Formed in 2018, EyRIS was the brainchild of a long-term collaboration across healthcare researchers and practitioners, and computer scientists. EyRIS was launched to commercialise and sell an AI-driven algorithm called SELENA+ that analysed retinal images to screen for diabetes-related eye diseases. Over time, many moving parts came together to facilitate full-scale production usage of SELENA+ within the national-level Singapore Integrated Diabetic Retinopathy Programme (SiDRP). The facilitators included multiple individuals in the public healthcare sector medical field, and several government institutions such as Singapore's Ministry of Health (MOH), the Singapore National Eye Centre (SNEC), and Singapore's national healthtech agency, amongst others. Over the years, the algorithm was further fine-tuned and trained on as wide a data set as possible in studies that spanned ethnicities and age groups, eventually yielding highly accurate results. SELENA+'s results bridged the gap between research discovery and real-world use. Now, the team at EyRis had to commercialise SELENA+ and bring it to a wider range of markets and geographies. They faced numerous challenges in the process, within Singapore and in other countries. Nevertheless, by 2023, EyRIS' efforts paid off and the SELENA+ algorithm received regulatory approvals for use in a growing number of countries. Now, EyRIS' commercial heads, along with Dr Wong and the other co-founders, wondered how best they could continue to scale EyRIS' market reach and offerings.
The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) handles all online and mobile ticketing for the Indian Railways, the largest passenger carrier in the world, with an annual footfall of more than 8 billion. The IRCTC wished to monetise its data assets and floated a tender in July 2022 to engage a consultant for its data monetisation initiative. The tender faced severe backlash on social media from the lay public as well as privacy rights advocates, and invited the scrutiny of a Parliamentary Committee of the Government of India. Faced with this opposition, the IRCTC recalled the tender. This case allows students to analyse if there is value to IRCTC's data monetisation project and, if so, for which stakeholders. Should the tender be redesigned or should the IRCTC or Indian Railways do this exercise internally? Can data monetisation coexist with data privacy of stakeholders or should this project be abandoned? Would a tender for hiring a consultant for data analytics have seen as much resistance? The case highlights the importance of a tender document to be seen as a medium of communication for the lay public and not just as a commercial document for vendors.
Davis Bookhart, the founding director of Sustainability/Net Zero office, at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has an HKD 50 million problem. Four years ago, a fund was created to build a position of institutional leadership in sustainability from the largesse of the university's then president. Intended to pair students with research faculty and the university's operations staff in the development of sustainable, smart solutions to campus problems, the resultant program transformed the university's campus works into a living lab, offering an exploration of frontier problems in sustainability and an alternate pedagogical model to classroom teaching. Four years on, over 30 projects have been funded, with outcomes ranging from digitalizing the school's registrar to using artificial intelligence to build a smart monitoring system for the campus' bird population. Now, under new leadership and with its funding set to soon expire, Bookhart must reevaluate the living lab's impact and address how the case for a living lab might be institutionalized. He must also grapple with a broader question of what the role of the university will be in supporting early-stage innovation in China's now emerging Greater Bay Area?
The concept of courage has been associated with leaders and leadership for centuries. The purpose of this article is to explain the concept of courage and how to approach it in leadership practice by drawing on recent behavioural science and practice-based evidence. Specifically, it addresses four questions: What is courage? What does leadership courage look like in practice? Where does courage come from? And finally, how can we grow and sustain leadership courage? It is important both from an individual and an institutional perspective to identify and establish systems that support courageous leadership. Some specific systems include access to peer advisors, coaching, short sabbaticals, and support networks. The Center for Creative Leadership offers three insights about the nature and effectiveness of leadership, which are relevant to cultivating, growing, and sustaining courageous leadership. Firstly, leadership is cultivated and not inherited. Secondly, collaborations build strong leadership. Finally, good leadership never stops—meaning leadership learning and skill development must continue throughout one’s career. Ultimately, showing courage is also about finding meaning, and learning to embrace courage brings purposefulness, which in turn becomes an important ingredient in its sustenance.
VDart Inc (VDart) was founded by Sidd Ahmed in December 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, as a digital talent management and services firm, which grew at a steady rate to reach US$160 million in annual revenue and more than 2,550 employees in 2019. The same year, the company was classified as the 138th largest and fifty-sixth fastest-growing staffing firm in the United States. VDart’s global servicing hub was based in Tiruchirappalli, India, with about 380 employees who served clients from seven geographic locations. VDart differentiated itself from its competitors through its core values of appreciation, recognition, and encouragement (ARE) and through unique cultural practices including shout-outs during Monday conference calls, Friday Lunch & Learn sessions, and annual reward and recognition (R&R) events. Growing rapidly, VDart had set itself an ambitious goal of becoming a $500 million revenue firm by December 2022. However, the rapid growth was putting a strain on the existing culture, making it challenging to sustain and nurture it. Ahmed and the top management were finding it increasingly difficult to instill the VDart culture in new employees, realizing that the values which had propelled VDart’s success thus far would not take it to the next level. The case describes the company’s twelve-year growth journey, its unique cultural practices, and the growing pains, inviting students to think about options to manage culture during rapid growth.
In December 2019, Pembina Pipeline Corporation (Pembina) must evaluate an opportunity to partner with the Western Indigenous Pipeline Group (WIPG) to bid for the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) project owned by the Canadian government. Pembina’s chief executive officer had previously stated that the company was unlikely to bid on the pipeline due to the challenging legal landscape, especially regarding Indigenous land rights. However, since WIPG consists of Indigenous communities along the pipeline’s route, partnering could mitigate these concerns. If the project succeeds, the payback could solidify Pembina’s position as a market leader in oil and gas. Should Pembina proceed with the WIPG partnership? And if they do, how should they manage relations with governments and other stakeholders?
Economic downturns are frightening. Consumers curb spending, companies cut costs, and we all wait anxiously for the economy to recover. In such a climate, launching a product-an expensive and uncertain endeavor in the best of times-would seem to make little sense. But a new study finds that products launched during recessions outperform on several important measures. Even though people tend to limit spending during downturns, the timing may confer, for several reasons: There is less noise in the marketplace, making it easier to differentiate products and draw consumers' attention; the cost of running ads is often lower; and going ahead with new products in the midst of a weak economy is often perceived as a signal of corporate health. This article outlines other key insights from the research and offers guidance on how best to time product launches.
New research looked at the extent to which the employees of a fashion retailer followed the stocking recommendations of two algorithms: one whose workings were easy to understand and one that was indecipherable. Surprisingly, they accepted the guidance of the uninterpretable algorithm more often.
Cormac Kinney, Founder and CEO of Diamond Standard, was on a mission to transform the U.S. diamond market through unlocking the precious gems as market-traded assets. As a serial FinTech entrepreneur, he hoped to add an additional service to his vault: Carats. The commodity currency would be backed by a fungible resource, being the first in its field to have a physical-digital combination. Following the recent crypto-market crash, Kinney wondered if this was the right opportunity to launch his product. Although Kinney saw Carats as the best of both gold and other decentralized currencies, his advisors were wary of the potential regulatory risks that could ensue, in addition to the current dreary landscape of the crypto-market. Should Diamond Standard pursue Kinney's vision of Carats, or focus its limited resources on other diamond-backed financial products?
Since its founding in 2019 by Kim Kardashian and Jens Grede, Skims, a solutions-oriented brand creating the next generation of underwear, loungewear, and shapewear with an eye toward body-type and skin-tone inclusivity, has experienced a meteoric rise. Kardashian, who was a well-known media personality, socialite, influencer, and businesswoman, served as the brand's creative director and aesthetic muse and brought her cultural impact and followers into the brand. CEO Grede and COO Emma Grede had experience managing celebrity brand relationships and founding other celebrity brands. In July 2023, the company was valued at $4 billion, an incredible achievement for a direct-to-consumer products company. Skims seemed to be bucking the trend that was dragging down other DTC brands, which for the first time in a decade were having trouble raising new venture money, raising money in down rounds that diminished the valuations of their companies, or seeing sharp stock price declines post-IPO. Instead of looking to other DTCs for inspiration, Skims' founders were inspired by brands such as Nike, Apple, and lululemon, hoping to propel Skims to iconic brand status. With the recent $4 billion valuation, Skims' investors would pressure the management team to drive exponential topline growth while managing profitability. Could Skims continue to accelerate its growth trajectory or would it fall prey to the same forces slowing down the growth and profitability of other DTC brands?
In the early 2010s ADM, a century-old agricultural products and services company, embarked on a big transformation. It streamlined and reorganized its divisions, refocused its teams on smart investments and innovation, and became more strategic and disciplined about capital, costs, and cash. But then the leadership team turned its attention to another important C: customers. The goal was to reorient the business toward value-added nutrition products and services, a more stable sector in which it could build a broader base for growth and impact. Now the company is split into three segments: agricultural services and oilseeds; carbohydrate solutions; and nutrition. All three units sell not just raw or processed commodities but differentiated products. And ADM's leaders have identified three long-term global macro trends-food security, sustainability, and health and well-being-around which the company is making capital-allocation, strategic, and operational decisions. This transformation has been methodical and mission-driven. In 2019 ADM unveiled a new corporate purpose-"to unlock the power of nature to enrich the quality of life"-and over the past decade its heightened focus on innovating for the customer has brought it even closer to fulfilling that purpose. This story offers lessons for other companies that are trying to envision and execute similar change efforts.
In the coming decades, as the pace of technological change continues to increase, millions of workers may need to be not just upskilled but reskilled-a profoundly complex societal challenge that will sometimes require workers to both acquire new skills and change occupations entirely. Companies have a critical role to play in addressing this challenge, but to date few have taken it seriously. To learn more about what their role will entail, the authors-members of a collaboration between the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard's Digital Reskilling Lab and the Boston Consulting Group's Henderson Institute-interviewed leaders at some 40 organizations around the world that are investing in large-scale reskilling programs. In synthesizing what they learned, they became aware of five paradigm shifts that are emerging in reskilling: (1) Reskilling is a strategic imperative. (2) It is the responsibility of every leader and manager. (3) It is a change-management initiative. (4) Employees want to reskill-when it makes sense. (5) It takes a village. The authors argue that companies will need to understand and embrace these shifts if they hope to succeed in adapting dynamically to the rapidly evolving new era of automation and AI.
Governments around the world are increasingly intervening in the private sector through industrial policies designed to help domestic sectors reach goals that markets alone are unlikely to achieve. Companies in targeted sectors-such as automakers, energy companies, and semiconductor manufacturers-may experience dramatic changes in their operating environments. The policies could create new costs or deliver significant financial incentives to shift R&D or manufacturing investments. They might also incent firms to alter their supplier networks or change their trading partners. Managers who have grown up in markets without such interventions are now facing an unfamiliar environment. In this article, HBS professor Willy C. Shih outlines some of the policy approaches and offers a framework for responding to them. Business leaders need to understand the competing interests shaping the policies, engage and educate political leaders and their staffs, collaborate with upstream and downstream partners, and weigh the pros and cons of accepting government incentives.
Does your firm's culture support its strategy? If not, you'll need to retool your culture, and that's not so easy to do. The values, beliefs, and norms that make it up are intangible and diffused throughout your organization, and employees tend to resist anything that threatens established behaviors and relationships. To figure out the secret to doing cultural change well, the authors examined how business leaders around the world approached it. They learned that successful ones didn't begin with workshops, studies, or new HR policies. They began by creating stories highlighting actions that were deeply inconsistent with a firm's established culture but reinforced an alternative culture more aligned with its strategies. The most effective stories were authentic, featured the leaders themselves, offered a break with the past and a path to the future, appealed to hearts and minds, and were dramatic and memorable. Most critically, they empowered employees to begin crafting their own stories about cultural change so that everyone in the organization ended up co-creating a new culture together.
In recent years leading executives-from firms like Google, Bridgewater, and Netflix-have touted the advantages of a work environment marked by candid feedback. Employees seem to have bought into the benefits too. In a 2019 survey, 94% said that corrective feedback improved their performance when it was presented well. Unfortunately, the increased diversity of our workplaces has made it much more likely that feedback won't go over well and will be misinterpreted as an act of hostility. That's because people from different cultures, genders, and generations have varying expectations for how feedback is delivered and by whom. What's standard in America, for instance, can come off as harsh or baffling in other countries. Boomers and Millennials hold radically different ideas about what's appropriate too. And gender differences add to the complexity. Women who are frank are often seen as aggressive, and men have a bad tendency to offer unwelcome advice. This article explains how to navigate the divides: Understand the norms of feedback recipients and adjust for them. Follow the three A's-make sure any advice is intended to assist, actionable, and asked for. Last, get everyone on your team on the same page by establishing a common approach and building regular feedback loops into your collaborations.
Generative AI and other easy-to-use software tools can help employees with no coding background become adept programmers, or what the authors call citizen developers. By simply describing what they want in a prompt, citizen developers can collaborate with these tools to build entire applications-a process that until recently would have required advanced programming fluency. Information technology has historically involved builders (IT professionals) and users (all other employees), with users being relatively powerless operators of the technology. That way of working often means IT professionals struggle to meet demand in a timely fashion, and communication problems arise among technical experts, business leaders, and application users. Citizen development raises a critical question about the ultimate fate of IT organizations. How will they facilitate and safeguard the process without placing too many obstacles in its path? To reject its benefits is impractical, but to manage it carelessly may be worse. In this article the authors share a road map for successfully introducing citizen development to your employees.
Business leaders are being urged to adopt a multistakeholder approach to governance in place of the shareholder-centered approach that has guided their work for several decades. But through hundreds of interviews with directors, executives, investors, governance professionals, and academics over the years, the author has found wide differences in how those leaders understand stakeholder capitalism. That lack of clarity can put boards and executives on a collision course with one another when decisions requiring difficult trade-offs among stakeholders' interests arise. It also creates expectations among stakeholders that if unfulfilled will fuel cynicism, alienation, and distrust. To help reduce the risk of such negative consequences, the author has created a guide for corporate leaders that illuminates four versions of stakeholder capitalism: instrumental, classic, beneficial, and structural. They reflect significantly different levels of commitment to the interests of stakeholders and rest on very different rationales.
Companies typically treat their innovation projects as a portfolio, aiming for a mix of projects that collectively meet their strategic objectives. The problem, say the authors, is that portfolio objectives have become standardized, and innovation projects are often only weakly related to a company's distinctive strategy. This article introduces a new tool to help leaders better align their innovation investments. The strategic innovation tool kit has two elements: a strategy summary framework and an innovation basket. Leaders start by clarifying a unit's strategy and determining what needs to change to achieve it. The change needs are translated into innovation goals, and leaders create their "innovation basket" by plotting each project against those goals. They can then cut projects that aren't aligned and create new ones that are. It's an iterative and creative process: Projects are adjusted to fit the strategy but can also shape it. Examples from the authors' research demonstrate how the process of creating an innovation basket gives managers fresh insight into what their innovation activities are really doing for their strategy.
The increasing frequency of interactions we have with AI and automated technologies means it is vital to understand how those things make people feel about themselves. Why? Because how people feel about themselves affects a wide range of success factors, including sales, customer loyalty, word-of-mouth referrals, employee satisfaction, and employee performance. The authors have been studying people's reactions to automated technology for more than seven years. In this article they focus on psychological responses to AI and automated technologies that they've observed in service and business-process design, product design, and communication, and offer practical guidance to help leaders and managers figure out how best to use these new technologies to serve customers, support employees, and advance the interests of their organization.