The best time to have a difficult conversation is, ideally, as soon as possible. Engaging in challenging conversations early can produce beneficial results for several reasons, such as resolving issues, improving communication, preserving relationships, and increasing efficiency. This note includes best practices for difficult conversations, how to initiate conversations, steps for guiding the dialogue, methods for upholding intentions, and examples of difficult conversations.
The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding was a world-renowned giant panda research institution and tourism destination and had successfully attracted millions of tourists since its opening. The surge in tourists, however, had also increased pressure to provide a tourist-friendly experience, and long wait times generated more complaints than any other issue. Tourists experienced long queues at the ticket offices and at the entrances of the panda house and delivery room, which greatly impacted their experience. Moreover, long queues also created other issues, such as managing crowding and the negative impacts on the giant pandas' emotional and psychological health as a result of the noise generated by tourists waiting in lines.
Research shows that innovators have a poor track record of predicting which of their own ideas will result in breakthroughs. But some ideas that appear to be incremental at first eventually prove to be blockbusters. Carrying more ideas through to incubation gives both the company and the broader market a chance to learn more about them and for unanticipated use cases to emerge.
Lego Group's crowdsourced innovation strategies have long been a model for open innovation. New research into how the company has advanced its practice of integrating customer communities into its idea-generation process yields additional lessons in how to integrate customer input into product development, and how to nurture creative customer communities.
With many knowledge workers working remotely, digital collaboration tools are more important than ever, but how do they affect creativity and innovation? The authors studied the content of communications generated through the use of these tools at a manufacturing company and found that these technologies can support the formation of both loose, open networks and tightly controlled, closed groups with different implications for creative output.
Jonathan Gray, the head of Digital Assets at NorthCentral Bank, was tasked with deciding how the bank should approach the growing demand for cryptocurrency (crypto) investment products and services. As the fintech industry continued to grow rapidly and younger digital consumers expressed a desire for crypto-friendly products, the bank had to decide how to proceed. Gray considered three options: maintaining the status quo and not offering crypto products; developing investment-only products and services around digital assets; or becoming a meaningful ecosystem player by offering wallets and enabling users to acquire crypto assets and use them natively on blockchains. Each option had its own benefits and risks, and Gray had to decide which path is best for NorthCentral Bank to remain competitive in the rapidly evolving fintech industry.
Ola Electric Mobility Pvt. Ltd. (Ola Electric) was launched in 2017 by ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd., better known as Ola Cabs, as a venture for making electric scooters. Bhavish Aggarwal, one of Ola Cabs’ founders, acquired a 92.5 per cent stake in Ola Electric and pursued a path of rapid expansion. By 2022, Ola Electric had successfully raised a large amount of capital from investors, developed several subsystems (especially software) of its products in-house, carried out two product launches and generated tens of thousands of bookings from customers, and was building a state-of-the-art plant for making electric scooters. While Ola Electric’s scooters had received positive reviews from a few expert reviewers and generated customer bookings, the company found it difficult to deliver defect-free scooters in sufficient numbers. The company was also mired in a number of controversies, such as some of its scooters catching fire, alleged safety issues with its products, publicly sharing a customer’s private data, and the departure of several executive from the company. Blunt communication by the founder and majority owner Aggarwal made some of the controversies worse. Aggarwal and his team now had to determine how to address the challenges and decide whether to focus on tackling these or on aggressively pursuing greater volumes. In which direction should they steer the company’s strategy?
Mamaearth, founded in 2016, started as a direct-to-consumer personal-care brand and carved a niche for itself as a trusted, toxin-free baby-care, skin-care, and hair-care brand in a competitive Indian personal-care market landscape that included established multinationals. In 2022, its parent company, Honasa Consumer Private Limited (HCL), raised $52 million in financing for a valuation of US $1.2 billion, becoming the first unicorn of 2022. HCL also acquired BBlunt, a hair-care and styling-products business in a ₹1.34 billion deal that was seen as a significant step toward meeting Mamaearth's growth aspirations. In a competitive personal-care market landscape, the leading companies had realized health-aware consumers' need for natural and toxin-free products and were innovating and aggressively pushing chemical-free products. Mamaearth now faced a challenge in taking the next leap forward: it needed to grow its market, retain its sustainable positioning, determine its consumer segment, and build a communication strategy around these factors as a trusted, toxin-free skin-care and hair-care company.
Alex Tapscott, business author and alternative investment market professional, explains why he thinks believing in a decentralized future is as deadly practical as Blaise Pascal's wager on God.
Fundrr was a South Africa-based alternative funding business that launched in 2018. The business's goal had been to disrupt the South African business lending landscape, specifically at the small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) level where the majority (about 71 per cent) of SMEs generated annual revenues of less than R200,000 and employed between two and five people. Reflecting on the company's journey in October 2021, the company's founders realized that Fundrr had weathered the COVID-19 storm and had grown 630 per cent between September 2020 and September 30, 2021. However, there was a discrepancy between their current client base and the founders' vision for the company as a disruptive, innovative, entrepreneurship-friendly alternative funder seeking to offer financial backing options independent of those granted by traditional banking institutions. The typical Fundrr client was usually in their fifties and male. Operating on a continent with the youngest population in the world, what did this say about their marketing and brand positioning? How could they apply the same resourcefulness and relevance to position the business into the future?
This final note in the five-part series on competitive-cost analysis introduces the concept of the experience curve, which can be analyzed with a log-log relationship between unit cost and cumulative volume.
Companies are increasingly embracing the idea of helping nontechnical employees those with deep business-area expertise learn to automate mundane, repetitive, time-consuming processes through minimal training in low-code and no-code technologies. This article describes the benefits and challenges that six companies AT&T, Dentsu, Johnson & Johnson, PwC, Voya Financial, and Wesco experienced in their forays into the citizen automation movement.
Neeraj Bakshi, who bought a vodka distillery in 2019 in Mississauga, Ontario, had big dreams for the distillery and purchased a 2.5-hectare property in Welland, Ontario, to increase its production capacity. Bakshi had invested significantly in NB Distillers, which now produced three types of vodka, two types of whisky, and one type of gin, and he wanted to see nothing but success. He had advertised on billboards, bus shelters, and radio, but he wanted to spend his communication budget more strategically and was open to trying new ideas. Now, in May 2021, he needed answers to several important questions: What audience segment should NB Distillers target? How should Bakshi position the distillery? What other promotional tools might help him achieve greater brand awareness?
Abraham Heifets and his co-founder, Izhar Wallach, had founded Atomwise to develop i) an AI engine to transform drug discovery by creating better medicines faster, and ii) a machine learning-based discovery engine that combined the power of convolutional neural networks with massive chemical libraries to discover new small molecule medicines. Computational chemists employed at big pharmaceutical companies were interested in trying these engines and associated tools on their projects. On the other hand, Atomwise could keep its tools for itself if it were to become a pharmaceutical company on its own. These options would chart very different courses for Atomwise. The case articulates the dilemma facing Heifets and Wallach, as they contemplated committing to a business model that would leverage the strengths of the technology to deliver value for patients and for investors.
In June 2022, Mohamed Salah, one of the world's best soccer players, and his lawyer and advisor Ramy Abbas Issa were in ongoing discussions with top English Premier League club Liverpool FC about a new playing contract for Salah. Arguably the Arab world's biggest sports superstar, Salah's contract was due to expire next summer and so this was the time to try to secure a big contract from his current club. But renegotiating with Liverpool had been a lengthy and increasingly tense process, and the two parties were still far apart. Salah for the first time had to face the possibility that his long-term future might be with another club. Were Abbas and Salah right to continue to push Liverpool for a better deal-even if Salah, who would turn 30 in a few days, already was one of the highest-paid players in the world? What was the right mix between fixed and variable compensation-specifically, was it wise for Abbas and Salah to entertain Liverpool's push for a higher share of performance-related compensation? And could and should Abbas and Salah bring his image rights to the table to try to break the deadlock?
Trilling Foods, a regional bricks-and-mortar grocery chain, has recently provided its frontline managers with new tools for using data. Allison Andersen, Trilling's VP of Data Science, has spearheaded these efforts. Yet, as she works with Kent Wade, the general manager of one of Trilling's grocery stores, Andersen quickly discovers that many frontline workers are not bought into it. Taking the perspectives of managers from across multiple levels of the organization, the case examines how individuals with different backgrounds and experiences manage digital transformation.