Kathy Engle was one of four executive directors of the LEADER Project (LEADER), an MBA student-run volunteer organization associated with The Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. LEADER's objective was to contribute to international development by teaching introductory business and decision-making skills in a free market economy to institutions in emerging economies. In March, 2002, Engle had to quickly decide a course of action for LEADER: Whether the LEADER Project should maintain the status quo of working in the countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU) or instead focus its energies on expansion into a new country outside the FSU with a transition economy. If expansion was considered, Engle needed to determine which new emerging economy should be selected and how to manage the transition into a new country beginning in two months' time. Engle had gathered a considerable amount of information about Cuba that led her to believe it may be an appropriate target for expansion, but the information was both positive and negative.

The VIRGINIA-class submarine was one of the largest naval-acquisition projects in history, involving the construction of 30 submarines at an acquisition cost of $93 billion. By FY05, the VIRGINIA-class program was in its 10th year. Construction had begun on seven submarines. Unit costs were running 41% over the base-line budget, and production goals were not being met. Ship construction budget limits necessitated a 20% unit-cost reduction, an unprecedented task on a ship already in serial production. How would the program office achieve that goal and prevent the program from being truncated, the fate of its predecessor the SEAWOLF-class?

Positive environment in the workplace is usually assumed to be beneficial to employee morale, but not always a necessity for achieving the firm's strategic goals. Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) is a field of study that focuses on how leaders and organizations can achieve extraordinary results while focusing on positive deviance. In April 2004, Prudential Financial acquired CIGNA's full-service retirement business and various challenges in integrating the two firms became present. The challenges included aligning the cultural aspects of the organizations. This case describes how senior management led the merger of Prudential and CIGNA while implementing various POS practices throughout the organization in hopes of creating a successful culture for the staff, compelling results for the clients, and a strong value for the shareholders.

Cerámicas de Costaragua (CC) began producing ceramic tile in 1953. The founders were interested in forming a vertically integrated chain. During the 1990s, CC suffered the consequences of policies that liberalized the economy and, amidst a decline in sales, it decided to enter into a new unexplored market in the ceramic sector: low-income consumers. Lack of knowledge about the behavior of low-income consumers was a challenge for CC. Therefore, it sought the support of a social leader who knew the inhabitants of low-income sectors. A program called "Remodeling your Home" was launched and the community was actively included. Existing community organizations were responsible for convening and coordinating sales promoters. Two years after the initiative was established, CC expanded to other areas of city and to other cities. Strengthening of the distribution channel with specific adjustments for the low-income populations generated a growth in demand that led to a mid-term sales projection of one million m2 of ceramic tiles per month. To achieve this, Remodeling depended on the vertically integrated value chain of CC, but required a new distribution channel that was suitable for the expanded sales expectations in this market. The case poses three options to achieve the most appropriate distribution of the Elénica products: • The first assigns community organizations the most active role in distribution, putting them in charge of maintaining product inventory in their offices to supply demand for a zone; • The second proposal proposes that CC be the direct distributor of the product from the factory to the consumer's home, maintaining the role of the Elénica Service Centers that the company created in neighborhoods; and • A third option creates larger service centers that function as storage warehouses near consumers.

The case opens in March 2008 with Andrés González, the entrepreneurial mind behind Empleados Ya (EY), concerned about the financial situation of his new venture. González and Salvador Sáez, both faculty members at one of Chile's most distinguished business schools, had formed EY with startup capital of just US$ 10,000. In a nation were unemployment was historically high the partners aimed to achieve a dual purpose, namely to make a profit (i.e. create economic value) while making a contribution to solve a pervasive social problem (i.e. create social value). Chile had a longstanding headhunting industry geared towards highly qualified professionals, but labor brokerage for the low-skilled employment sector had been managed by the government through a network of municipal employment offices (Municipal Labor Intermediation Offices, henceforth OMIL). These offices, however, were inefficient in brokering employment and companies did not use them to fill vacancies. González felt that the lack of information available about the job market was one of the causes of unemployment in low-skilled sectors: Job seekers did not know where to find work, and large companies did not trust the OMIL offices to find good workers. This left a niche open for a trustworthy intermediary service to match companies with potential candidates from the low-skills sector. The case outlines the challenges facing EY to stay afloat after three years of operation. Its leaders had formed a partnership with an international labor brokerage organization that had not produced the desired results. While Sáez is willing to cut his losses and close up shop, Gonzalez is not. Still, given EY's unsatisfactory financial results, González has to make some important decisions in order to make the business profitable.

INACAP was the largest tertiary education institute in Chile, with little more than 54,000 students and with coverage throughout the country. Since 1966 the organization had delivered technical and professional formation for work through its technical training center (TTC) and its vocational center (VC). In 2007, given the growing competition of many new private TTCs, VCs and universities offering education for work, INACAP decided to broaden its technical program mix and become a university: Universidad Tecnológica de Chile. The decision entailed venturing into the provision of university education, an area where INACAP had no previous experience. One of its competitors was the DUOC, with a long-standing presence in the market. It offered high quality technical and professional education under the wing of one of the most prestigious universities in the marketplace, Universidad Católica (UC). The other competitor was Universidad Santo Tomás (UST), a university that did not enjoy the high reputation of UC, but nevertheless granted academic degrees to its graduates. This meant that, even if its programs did not measure up to those of INACAP, graduates from Santo Tomás possessed a university degree, a valued asset, in a country that overrated academic degrees. In this scenario, when INACAP's leaders saw the chance of purchasing Universidad Vicente Pérez Rosales, they made a decision to go ahead and buy it. However, the decision entailed changing INACAP's strategic position. Few months into the purchase, the incumbent Rector resigned and the new Rector, Gonzalo Vargas, was confronted with the need to evaluate the cogency of the business model INACAP had been operating and decide its competitive strategy.

The Virtue Matrix, first introduced in a 2002 Harvard Business Review article, is a tool developed by the lead author that provides a concrete, actionable framework for creating a corporate citizenship strategy. The goals of CSR have long been poorly defined and unclear, and as a result, many companies are uncertain of the rules or the benefits of doing what is 'right'. The authors argue that as regulations become tighter and solutions more difficult, the capacity of firms to innovate in this arena will become increasingly valuable. The best organizations, they say, will stand out by fully complying with the laws of their industry and jurisdiction; meeting the highest level of current non-regulated norms; having projects underway in the 'strategic frontier' of the Virtue Matrix; and being an active participant in 'structural frontier' projects as well. In addition to describing the four quadrants of the Virtue Matrix in detail, the authors show how companies can protect the best of what currently is - the civil foundation - and contribute to the expansion of what could be, through activities on the frontier.

In this May 2009 interview, Harvard Business School Professor and SSRN chairman Michael Jensen defines 'integrity', explains how it differs from morality and ethics, and argues that the effects of out-of-integrity behavior are significantly more damaging than most of us believe. He explains that people are not the only ones that can have integrity: objects and systems can have it too - indeed, they can only obtain maximum performance by maintaining integrity. He describes the distinction between the integrity of design, the integrity of implementation and the integrity of use. Reflecting on the 2008-09 finance crisis, the author says that putting the economic system back in order is deceptively simple: "people have to start honoring their word. If they do, trust will materialize almost instantly."

We care deeply about what other people think of us, and as a result, 'mattering maps' exert a powerful influence on our behavior. In principle, there is a mattering map for each person, each social environment and for society as a whole, and because each person typically belongs to more than one social group--workplace, family, friends-these groups and the mattering maps that apply to them often overlap. Mattering maps may be a source of misery for some, but given the realities of human nature, they cannot be avoided. The authors show that in the end, they enable both the greatest accomplishments of the human race when we compete to outdo one-another in things that are constructive, and our greatest follies when we compete over activities that are wasteful or destructive.

Without realizing it, managers delegate unethical behavior to people in their organizations on a regular basis. This occurs whenever someone tells their subordinates to 'do whatever it takes' to achieve production or sales goals, leaving open the possibility of aggressive or even unethical tactics; it happens when companies outsource production to offshore subcontractors that are inexpensive because they are less constrained by costly labor and environmental standards; and it happens when partners at accounting firms remind junior auditors about the importance of retaining a client that has inappropriate accounting practices. In these and countless other situations, people are motivated to overlook the problematic ethical implications of other people's behavior. The result: scandals that can cost trillions of dollars. The good news, say the authors, is that the evidence strongly supports the notion that most people value ethical decisions and behavior and strive to develop the habit of ethicality. Nevertheless, people still find themselves engaging in unethical behavior because of biases that influence their decisions-biases of which they may not be fully aware. Fighting human nature is no easy task, but the authors explain that leaders can and must make the structural changes necessary to reduce the harmful effects of our psychological and ethical limitations.

Members of organizations are naturally motivated to consider the attitudes and opinions of their peers in order to gauge others' reactions to their decisions and assess where they stand relative to organizational norms. However, the authors found strong evidence that people are not very good at estimating the percentage of others who agree with their choices, and that this tendency has major implications for ethical decision making. Specifically, they argue that people fall victim to a False-Consensus Bias, wanting to believe that others are more like them than not. While ethical pundits may predict that 'loners' would be more likely to violate ethical standards because they lack insight into others' attitudes and have fewer colleagues to whom they can turn for help or advice, the authors suggest that the social butterfly, rather than the social outcast, may actually be more likely to erroneously assume that their ethical judgments are in line with the normative view. In a workplace environment, the potential danger is that employees who act in ways that most others consider unethical may confidently believe that their actions are in line with the socially-shared ethical standard when making decisions. And as we have seen, the end-results can be widespread and severe.

Accountability has become a major buzzword of late, cited to be at the core of market meltdowns and revivals and one of the basic buildings blocks of successful businesses. As a result, it has become a topic of investigation by a large coterie of consultants, social scientists and practitioners. Break the riddle of accountability, the thinking goes, and you will have solved one of the biggest issues in modern business. The author argues that most of the proposed approaches focus too narrowly on tasks, responsibilities, personal attributes and measurement systems - all of which are important aspects of accountability, but overlook its three most important features: its relationality, reflexivity and relativity. He explains that accountability is relational in that it involves a promise or commitment from me to you; it is reflexive in that it says something about me and about our relationship that I have to internalize and accept; and it is relative to a set of background assumptions and a background audience - made up of those who can witness my commitment to you and those who cannot, but could. Keeping promises and accounting for their breaches in credible, genuine and authentic ways is what makes organizations work, societies thrive, and cultures promulgate themselves into the future. The commitment path described by the author can thus be seen as an 'audit trail' for the journey of promising, a way of assigning responsibility in the face of ambiguity, mendacity and subterfuge.

When interpersonal risks loom large in the moment, human beings often fail to act in their own or in their organization's best interest. When uncertainty clouds peoples' tentative thoughts and views - views that may be at odds with those of others' - they often take the path of 'reduced interpersonal resistance' to avoid conflict and confrontation. This can happen when a lot is at stake (a patient's health, an aircraft's safety, a costly takeover) and when not much is at stake (a small improvement idea is not communicated to the individual who could act on it). Either way, the silence, along with the incomplete thoughts that lie behind it, inhibits team learning in organizations that depend upon such learning for their ongoing viability. As a result, in virtually every organization, failed collaboration occurs countless times throughout the day, usually without much conscious attention. Diversity of three particular types exacerbates these tendencies. The authors explain how 'psychological safety' can enable team diversity to be better and leveraged, allowing a team to reap the benefits associated with diverse sets of skills, experience, knowledge and backgrounds in ways that would not be possible if team members were unwilling to take the risks associated with speaking up.

Each year in March, 800 delegates from 60 countries convene for the Skoll World Forum, a gathering of the world's leading social entrepreneurs organized by the Skoll Foundation. Prominent figures from the social, academic, finance, corporate and policy sectors engage for three days of debates, discussions and work sessions focused on scaling solutions to some of the world's most pressing issues. This article summarizes one of the panels, "Leadership for Change," which featured five prominent business leaders/social entrepreneurs: Hasbro's Chairman Alan Hassenfeld; Cisco's Senoir VP, Corporate Affairs, Tae Yoo; Amamex International's Founder and CEO, Fadi Ghandour; Pitney Bowes' past Executive Chairman Michael Critelli; and Intel's General Manager, Sustainability, William Swope. Each discusses their organization's approach to CSR, sample initiatives and leadership lessons.

According to the author, we are in the midst of a tectonic-plate movement in the financial world that is shaking the 'real' world quite dramatically. The purpose of the article is not to review the causes or longevity of the 2008-2009 finance crisis, but to explore the curiosity that in the world of publicly- traded companies, boards of directors have once again let society down. Complicating matters is the fact that, just as a re-balancing of the directors' role was taking shape post-Sarbanes Oxley, expected reforms in the areas of risk management and compensation will once again challenge director effectiveness. While boards will never be able to predict the future, the author argues that they can become more effective instruments for helping management devise plausible and actionable strategies if they do three simple things: take charge of their own agendas, manage their time effectively against three time horizons (past, present and future), and continually assess their performance against best practices.

With many still reeling from the ripple effects of the 2008-09 global financial crisis, it has become abundantly clear that the principles and ethics of business are fundamental to economic success. Recovering from this systemic failure and ensuring that it never repeats itself will require new thinking about the types of institutions on which a successful economy depends, and more importantly, on the relationships between those institutions. The authors' aim is not to lay out a detailed framework for bank solvency, accounting regulation or corporate governance; rather, it is to clarify the principles on which any responsible market system will rest, and how these might be applied. It is also to suggest various actions that market participants can take to prevent similar disasters. The authors show that, in many ways, an effective economy is like an effective political system: it has checks and balances, accountabilities, responsibilities, information flows and cultures. They go on to describe the five principles of 'accountable capitalism', and the four levels of stakeholders required to make it a reality.

With an eye toward prevention, many companies are having their top managers undergo pricey, comprehensive physical exams, complete with full-body CT scans. As imaging technology continues to get better and safer, the day may come when screening healthy people is worth the costs and the risks - but we're not there yet.

A project manager with a talent for creating dashboards, David is frustrated by his repressive, micromanaging boss, Thaddeus - aka "the Commodore." Thaddeus drones on about the high point of his own (now stalled) career, calls unnecessary last-minute meetings, and tries to one-up his direct reports - while bending over backward to honor an intern's filing job. David has managed to impress Irving, the EVP of Finance Europe, enough to receive a job offer, but it's a lateral move with no increase in pay. What should he do? Three experts comment on this fictional case study in R0909B and R0909Z. He should stay where he is, at least for now, says Gini Graham Scott, an author, consultant, and motivational speaker. Meanwhile, he can form a supportive network of colleagues, make a special effort to find pleasures outside of work, and even attempt - non-confrontationally and subtly - to improve his relationship with the Commodore. Brad Gilbreath, formerly a human resources manager and now an assistant professor at Colorado State University, advises David to escape from Thaddeus in the interest of his own health. Research shows that bosses' behavior can lead to high blood pressure or psychiatric problems in their subordinates. By learning how to set boundaries, says Lauren Sontag, the president of a consulting firm specializing in executive coaching, leadership development, and talent management, David might be able to improve his relationship with Thaddeus. But accepting Irving's offer would provide more room to maneuver and advance. Alternatively, David might propose a dashboard "center of excellence" to serve both Thaddeus and Irving.

Cisco Systems has plenty of experience developing new technology internally; it has also proved adept at growing its product offerings through targeted acquisitions of tech start-ups. Not too long ago, the company began running an internal innovation competition, offering cash rewards for the best new product ideas. After a few years, though, Cisco sought to reach beyond its walls to see what sorts of ideas - and different perspectives - the wider world had to offer. In late 2007, it announced the I-Prize competition. The goal was to build a new billion-dollar Cisco business around the winning idea to emerge from among many outside contributions. The contest called for an idea that would align with Cisco's strategy and take advantage of its leadership position in internet technology. A total of more than 2,500 people from 104 countries registered on the I-Prize website and submitted more than 1,200 ideas. After a challenging, nearly year-long process of winnowing and evaluation, an in-house judging panel chose an idea for creating a "smart" electricity grid - a natural fit with Cisco's competencies and long-term strategy. In this article, I-Prize impresario Jouret, chief technology officer of Cisco's Emerging Technologies Group, describes the experience of dealing with the unexpected complexities - and labor-intensiveness - of crowdsourcing: "The misconception about crowdsourcing is that merely by turning on a website and putting up a reward, in no time you'll have recipes for cold fusion by the bucket load. That's not what happens."

As a market, women represent an opportunity bigger than China and India combined. They control $20 trillion in consumer spending, and that figure could reach $28 trillion in the next five years. Women drive the world economy, in fact. Yet most companies do a remarkably poor job of serving them, a new study by the Boston Consulting Group reveals. BCG surveyed more than 12,000 women from a variety of geographies, income levels, and walks of life about their education, finances, homes, jobs, activities, interests, relationships, hopes, and fears, as well as their shopping behaviors and spending patterns. In this article, Silverstein and Sayre, two of the firm's partners, review highlights of the findings and explain the biggest opportunities. While any business would be wise to target female consumers, they say, the greatest potential lies in six industries: food, fitness, beauty, apparel, health care, and financial services. Address women's concerns effectively, and your company could see the kind of rapid growth that fitness chain Curves enjoyed. Most health clubs are expensive and designed for men, with lots of complicated body-building equipment. Curves, however, understood that time-pressed women needed quick, affordable workouts, and came up with the concept of simple, 30-minute exercise routines geared to women and offered in no-frills spaces. Companies that likewise successfully tailor their offerings to women will be positioned to win when the economy begins to recover.