a hot market. Then, to account for the many aspects of leadership beyond financial success, we incorporated a measure of environmental, social, and governance performance. For this we relied on the ratings of the investment research firm Sustainalytics. Our view is that, in an era of big data and greater transparency, consumers and investors want to understand a company's culture and values, not just its share price. And as the number one CEO on this year's list, Novo Nordisk's Lars Sorensen, points out, the two are inextricably linked. "In the long term, social and environmental issues become financial issues," he says. In an interview with HBR's editors, the low-key Sorensen shares his thoughts on counterintuitive strategy, connecting with employees, and managing for a triple bottom line.
When a company connects with customers' emotions, the payoff can be huge. Yet building such connections is often more guesswork than science. To remedy that problem, the authors have created a lexicon of nearly 300 "emotional motivators" and, using big data analytics, have linked them to specific profitable behaviors. They describe how firms can identify and leverage the particular motivators that will maximize their competitive advantage and growth. The process can be divided into three phases. First, companies should inventory their existing market research and customer insight data, looking for qualitative descriptions of what motivates their customers--desires for freedom, security, success, and so on. Further research can add to their understanding of those motivators. Second, companies should analyze their best customers to learn which of the motivators just identified are specific or more important to the high-value group. They should then find the two or three of these key motivators that have a strong association with their brand. This provides a guide to the emotions they need to connect with in order to grow their most valuable customer segment. Third, companies need to make the organization's commitment to emotional connection a key lever for growth--not just in the marketing department but across every function in the firm.
The credit card giant Capital One is known for its pioneering use of marketing analytics and big data, so it might be surprising to read about its recent realization: that too much reliance on those tools had left it without a meaningful brand. The authors explain how the number one job of the CMO--to strike the right balance between promotions that goose revenue in the short term and brand-building campaigns that support healthy margins in the long term--has become dramatically harder in the age of data-driven targeting. Capital One got its own wake-up call when its CEO, Rich Fairbank, commissioned a brand equity study. The research revealed that Capital One was overwhelmingly known by consumers for just one attribute: "They send me lots of mail." Efforts to strengthen the brand and give Capital One a stronger foundation for future growth yielded five lessons--all learned and refined through conversations with other marketing executives, including Tony Pace, of Subway; Mark Addicks, of General Mills; Tariq Shaukat, of Caesars Entertainment; Russell Weiner, of Domino's; and Jim Speros, of Fidelity, as they dealt with the same tension in their very different organizations.
As digital technology has enabled shoppers to easily research and buy products online, sellers have been scrambling after them, trying to understand and satisfy their wants. Savvy companies, however, are using new tools, processes, and organizational structures to proactively lead digital customers from consideration to purchase and beyond. They are creating compelling customer journeys and managing them like any other product--and gaining a source of competitive advantage. Building successful journeys requires four key capabilities: (1) Automation, to smoothly carry customers through each step of their online path; (2) Personalization, to create a customized experience for each individual; (3) Contextual interaction, to engage customers and appropriately sequence the steps they take; and (4) Journey innovation, to add improvements that enhance and extend the journey and foster customer loyalty. In addition, the most successful companies have a particular organizational structure, with a chief experience officer overseeing a journey-focused strategist and a "journey product manager." This latter role is critical--the journey product manager leads a team of designers, developers, data analysts, marketers, and others to create and sustain superior journeys, and he or she is accountable for the journey's ROI and general business performance.