In December 2022, Maruti Suzuki India Limited (Maruti Suzuki), the undisputed leader in the Indian car market, was evaluating the various alternatives for its continued growth and sustained performance. In 2015, building on the company's success selling no-frills cars, Maruti Suzuki launched its New Exclusive Automotive Experience (NEXA) line to attract customers who were seeking advanced car models. However, the emergence of electric vehicles posed a key challenge for Maruti Suzuki specifically because it lacked capabilities in this arena. To achieve continued growth and performance, Maruti had to prioritize among three alternatives: building upon its success in selling used cars, further building on the NEXA line, and aggressively trying to launch new electric vehicle models.
In October 2022, Priyanka Bhat, the project manager leading a project for Fintech Solutions, was contemplating her options to handle issues plaguing the project. Foremost among them was to find an effective solution to the many conflicts between the team’s business analyst, Jada Goodwin, and the other team members. Although Goodwin was a competent employee and liked by the client, she had been accused by several team members of creating a hostile work environment. Bhat needed to quickly devise a plan that restored a collegial team environment and ensured on-time delivery of the project to the client.
Critics of stock buybacks allege that the practice is a form of market manipulation that allows insiders to unfairly profit and sacrifices long-term growth. The authors conducted a large-sample study of stock buybacks over the past 30 years in the U.S. and did not find a correlation between share repurchases and price manipulation, return reversals, excess CEO compensation, or underinvestment. A ban could, however, impose costs on U.S. public companies and other stakeholders.
This field-based case introduces students to the challenges of building a professional brand through the lens of a college athlete. Since the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA's) landmark decision in 2021, college-level student athletes have been able to monetize their name, image, and likeness (NIL). Brian Gursky is finishing his collegiate pitching career at the University of Virginia after playing for four years at the University of Southern California and earning a business degree there. He hopes to play professional baseball, and his backup plan is to work in business. Gursky realizes that he might not have been fully leveraging social media to achieve either of his professional goals. Students investigate Gursky's tweets and assess what they communicate about him to potential scouts, coaches, NIL sponsors, and business recruiters. They learn that as athletes (and students) seek to become more professional, they need to use social media not as a vehicle to communicate with friends but as an advertising and promotion platform to establish their athlete or professional brands. This case is well suited for undergraduate and graduate (e.g., MBA) courses in core marketing, marketing strategy, sports marketing, sports management, advertising, promotion, strategic partnerships/alliances, brand management, or brand strategy. It can also be used in executive education courses to help business leaders identify, analyze, and recommend improvements in leveraging social media to build a professional brand. Finally, athletic departments can use it to introduce collegiate athletes to the rules and protocols for conducting themselves appropriately in today's high-pressure collegiate sport environment.
In December 2022, Maruti Suzuki India Limited (Maruti Suzuki), the undisputed leader in the Indian car market, was evaluating the various alternatives for its continued growth and sustained performance. In 2015, building on the company's success selling no-frills cars, Maruti Suzuki launched its New Exclusive Automotive Experience (NEXA) line to attract customers who were seeking advanced car models. However, the emergence of electric vehicles posed a key challenge for Maruti Suzuki specifically because it lacked capabilities in this arena. To achieve continued growth and performance, Maruti had to prioritize among three alternatives: building upon its success in selling used cars, further building on the NEXA line, and aggressively trying to launch new electric vehicle models.
In October 2022, Priyanka Bhat, the project manager leading a project for Fintech Solutions, was contemplating her options to handle issues plaguing the project. Foremost among them was to find an effective solution to the many conflicts between the team's business analyst, Jada Goodwin, and the other team members. Although Goodwin was a competent employee and liked by the client, she had been accused by several team members of creating a hostile work environment. Bhat needed to quickly devise a plan that restored a collegial team environment and ensured on-time delivery of the project to the client.
Tourism, the fulcrum of the livelihoods for residents of Jaisalmer, India, was significantly affected during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic that occurred in January 2021. The situation worsened when SpiceJet, the only airline operator of Jaisalmer, announced the suspension of its operations, citing low passenger load and high operating costs. With the support of Ashish Modi, their district administrator, the Jaisalmer community tackled the issue using a first-of-its-kind initiative called “the citizen-airline partnership model.” The interplay between the Jaisalmer community and SpiceJet management unveiled finer aspects of negotiation during a crisis. Would the model succeed in a win-win negotiation?
Sandie Beauchamp, was the chief experience officer at the social enterprise and Certified B Corporation hybrid organization Clean the World (CTW), located in Orlando, Florida. Beauchamp finds herself in survival mode as she struggles to keep the organization from closings its doors while simultaneously keeping herself, employees, and volunteers safe during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Through a focus on CTW’s mission as well as trial and error, Beauchamp and her team innovate a product and process to meet the hygiene needs of CTW beneficiaries while generating income.
In this Executive Focus, the authors follow up with Dr. Brian Kropp, chief of research and group vice president at Gartner Research, Inc., on a previous interview about the work-from-home trend. Dr. Kropp explains where the trend stands currently as well as where managers can expect it to change in their organizations.
Many industries and their offerings have fallen victim to managerial shortsightedness. Firms often believe they are invincible and see themselves as immune to threats from seemingly unrelated technologies. There seemed to be no apparent link between bound paper books and the emerging internet, no discernible ties between the video rental business and streaming technologies, and no obvious connections between photography and cellular phones. When these associations were established by means of other, newer technologies, major incumbent firms such as Barnes & Noble, Blockbuster, and Kodak came crashing down. CRISPR is the technology of the moment, one that will enable the programming of evolution. While we might think about gene editing in terms of cures for diseases, its repercussions will impact almost every domain of human and planetary development, and sooner than one might think. In this installment of On The Horizon, we adopt an evolutionary perspective to understand the impact of the genetic revolution on firms regardless of industry.
Resistance to change can be a significant factor in the success or failure of changes. As such, researchers have spent more than a half century studying the causes of resistance and how to manage it. Much can be learned from resistance literature that applies to today's unparalleled, nonstop change in which an organization's ability to manage resistance to change can not only impact the change's success or failure but also determine whether an organization will survive or thrive. This article explores important lessons revealed via resistance literature, and more importantly, how such knowledge applies to managing change in the modern world. The article emphasizes the urgent need for organizations to become skilled at effectively managing change and resistance to change and offers recommendations on how they can do so.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is ubiquitous in today's public discourse, underpinned by societal recognition of inequality and demands for less discrimination. Further, DEI increasingly serves as a resource for brands to express their identity and align with consumer values. However, implementing DEI as a brand management strategy requires more than lip service and poses risks if not properly embraced. For instance, consumers can perceive DEI initiatives as inauthentic, or initiatives can miss the mark with target consumer groups when poorly executed. Because brands are now more inclined to take responsibility and a public stance on sociopolitical issues, we take a step back and discuss key considerations and opportunities for brands to embrace DEI. We first document the case for DEI in brand management. Next, we present the consumer and brand perspectives of DEI before unpacking the considerations and opportunities of embracing DEI for brand management. Overall, our manuscript provides guidance for brands, marketers, regulators, and policy makers to better understand the role of DEI for brand management.
The digital data available online is currently measured in zettabytes. These vast repositories of big web data are increasingly viewed as a strategic resource comparable in value to land, gold, and oil. This big web data can be extracted and analyzed by organizations to gain a better understanding of their internal and external environment and improve organizational performance. Because of these opportunities, automated retrieval and organization of web data (i.e., web scraping) for research projects is becoming a common practice. This article outlines the data-related, technical, legal, and ethical issues related to web scraping. Awareness of these issues can help researchers save time and resources and, most importantly, mitigate the potential risk of ethical controversies or lawsuits related to the retrieval and use of big web data.
This article introduces the next major generational evolution of the web: Web3. We review the fundamental evolution of the internet and the web over the past 3 decades, including a brief presentation of the publications in Business Horizons that are important in a discussion of the emergence of Web3. We then discuss what these recent developments mean to organizations, consumers, and the public. Though the degree to which Web3 will be widely adopted is uncertain, these technologies are already creating both exhilarating and terrifying implications for e-commerce, digital media, online social networking, online marketplaces, search engines, supply chain management, and finance, among others. We propose the consideration and management of technical, organizational, and regulatory interoperability for Web3 to deliver on its promises of value and that failure to consider these interoperability components may destroy economic value, consumer confidence, or social issues online. We also call on our fellow researchers to focus on these interoperability issues and how they might impact the positive and negative sides of Web3 technologies to help us understand and shape our Web3 future.
Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have experienced exponential growth over the past few years. Many companies and creators have experimented with various ways to develop NFT businesses, but often without clear guidance on how NFTs shape property rights and business models. In this article, we examine the roles of NFTs in establishing digital property rights, creating value for creators and collectors, and empowering business model innovation. As NFTs unlock digital property rights, they can spawn new business models centered around digital ownership, portable and composable digital assets, and decentralized communities. We believe our framework can help businesses and creators formulate and implement actionable strategies to create and capture value in NFTs and Web3.
In 2023, Tesla, Inc. (Tesla), was the most valuable automotive company in the world. Over 20 years, it had developed revolutionary products and a large, complex, global supply chain network. After announcing plans to spend nearly $150 billion to achieve the strategic goal of selling 20 million vehicles per year, it needed to dramatically expand its capacity. Chief executive officer Elon Musk was facing a key challenge: deciding what changes needed to be made to Tesla’s global supply chain to support its strategic objectives. What supply chain capabilities would Tesla need to support these plans?
Despite our reliance on entrepreneurs to kindle the fire of capitalism, we still know little about what motivates them and why. That’s concerning, since the data suggest most new job growth depends on the enterprise of entrepreneurs who build new solutions for old (and new) problems. For over 200 years, scholars have sought in vain to clarify the definition of entrepreneurship and reach consensus on its meaning. According to French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, who coined the term “entrepreneur” around the dawn of the 19th century, “The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.” For economist Joseph Schumpeter, an entrepreneur is a “wild spirit,” driven to disrupt norms and build new commodities of enduring value. But this leads to more questions: Can this creative wildness be developed? Or are entrepreneurs, as Steve Jobs put it, born primed to put “a dent in” the universe? Starting around 2002, written use of the word “entrepreneur” kept rising, and much public discussion of entrepreneurs now fixates on the fast-falling fortunes of flashy tech founders with dubious business practices. Ultimately, not all founders fit the label “entrepreneur”—it is only the tenacious ones with the skill to manage their wild spirit that dramatically boost productivity and yield and thereby lift up whole industries, sometimes entire economies, from ruin.
The biopharmaceutical sector’s innovation- and growth-focused activities are having a surprising side effect—they’re building organizational resilience at a time of inflation, looming economic downturn, and scarcity of the right skills and talent. This offers relevant lessons for all other industries. The idea of building resilience may most often be associated with “playing defense” through cost-cutting and efficiency moves, but it can also stem from new and more rapid ways of leveraging invention and innovation driven by purpose. To understand how, the authors recommend taking a closer look at the “New Science” of some biopharma companies. New Science combines the best of what biopharmas know on the scientific front with the best of what technology can offer to target disease areas where no treatments or cures exist. According to Accenture’s research, the three significant benefits of New Science are improving the chances of creating viable offerings, reducing the cost of innovation, and driving revenue growth. While scientific novelty, technology convergence, and unmet patient needs are the guiding principles of New Science, transferring these basics to other industries requires shifting a company’s essence toward innovation with purpose. This article offers three practical steps to make that happen. First, reorient the portfolio: business leaders must pursue new products and services, new markets, and new ecosystems to address unmet needs. Second, flip the budget: senior executives need to free up capital to invest in innovation activities. Third, create dynamic teams: applying the principles of New Science requires forming new kinds of teams—human teams and “human + machine” teams.
Speaking Up at Work is intended for individuals who fear speaking up about their ideas or have done so but are frustrated by their lack of success, It provides stories of others who have been a "lone voice" or an "independent thinker" and their attempts at change-both successful and unsuccessful. It offers insight into effective tactics and pitfalls to avoid. It also offers various tools and tactics to leaders who want to get the best ideas from their teams. The book explores the individual characteristics and situational conditions that lead an individual to develop an independent point of view and to openly voice this view regarding an organizational performance issue. The implications are to better understand how to encourage independent thinking and to understand the personality characteristics and developmental experiences that foster this ability. The author conducted over 50 interviews with individuals about numerous "voice events" throughout their working lives. Chapter 1 begins this effort with stories of speaking up as an "independent thinker" and what that experience is like.