This case traces the rise and rise of Amazon.com, the second company after Apple to hit a trillion dollar market cap. The growth of Amazon is described, from its origins back in 1995 through to 2016. The case intentionally provides a lot of detail on specific new products and services created over this twenty year period, and how many of these were highly risky bets, and some were failures. For example: there is a discussion of how Amazon survived the original dotcom bubble bursting by deliberately reducing investment and showing a profit for the first time; the origins of Amazon Prime, Amazon marketplace, the Kindle, Amazon Web Services, and Amazon video are all described with enough detail for students to ask, why did they do this? What was the bigger purpose behind these moves? The case also talks about Amazon's management principles and organization culture. For example, one of Bezos's guiding principles was to "obsess over customers" - meaning always seeking out ways to improve the quality of their buying experience and offering additional services and products to meet their evolving needs. There is also a discussion of the "always day one" culture, the "willingness to be misunderstood" and the style of leadership Bezos exhibits.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. A survey of top business executives from major international organizations found that 79% said it was extremely important to have leaders who act on behalf of the entire organization, not just their units. The rest said it was very important. Nearly 65% said they expected at least half of their senior and midlevel managers to behave as enterprise leaders -that is, executives who are as successful at serving the needs of the enterprise as they are at growing the units they head. The expectation that managers will know what's happening elsewhere in the enterprise is rising, authors Douglas A. Ready and M. Ellen Peebles write, but few organizations have been set up to support the development of such enterprise leaders. So how are managers learning to become effective enterprise leaders, and how can organizations encourage their development? The authors surveyed and interviewed scores of executives from the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and focused on three companies: Pfizer, Li & Fung, and Unilever. They found that regardless of the business or the location, enterprise leaders developed their capabilities in similar ways -through a combination of deliberate personal development, high-level mentoring, and opportunities afforded by their work that enabled strong unit performers to become even more effective as enterprise leaders. According to the authors, the essence of enterprise leadership lies in combining two often incompatible roles -those of builder and broker. That means executives need to build their unit's vision and integrate it into the wider corporate vision, clarifying where the enterprise is going and how their teams can best contribute, both within and beyond unit boundaries. They must build unit capabilities and share resources and business know-how across units to contribute to enterprisewide organizational capability.

Although learning executives such as chief learning officers must shoulder the burden of developing the company's talent capabilities and supporting strategic priorities, the authors argue that CEOs and other top executives have a critical role to play. Personal engagement and leadership on the part of the CEO can make a big difference in setting the right tone for the organization. While companies often begin with training-needs assessments, the authors recommend starting by mapping what they call the "CEO agenda"to ensure that learning gets properly aligned with strategy. This connects learning and development with the company's specific needs and cuts through the noise of multiple initiatives vying for attention -highlighting the critical "must-win battles"that the CEO has identified. The next task is to operationalize the learning agenda through a portfolio of learning and development activities. This involves doing an inventory of existing learning and development resources. Companies should repeat this on a regular basis, the authors say, to ensure that the activities in place reflect the company's learning strategy. Companies should be wary about making wholesale changes to learning portfolios and organizational structures, the authors warn, unless there are major shifts in the company's mission or business context. Reorganizations "should be limited to situations where they are warranted -for example, when the learning agenda is misaligned with corporate strategy or the strategy changes." Like the CEO agenda, the company's learning agenda should articulate the essential strategic initiatives for corporate learning. Choices about what to include or eliminate to bring learning activities in line with current priorities should not be made in isolation, and the authors say it's important to get input and buy-in from both the learning organization and business leaders -all the way to the CEO level.

But what is the right way to apply this theory? What are its core elements, and how predictive is it? In this article, authors Andrew A. King and Baljir Baatartogtokh examine these questions. To begin with, they found that the theory's essential validity and generalizability has been seldom tested in the academic literature. The studies that have been published fail to provide confirmatory evidence for the theory. To assess the theory, the authors surveyed and interviewed experts on each of 77 cases discussed in Christensen's two books, The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution (the latter with coauthor Michael E. Raynor). Based on the interviews, the authors found that many of the theory's exemplary cases did not fit its conditions and predictions. A handful corresponded with all of the theory's elements (for instance, the disruptions by salesforce.com, Intuit QuickBooks, and Amazon.com). But the majority were found to include different motivating forces, and some displayed unpredicted outcomes. Among them were cases involving legacy costs, the effect of numerous competitors, and changing economies of scale. The threats faced by the companies in the sample, the authors say, cannot be understood from a single viewpoint or solved by a single prescription. "Instead,"they write, "managers need to evaluate difficult problems from a number of different perspectives. In that spirit, we do not advocate discarding the theory of disruption. Rather, we recommend using its best parts in addition to classical approaches to strategic analysis."Case studies about disruptive innovation "can provide warnings of what may happen,"the authors argue, "but they are no substitute for critical thinking. High-level theories can give managers encouragement, but they are no replacement for careful analysis and difficult choices."

The authors conducted two surveys, yielding responses from more than 1,200 young professionals, and had 18 in-depth interviews to examine the work behaviors and experiences of early-career, highly skilled employees. They found that young professionals have short average tenures at organizations. Ninety-two percent of them are on the lookout for other job opportunities while employed, and their job search continues even if they seem engaged in their current job. They consider jobs with high stakes, top management support, and ample formal training the most valuable and important for their career development, and they want more coaching, mentoring, and formal training from employers than is currently given to them. The authors organize their conclusions around three themes: the rewards of job change, the job-search behaviors of this footloose group of professionals, and the management-development practices that may keep them with employers. The researchers note that their findings on the relationship between employer changes and promotions represent a radical departure from both previous empirical research and past conventional wisdom about job hopping and career success. A decade ago, it was generally believed that promotions accompanied with a disproportionately large increase in responsibility were more likely to be given to insiders than outsiders. This advantage seems to have eroded: The authors found no marked differences between the promotion patterns of job hoppers and those who stayed with the same employer during the early stage of their career. Young professionals have marked and ambitious career goals that are often not linked to any particular organization, and they don't see frequent jumps across employers in a negative light. In fact, this relentless job search is not necessarily driven by dissatisfaction with the job and the intention to leave the organization, as traditional models of job search and turnover might assume.

A prototypical high-road company the author cites is Southwest Airlines Co., which has been the most profitable airline in the U.S. over the past 30 years and has also often been rated as one of the best places in the U.S. to work. Also mentioned is Market Basket, a family-owned grocery store chain headquartered in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. In the summer of 2014, Market Basket's legacy of low prices, good customer service, and good-quality jobs was highlighted when a family feud broke out among members of its board of directors and the family member who had been serving as CEO and was popular among employees was fired. After a six-week "strike"by nonunion employees and managers that had broad community and media support (it caused an astounding 92% reduction in the company's revenues), the board agreed to sell the business to the ousted CEO, whose reinstatement employees had sought. Standard economics argues that the higher labor costs are as a proportion of total costs, the more important it is to control these costs. However, the author explains, high-road companies take another view, relying heavily on practices including screening employees for their strong technical, problem-solving, and collaborative skills; investment in training and development of the full workforce; compensation systems that align employee and company interests through profit sharing and/or payment for attaining higher levels of skills; and labor-management partnerships.

However, he writes, there is an important third dimension: the detection lead time. This is the amount of warning time during which a company can prepare for the disruption and mitigate its effects. As the author explains, some disruptions involve long-term trends that are widely discussed in the media (for example, aging populations in the Western world, China, and Japan) or are prescheduled events (such as new regulations or labor union contract deadlines; some (for instance, hurricanes) occur after a short warning of a few days; while others such as fires, earthquakes, or power outages occur without warning. Still other disruptions (such as product contaminations or design defects) may not be discovered until well after they've occurred or may never be recognized (for example, industrial espionage or cyberattacks). Drawing on examples from companies including Dow Chemical, Ikea, BNSF Railway, Walgreen's, Cisco Systems, UPS, and FedEx, the article presents nine data sources that leading companies use to improve their ability to detect potential disruptions early: monitoring the weather; tracking the news; using data from sensors; monitoring the supply base; visiting suppliers; being on the alert for deception; developing traceability capabilities; monitoring social media; and tracking regulatory developments. The article then discusses four ways companies can improve their abilities to both detect and respond to disruptions: (1) mapping the supply chain to determine the locations of their suppliers to assess supplier risks, (2) assessing global events to identify potential disruptions that could affect production or revenues, (3) creating supply chain control towers with technology, people, and processes that capture and use supply chain data to enable better short- and long-term decision making, and (4) improving response time through data and analysis.

When Dunn became the CEO of Bolthouse, in 2008, he had 20 years' experience in the soft drinks industry. If Coca-Cola could persuade people to drink more than a billion servings of its soda each day, he wondered, why couldn't Bolthouse do the same for a vegetable? He and his team decided to use some of the tactics of junk food companies, which are experts in demand creation. "Eat 'Em Like Junk Food," Bolthouse's multimillion-dollar marketing campaign, used tongue-in-cheek TV, print, and digital ads to liken baby carrots to Cheetos, Doritos, and other snack food favorites. The company put its products in vending machines, used "Sesame Street" characters on its packaging, and sold through retailers such as Walmart and 7-Eleven. It created carrot snack packs, developed 27 varieties of juices and smoothies, and put veggie and fruit purees in squeezable tubes. And it attracted the attention of Campbell's, which acquired Bolthouse in 2012.

Since 1980 global corporate profits have grown at an unprecedented pace, increasing their share of global GDP by 30%. North American and Western European multinationals have been the biggest beneficiaries, capturing more than half of corporate profits by leveraging their scale and exploiting unprecedented opportunities for reducing costs. This remarkable era is now coming to an end. Growth is slowing, costs are rising, and new rivals from emerging economies and from the technology sector are changing the rules. In the decade ahead, the authors forecast, profits will continue to increase in absolute terms, but they will fall to 7.9% of global GDP--around what they were when the boom began. To maintain their lead, executives in Western multinationals must consider the following responses. (1) Be paranoid. Instead of focusing internally, executives in Western firms need to understand their new rivals. (2) Seek out patient capital. Emerging-market firms and technology companies often take a long view, building their market share over years at the expense of short-term profits. (3) Radically self-disrupt. Companies must overcome strategic inertia by reallocating capital as conditions change. (4) Build new intellectual assets. The most profitable businesses are in idea-intensive industries, so intellectual capital, such as data and algorithms, is a prime asset. (5) Go to war for talent. As populations age and talent becomes scarce, now is the time for human capital management to become a strategic priority.

As companies internationalize, their employees lose shared assumptions and norms. People in different countries react to inputs differently, communicate differently, and make decisions differently. Organically grown corporate cultures begin to break down; miscommunication becomes more frequent, and trust erodes, especially between the head office and the regional units. In their efforts to fix these problems, companies risk compromising attributes that underlie their commercial success. INSEAD's Erin Meyer presents five principles that can prevent disintegration. Managers should: (1) Identify the dimensions of difference between the corporate culture and local ones; (2) Make sure every cultural group has a voice; (3) Protect the most creative units, letting communication and job descriptions remain more ambiguous; (4) Train everyone in key norms; and (5) Ensure diversity in every location. Getting culture right should never be an afterthought. Companies that don't plan for how individual employees and the organization as a whole will adapt to working in a global marketplace will sooner or later stumble because of unnoticed potholes. By the time they regain their balance, their economic opportunity may have passed.

Many companies today rely on employees around the world, leveraging their diversity and local expertise to gain a competitive edge. However, geographically dispersed teams face a big challenge: Physical separation and cultural differences can create social distance, or a lack of emotional connection, that leads to misunderstandings and mistrust. To help global team leaders manage effectively, the author shares her SPLIT framework for mitigating social distance. It has five components: (1) Structure. If a team is made up of groups with different views about their relative power, the leader should connect frequently with those who are farthest away and emphasize unity. (2) Process. Meeting processes should allow for informal interactions that build empathy. (3) Language. Everyone, regardless of language fluency, should be empowered to speak up. (4) Identity. Team members must be active cultural learners and teachers to understand one another's identity and avoid misinterpreting behaviors. (5) Technology. When choosing between videoconferencing, e-mail, and other modes of communication, leaders should ask themselves if real-time conversation is desirable, if their message needs reinforcement, and if they are opting for the technology they want others to use.

The author of the book "Global Dexterity: How to Adapt Your Behavior Across Cultures Without Losing Yourself in the Process," Molinsky draws on his years of field research, teaching, and consulting to advise managers who must learn to adapt to a new culture. He focuses on how people practice new behaviors in actual situations, such as speaking up in a meeting or giving performance feedback, rather than on the differences between cultures. He suggests an approach that consists of three stages: (1) Figure out what the cultural norms are and how they differ from the home culture in directness, enthusiasm, formality, assertiveness, self-promotion, and self-disclosure. (2) Figure out what the "zone of appropriateness" is in the new culture for each of those six dimensions. (3) Once you know what adaptations you can (and are willing) to make, practice them to develop "muscle memory." Certain psychological barriers may arise in the process. People get anxious about whether they're being authentic, or they feel incompetent and worry that others see them that way, or they become resentful of the hard and stressful work of adapting. But they often learn something interesting about themselves, Molinsky says, and that can be exciting.

Customers' assessments of quality and value, buying decisions, and recommendations are all influenced by emotions. But too often companies don't adequately anticipate those emotions and therefore can't mitigate negative ones. This is especially true for "high-emotion services"--those that trigger strong feelings before the service even begins. Services relating to major life events, such as birth, marriage, illness, and death, fall into this category, as do airline travel, car repair, and home buying, selling, and renovation. They may elicit intense feelings for the following reasons: lack of familiarity with the service, lack of control over its performance, major consequences if things go wrong, complexity that makes the service a black box, and a long duration. The authors have identified four guidelines that can help managers influence expectations and perceptions of quality and value, enhancing customers' satisfaction and loyalty: (1) Identify emotional triggers; (2) Respond early to intense emotions; (3) Enhance customers' control; and (4) Hire the right people. They use some leading providers of cancer care to illustrate the application of these guidelines.

The evolution of products into intelligent, connected devices is revolutionizing business. In a November 2014 article, "How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition," Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and PTC president and CEO James Heppelmann looked at how this shift is changing the structure of industries and forcing firms to rethink their strategies. In this companion article, the authors look at the effects inside firms, examining the impact that smart, connected products have on operations and organizational structure. The new capabilities and vast quantities of data that smart, connected products offer are redefining the activities of the core functions of companies--sometimes radically. As software and cloud-based operating systems become integral to products, new product-development principles emerge, manufacturing components and processes change, and IT security becomes the job of every function. Companies need different skills and expertise, which creates new imperatives for HR. In the marketing function, the ability to track a product's condition and use shifts the focus to maximizing the product's value to the customer over time. Customer relationships become continuous and open-ended, service becomes more efficient and proactive, and new business models are enabled. The rich data on location and environment that products provide take logistics to a whole new level.

People in creative roles may seem immune to others' input. The authors, who studied populations from toy developers to R&D scientists, say that creative types sometimes react in this way not so much because of ego but, rather, a sense of identity as an artist. The authors explore the particular characteristics of the "artist identity" and suggest four tactics for working with artists: (1) Offer broad suggestions. Artists may see specific, fully formed ideas as attempts to wrest creative control. Plant just the seed of a concept, and you inspire continued engagement. (2) Temper your enthusiasm. If you're too invested in your idea, you may imply that the artist can't contribute much. A dispassionate demeanor works better. (3) Delay decision making. Expect initial resistance, and give the artist ample time to consider your ideas on their merits. (4) Show respect and like-mindedness. Acknowledging an artist's prior thinking and work will reassure him or her that your ideas are not off-base.

The tennis star talks about his legendary comeback, managing his emotions on the court, and what makes a great coach.

Rocket Internet, a unique technology incubator based in Germany, invests in and develops startups in Europe and emerging markets that are versions of successful technology firms primarily located in the United States, such as eBay, Zappos, Amazon and Groupon. Fundamentally, the company seeks to reduce the uncertainty of entrepreneurial startup ventures by imitating proven business models and replicating them in other geographic regions. Rocket Internet has recently begun to expand into emerging markets more aggressively, and its chief executive officer must now decide on the best strategy to continue the firm's global expansion.

Jack Swain, the newly appointed CEO of Starling Systems, a call center software solutions company, had a problem. Swain had recently hired in a new VP of operations, Felicia Shaw, and while she had instituted a number of much-needed changes within the organization, she had not been well-received by the tight-knit customer service team. Specifically, Starling System's top performing customer service representative, Judith Fenton, was not happy and her productivity had dropped sharply as a result. Jack had a brief discussion with Judith at the coffee bar one morning, where she revealed her discontent with Felicia's "hovering" and "harping," declaring that she could not work with her any more. The vignette ends with Jack getting ready to plan his conversation with Felicia.

For the past 30 years, the president of Benevento Foods, a food processor located in northern New York State, has overseen unprecedented growth. In June 2014, the family-owned company has 90 full-time employees and provides baking mixes and bases to both small stand-alone bakeries and national grocery chains across the United States. It has plans to expand distribution to Mexico and Japan and to develop new product lines, especially for gluten-free items. However, it faces a serious quality failure: one of its customers has discovered pieces of rubber in the latest delivery of baking mix. Is this an isolated event or indicative of a bigger issue? Is it symptomatic of a poor quality culture, lack of accountability on the shop floor and/or a misallocation of resources? What can be done to solve the current problem and make sure it does not happen again?

For the past 30 years, the president of Benevento Foods, a food processor located in northern New York State, has overseen unprecedented growth. In June 2014, the family-owned company has 90 full-time employees and provides baking mixes and bases to both small stand-alone bakeries and national grocery chains across the United States. It has plans to expand distribution to Mexico and Japan and to develop new product lines, especially for gluten-free items. However, it faces a serious quality failure: one of its customers has discovered pieces of rubber in the latest delivery of baking mix. Is this an isolated event or indicative of a bigger issue? Is it symptomatic of a poor quality culture, lack of accountability on the shop floor and/or a misallocation of resources? What can be done to solve the current problem and make sure it does not happen again?