Analytics is often seen as a threat by senior managers, yet good analytics can inform decision makers and lead to better decisions. Senior executives are likely to react negatively if their deeply held intuition is challenged by results derived from data that use analytics that they do not understand. However, a manager’s job is enriched when it changes from an operations-level, decision-making function to a role in which a complex system is supervised. While leadership and interpersonal skills remain crucial, executives must now possess the ability to critically assess and utilize the innovations emerging from data and advanced analytics. Big data can also lead to new business models, such as when retailers determine the precise needs of their customers and no longer need retail space. This article suggests ways that managers can mine big data to enable their firm to establish and sustain a competitive advantage. It illustrates how Dell analysts were able to define a lucrative product line of pre-configured computers and how IBM Research partnered with Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world’s largest bank by market capitalization, to develop a highly successful branch network optimization system.

The tendency of firms during an economic slowdown to wait for the economy to improve and then plan to act often leads to stagnation. Lack of resources has been identified as a major challenge that firms face in implementing strategy. Lean innovation, despite a negative reputation, is an effective means of harnessing resources and eliminating excessive complexity in business. Lean innovation both frees up resources so that they can be applied to innovation projects, and creates a morale boost through eliminating waste. Ideas, the author suggests, are often found from suppliers, employees, and customers, not just R&D departments. Central to the lean innovation framework is the generation, refinement, and spread of ideas. In determining how to refine our ideas, it helps to frame the situation with a question: “What problem is being solved?” The importance of an innovation culture is illustrated by the example of Kodak, which lacked such a culture and went bankrupt after the spread of digital cameras. Indeed, incumbent firms are often unprepared to deal with the appearance of a new model and fail to adapt. Conversely, Netflix embodies the spirit of an innovation culture, as it was willing to introduce video on demand even if it meant eroding growing revenues from its traditional video rental delivery service.

Google has been ranked as the best place to work in the United States. It practices a time allocation method of 70-20-10, with 70 per cent of employees’ time devoted to Google’s core business of search and advertising, 20 per cent to off-budget products, and 10 per cent to ideas based on personal interests and competencies. Luxury perks and generous rewards for employee innovations improve the likelihood that employees stay at Google instead of forming competing ventures. The firm is notable for its employee loyalty and investor confidence; the two founders and the CEO, Eric Schmidt, even took an annual salary of $1 just before the initial public offering in 2004. Schmidt’s leadership practices can be summarized as follows: 1. Get to know your employees. 2. Create new ways to reward and promote your high-performing employees. 3. Let your employees own the problems you want them to solve. 4. Allow employees to function outside the company hierarchy. 5. Have your employees’ performance reviewed by someone they respect for their objectivity and impartiality. This article concludes with the eight qualities of Google’s leader-managers, which relate to coaching, empowering, well-being, productivity, communication, career development, vision, and technical skills.

The innovation function — the starting point for creating new advantages — is ineffective in most companies. Warning signs that an innovation process is broken can be grouped into six categories. 1. Innovation is episodic. Innovation should be continuous and systematic, yet it is often downsized during a company’s financial struggles and is sometimes suppressed if a new idea threatens existing business models. 2. The innovation process is invented from scratch. Companies often neglect the wealth of educational opportunities and coaching, as well as the vast literature on venturing and entrepreneurship. 3. Resources are held hostage by incumbent businesses. Allowing existing businesses to determine where employees and funds are allocated does not enable or support innovation. 4. Innovations are force-fitted into existing structures. New businesses should be given combinations of people, assets, and resources that suit their particular needs. 5. Applying the same criteria to evaluate both an innovation and the core business. It is wrong to use the same planning, budgeting, and control processes for things that are predictable and those that are not. 6. Insisting on the venture meeting the plan. Many innovation leaders try to defend past assumptions even after they have been proven wrong.

Corporate directors should look for three criteria in executives: competencies, commitment, and character. This article focuses on leadership character, the least understood of the three criteria. The authors met with over 300 business leaders on three continents, who identified character weaknesses or defects — including overconfidence, lack of transparency, and lack of accountability — as central to the Global Financial Crisis. The authors posit 11 dimensions of character — integrity, humility, courage, humanity, drive, accountability, temperance, justice, collaboration, transcendence, and judgment. They examine why character has not been studied extensively, given its relation to the crisis, and point to the lack of resources that the private and public sectors have spent on studying character (in contrast to competencies), as well as the common misperception of character as a “soft,” non-quantifiable construct. Character is revealed by how individuals behave in particular situations, and a full character assessment requires a deep and wide-ranging examination of a person’s life and work history over an extensive time period. Directors can influence character development in their organizations by discussing dimensions of character during appraisal processes, developing formal leadership profiles, and introducing character-focused discussion into their own board assessments.

With the leaders of global organizations increasingly unable to individually grasp the full complexity of firms’ worldwide operations, the task more than ever falls to groups of leaders at the top. These groups of leaders must be diverse in expertise and experiences and yet also synchronized in directing global organizations. These two imperatives often lead to conflict, but leaders can overcome difficulties by forming “leadership ensembles.” Effective leadership ensembles are characterized by foresight and preemptive change, agility rather than fixed governance roles, and the application of synthetic intelligence. Research on top executives has yielded four blueprints for decision making that successful ensembles follow. “Incubators” value a cohesive corporate culture and emphasize cultural fit with any new addition. “Diplomats” allow flexibility between local businesses and headquarters. “Engineers” try to optimize organizational structures and processes and tie their firms together, as well as foster a single culture. “Directors” want decisions to be made by those closest to the operations. Global leadership ensembles can improve their decision making significantly by understanding which blueprint leaders prefer; continually assessing how their preferred blueprint helps or hinders the organization’s goals for global expansion; and understanding the connection between the blueprint and how the ensemble operates.

KSOIL has a project that bills customers on units of documents delivered. The productivity of employees is evaluated on the same basis. The output of the home-based team has increased two to three times compared to its previous office-based performance. As a result, the rewards and compensation for the home-based team have doubled compared to office-based employees. The head of HR is convinced home-based workers are using unfair means to achieve such high output. She is against the decision of the project manager to increase the size of the home-based team. She believes this will only increase the unrest among office-based workers. The general manager needs to make a decision soon, while keeping in mind the profitability, employee welfare and ethics of the firm.

The founder and CEO of a management company needs to address the future of its joint venture in Iran with a U.S. developer of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The joint venture partners need to decide whether to pursue a potential client’s request for a custom version of the ERP system that the joint venture sells. The two partners disagree regarding the strategic direction forward, but must make a decision.

Supplement to case W12442 In 2010, a recent business graduate tries to resolve a constant bottleneck in the printing department of the family business. The two-part case discusses the issues of identifying the need for relevant information and then discusses the staff's resistance to change and how these objections were handled and overcome. This pair of cases seeks to identify the pressures faced by small businesses, along with the task of managing the various stakeholders, including the father-owner and the personnel on the factory shop floor.

In 2010, a recent business graduate tries to resolve a constant bottleneck in the printing department of the family business. The two-part case discusses the issues of identifying the need for relevant information and then discusses the staff's resistance to change and how these objections were handled and overcome. This pair of cases seeks to identify the pressures faced by small businesses, along with the task of managing the various stakeholders, including the father-owner and the personnel on the factory shop floor.

OSI, one of the world's largest suppliers of processed meats to McDonald's and other QSRs, was in the middle of a $400M expansion in China that included backward integration into poultry production. However, its current customers took only a portion of each bird produced and OSI had to develop a go-to-market strategy for the rest. The case describes the opportunities and challenges of operating in China and raises questions involving vertical integration, competitive positioning, corporate strategy, organizational design, marketing and branding, and the management of business and political risk.

Four businesses had, by 2012, grown to dominate the infrastructure that all firms rely on to reach online customers. Will the balance of power among the four persist, will one take command at the expense of the other three, or are all four more vulnerable than they seem to outside forces? What are the implications for the pace at which consumers go online? Amara's Law claims that we tend to overestimate change in the short run, and underestimate it in the long run.

In 2007 Royal DSM, a leading life science and materials company, entered a partnership with the World Food Programme (WFP) to combat hidden hunger around the world by providing micronutrient solutions. The case investigates the unexpectedly large impact the partnership had on DSM and on the global nutrition discussion, and discusses the benefits and challenges of scaling up the Nutrition Improvement Program-a key component of DSM's human nutrition and health division-beyond the WFP partnership, despite the need to build significant additional capabilities and its somewhat lower margins.

The stage for this case is set in South Central LA, the infamous battleground of bloody gang wars, and the original breeding ground for rap and hip hop music. The narrative zooms in on the charismatic Alfred Lomas, who since leaving prison and his gang, has set up a business that requires him to maintain strong links to the warring factions, while at the same time ensuring that neither he nor his team gets caught up in the gangs again: His company LA Gang Tours takes visitors through the urban war zone, and the proceeds from the tours are used for community interventions. In a peacekeeping effort, former gang members de-escalate conflict between gangs, and break the chain of violence on the streets. The LA police are grudgingly supportive, but the business isn't growing. Alfred ponders various growth strategies, as each will affect the network of trust that he has established with the gangs, the police and the tourists.

This is the first part of a two-part case study. Part A begins In December 2009, where Professor Peter Ng, director of the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research (RMBR), is issued a challenge: raise S$25 million in the next seven months to fund the establishment of a natural history museum in Singapore. Raising enough money to resurrect the museum in the midst of a global financial meltdown seemed like an impossibly tall order for Ng. To complicate matters, donations for natural history or science-related causes were virtually unheard of in the country. How can Ng raise the funds?

Supplement to case SMU398. Part B follows Part A in June 2010, after Ng's team raised S$46 million (US$33.3 million). This overwhelming success has surprised everyone, including Ng. In addition to a S$10 million anonymous donation, the Lee Foundation donated S$25 million, while the Tote Board and the general public donated S$10 million and S$1 million, respectively. With funds in hand, the former Raffles Museum is finally ready to be resurrected as the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum in 2014. Part B of the case reveals how the protagonist accomplished their fund raising goal by utilising corporate storytelling skills explored in Part A.

There is arguably no more important role for senior leaders than to prepare organizations for risk. Firms face different types of risk, including strategic, operational, market, liquidity, credit, and reputational. This article starts by exploring risk leadership at TD Bank Group and Maple Leaf Foods Inc. In 2002, TD Bank’s leadership lowered its risk tolerance following years of volatile and uneven performance. It avoided excessive risk (including sub-prime lending) and grew from the 55th-largest North American bank in terms of market capitalization to the sixth in 2012. Maple Leaf Foods Inc., a large food-processing company, underwent a crisis in 2008 when its processed meats were implicated in 23 deaths due to Listeriosis. The firm then developed a world-leading food-safety culture, mobilized an increased industry focus on food safety, and recovered financially. <br><br>Five activities that lead to the establishment and maintenance of a strategically driven culture are described. “Think it” stresses the need for a deliberately conceived culture, rather than one that is merely emergent. “Talk it” emphasizes the need for messages and expectations to be articulated forcefully and clearly. “Walk it” suggests that leaders must not deviate from messages about a desired culture, and should offer organizational rewards for culturally congruent behaviours. “Reinforce it” states that leaders should celebrate the success of their organizational culture, while exercising caution. “Check it” suggests that leaders must link their current culture with their desired future culture and prevent the emergence of unplanned, undesired manifestations of culture.

The Tragedy of the Commons refers to the depletion of a shared resource by individuals acting independently and rationally, according to self-interest, despite knowing that an abuse of the common resource is contrary to their long-term interests. The Tragedy is a model of many of society’s resource-based problems, including over-irrigation, habitat destruction, over-fishing, traffic congestion, and air pollution. The Free Rider problem refers to when an individual benefits from another’s work without paying for it. The two practical ways to overcome this problem are through compulsory participation (e.g. carbon tax, cap-and-trade) and through linking the public good to a desirable private good (getting people to pay voluntarily). Both methods are controversial and politicized. <br><br> Social entrepreneurs have attempted to solve the Free Rider problem, including Verdant Power, a developer in the design and application of marine renewable energy. The obstacles it faces are the same as those that stymie most social entrepreneurs. The firm lacks revenue streams and profits, is at the mercy of private equity investors and/or the government, and must counter existing bureaucratic and regulatory impediments. The good news, however, is that institutional support for social entrepreneurs has grown enormously into a support ecosystem. Ultimately, the problem for social entrepreneurs may not be opportunity recognition as much as obstacle recognition and finding solutions within this burgeoning ecosystem.