These 14 vignettes have been developed to facilitate a discussion on the place of spirituality or religion in the workplace. Developed primarily from public sources, but

This case traces the history of an engineering consulting firm and highlights differences between its two principals. The partnership worked very well overall, and Longview Services made money from the start. But it soon became clear that the duo had some differences in style that would need to be worked through.

This case traces the history of a local, family-owned office supply business as it faces competition from national retailers.

It was 2010, and the Salazar family wanted funding to expand their animal husbandry support services business. They believed the time was right to pursue a bigger share of the expanding market for government, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology contracts with research labs.

Now in his mid-40s, Tom Bandy was not a novice entrepreneur. He was a veteran of the IT revolution two decades earlier. He had started a company after college that successfully exploited a market niche in database management. But by his late 30s, he had lost the business. Now he was ready to launch a new business. And guided by experience, he had some thoughts about how to finance it.

Every time Jim Fonner thought about how his own business had zigged and zagged, he was prone to laugh. Once employed at Weyerhaeuser, the international paper- and wood-products company, Fonner had left the management ranks to transform himself into something very different: one-half of the Beach Blues Brothers, a duo of singing, dancing, Hawaiian shirt-clad salesmen selling patio furniture door to door to Florida hotels. Ten years later, in 2007, he was running a company in Lexington, Virginia, supplying commercial outdoor furniture nationally. It had not exactly been a linear progression to the Shenandoah Valley.

Arnie Katz was thinking about his company's recent expansion into Richmond. It was a different environment than Charlottesville, where the company had started up and experienced its first successes. In a larger, less tight-knit city such as Richmond, he did not believe the company could rely on the same organic word of mouth that had fueled its early growth in Charlottesville. Acquiring new customers in Richmond might require traditional advertising. What kind of mix of the two approaches should he employ?

The new president and CEO of ACCION New York, a community development loan fund, was considering leading her organization in a combination with an affiliate organization, ACCION USA, and that morning, she would be conducting a meeting to discuss how to present the combination question to the directors at Friday's board meeting.

Bandy was no stranger to entrepreneurship and the problems brought about by success. Having honed his programming skills in the 1980s, he had already founded a database company that had seen great success-and then had been squeezed out by investors. He spent a few years after that working for a computing firm in Richmond until a chance remark by his young son spurred him to become an entrepreneur again. In 2005, he founded BandyWorks, a computing services consulting firm.

Katrina Didot's local organic food business, A Bowl of Good, was on the upswing now, and there was a chance to expand operations. In order to do that, Didot knew she needed a partner to shoulder some of the work. Didot had the recipes and knowledge-and she had drive. She needed someone who could make the trains run on time and ensure things flowed smoothly when it came to operations.

Sitting at their kitchen table early one morning, Renee and Gary Harris agreed that they finally had almost everything in place: a solid business plan, a great network of suppliers, an appealing and well-priced menu, start-up capital from their own personal savings

Using computer spreadsheets to track the finances for his restaurant-CC's Gourmet Kitchen-was one of Carl Coleman's least favorite things to do. This had been especially true at the end of each month since he opened. This evening in July 2010 was no different, as one figure in particular, the paltry $2,800 in profit, was characteristically depressing. "If I don't make some changes soon," Coleman said to himself, "I'm not going to be able to afford this."

BL Gruppo was a holding company that operated eight wildly acclaimed and highly rated restaurants, plus a catering operation, in Boston, Massachusetts. Its culinary mini-empire had continually achieved recognition as a great organization. But the story of BL Gruppo was actually two stories, of two entrepreneurial journeys. One was the journey of Barbara Lynch, a high school dropout who, through hard work, self-education, perseverance, and entrepreneurial focus, became a world-class chef. The other was the journey of someone with no formal business training who built a culinary business employing over 230 people and grossing close to $18 million in revenue. Now Lynch faced what she considered one of her biggest challenges: How might she institutionalize her business to sustain the enjoyment expected by her regular customers and the opportunity for advancement by her loyal employees, while at the same time giving her management team and herself chance to monetize and create wealth? And just as important: Should she keep directing her entrepreneurial zeal toward trying new business opportunities? ?

This case follows a protagonist as he tries to secure start-up capital to get his entrepreneurial venture going.

Jane Darcy stared in dismay at the spreadsheet. As the editor of Bolt, a free daily newspaper in Richmond, Virginia, Darcy had been working since January 2007 to build a devoted readership. Published Monday through Friday, Bolt featured topics such as local news and sports and was written in a snappy style for readers between 18 and 34 years old. Advertising had been steadily climbing. But its parent company was suffering, and Bolt might therefore be on the chopping block. What could Darcy do to save her beloved paper?

David Brown sat at his desk in the stock room of his toy store, Huckle Buckle Beanstalk, looking at the three résumés in front of him. He needed a new store manager, and these three résumés were his top choices. Each offered a different mix of skills and experience, and he hoped he would have the unusual luxury of having one rise to the top in the afternoon interviews. He had fired his previous store manager just over a month earlier for theft, and he knew that the business would suffer if he had to continue managing the store himself.

Elizabeth Franks, CEO of VBV, had a week until her July 2010 board meeting. VBV had just completed a six-month marketing and advertising campaign for a new product line and strategic rebranding, and early responses from the board had indicated mixed feelings.

Marjorie Burnett knew she was taking a gamble and wondered whether the potential new business she was considering would be worth the investment. Was expansion-offering even more products-the answer to increasing revenue, and would that decision be more profitable than her present business?

For business leaders, the 'new normal' is -- to borrow a phrase from the U.S. military -- a 'VUCA' environment: it is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. The author shows how organizations can leverage the benefits of complexity and interconnectedness to their advantage by presenting examples from Procter & Gamble that he believes "illustrate the future of strategy." Going forward, strategic choices will extend far beyond an organization's own walls, he argues, and increasingly, the frontier of business will be populated by organizations that embrace this notion. The firms with the greatest capacity to win will be those whose relationships and strategic choices extend out to networked stakeholders, business partners, suppliers - and even to competitors, in the right circumstances.

Globalization and instant communication have changed the rules of the game for business. Today's organizations are being held to stringent and fluctuating sets of standards by unrelenting 'webs' of stakeholders who are quick to pass judgment on their behavior. In what is becoming an ultra-transparent world, every step and misstep is subject to scrutiny and every company with a brand or reputation to protect is vulnerable. The author argues that for most businesses, it increasingly makes sense to opt for openness. He describes three key elements of openness that modern organizations should embrace: transparency, opening up the business model and placing intellectual property in an open commons. In doing so, he says, a firm will embrace the three dimensions effective organizations for the 21st century.