Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students are expected to learn an overwhelming amount of information in order to graduate college; however, in today's job market, it takes more than simply understanding STEM concepts to be successful. In this text, Roger Forsgren-NASA's former chief knowledge officer-offers STEM students critical lessons within four main areas: being an introvert in an extroverts' world, communication skills, critical thinking, and ethics. Each chapter acts as a practical guide and includes actionable strategies and historical case studies-some surrounding engineering topics, some not-demonstrating essential knowledge for STEM graduates as they progress in their careers. While this book is specifically written for individuals in STEM, many college graduates will find value in it regardless of their degree. Chapter 3 focuses on the need for critical thinking skills. Socrates taught critical thinking skills and techniques; he asked focused questions to confirm the logic and determine the validity of an idea. He would examine the premise, challenge the assumption, examine the logic, consider motivations, and think through the implications. Being aware of our own limitations is also vital to critical thinking skills. Emotion can get in the way of critical thinking, and while intuition is real, it can be dangerous for an engineer to rely on intuition. Recognizing cognitive biases is essential to developing critical thinking skills; several cognitive biases are outlined, including overconfidence bias, hindsight bias, and sunk cost effect bias. Case studies looking at sudden infant death syndrome in the early 1900s and the protection of Allied planes during World War II are offered.

Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students are expected to learn an overwhelming amount of information in order to graduate college; however, in today's job market, it takes more than simply understanding STEM concepts to be successful. In this text, Roger Forsgren-NASA's former chief knowledge officer-offers STEM students critical lessons within four main areas: being an introvert in an extroverts' world, communication skills, critical thinking, and ethics. Each chapter acts as a practical guide and includes actionable strategies and historical case studies-some surrounding engineering topics, some not-demonstrating essential knowledge for STEM graduates as they progress in their careers. While this book is specifically written for individuals in STEM, many college graduates will find value in it regardless of their degree. Chapter 4 starts by describing the human brain's prefrontal cortex and how it provides humans with a conscience and the ability to intrinsically know ethical behavior. Morals are personal beliefs we try to guide our lives by, and ethics are societal or organizational rules to regulate behavior. While morals and ethics are often complimentary, they can conflict. Morals and ethics, not just data, must be taken into account in an engineer's work. Several questions are offered in order to determine whether or not a situation is a moral issue and to make ethical decisions. The three case studies provided describe the Volkswagen emissions scandal (Dieselgate), NASA's Apollo 12 mission, and Albert Speer's work for Nazi Germany.

Year Up, a non-profit that provides training and practical work experience to low-income young people, has for years prioritized impact measurement. By 2022, it had built a robust body of evidence demonstrating that its program yields higher earnings for participants. The case finds Year Up's founder and CEO considering strategies to scale the program in a cost-effective manner and working to broaden the non-profit's focus to system and practice change among employers. But these new efforts risk diluting the core program and, in turn, diminishing the benefits delivered to participants.

In 2018, Erica Coletta became Mars Petcare's Chief Human Resources Officer, and immediately found herself dealing with high-stakes inclusion and diversity issues. U.S. employees especially were ready for substantive action after unprecedented racial justice protests, and its 100,000 employees across six continents eagerly awaited next steps from previous commitments to equity in hiring and management. How could she effectively capitalize on the energy for change?

The negative effects of bias in artificial intelligence models' underlying data has made headlines, and companies need to find ways to address it. But it's impossible to completely abolish bias in AI data to equitably account for diverse populations so instead, companies should remediate it to deliberately compensate for unfairness. The author describes a three-step process that can yield positive results for leaders looking to reduce the impact of AI bias.

In February 2021, the responsible seafood program officer for World Wide Fund for Nature Singapore (WWF-Singapore) was looking to encourage a collective change in the consumption of sustainable seafood. Promoting sustainable seafood in Singapore, however, had not been easy. Due to cultural influences and the nature of seafood trading, driving a change in the sourcing and consumption of seafood among stakeholders required significant effort and creativity. Identified stakeholders were generally either slow in acting or unresponsive. With each party pushing the responsibility to another, the challenge facing the program officer and WWF-Singapore’s market transformation team was how to overcome this deadlock of inertia. WWF-Singapore believed that it was necessary to understand and address each stakeholder separately, as stakeholders required specific communication messages and support to help them make a change. However, with limited resources, WWF-Singapore had to be strategic in deciding who to target and how.

In November 2021, Ford Motor Company offered a $2.5 billion green bond to finance investments in electrification. Issuance of green bonds significantly increased into the 2020s, and to date, the Ford Motor Company green bond was the largest such bond offered by a non-financial corporate institution. How would investors assess the attractiveness of the bond?

In February 2021, the responsible seafood program officer for World Wide Fund for Nature Singapore (WWF-Singapore) was looking to encourage a collective change in the consumption of sustainable seafood. Promoting sustainable seafood in Singapore, however, had not been easy. Due to cultural influences and the nature of seafood trading, driving a change in the sourcing and consumption of seafood among stakeholders required significant effort and creativity. Identified stakeholders were generally either slow in acting or unresponsive. With each party pushing the responsibility to another, the challenge facing the program officer and WWF-Singapore's market transformation team was how to overcome this deadlock of inertia. WWF-Singapore believed that it was necessary to understand and address each stakeholder separately, as stakeholders required specific communication messages and support to help them make a change. However, with limited resources, WWF-Singapore had to be strategic in deciding who to target and how.

LCA action plans integrate responsibility and accountability into decision-making and planning. This module note was designed for the LCA course and reviews six steps leaders can follow to develop a practical LCA action plan for their business. It shows how integrating an LCA perspective can help leaders make better strategic decisions when planning by helping them clarify analysis, sharpen criteria for success, and be better prepared to manage risk.

For all the hype around bossless companies, managerial authority and hierarchy are still the best ways to ensure coordination, cooperation, creativity, predictability, and accountability in large organizations. But authority and hierarchy must be aligned to a company's specific needs. To fine-tune them, leaders should consider the need for speed in decision-making, the extent of employee knowledge, what knowledge is truly required, employee feelings of ownership, and procedural justice.

The "Moral Complexity in Leadership" series of cases and teaching notes help business instructors harness the power of fiction to prepare students for the moral and ethical dilemmas they will face throughout their careers. Meaningful fiction challenges students intellectually and emotionally; it reveals the inner worlds of human players and enables learning that can be difficult to access through case studies, commentary, or reporting. Through literature, students will wrestle with the kinds of problems they will face as leaders looking to make courageous decisions aligned with their moral codes. The works in this series represent a wide range of settings, viewpoints, and cultural frameworks; the characters are complex and contradictory, and the systems within which they operate (whether family, organizational, or cultural) influence them in varied ways. They have been taught to executive, full- and part-time MBA student audiences for many years. The series aims to increase students' understanding of moral frameworks and enhance their skills in facilitating and participating in healthy and productive dialogue about complex and provocative issues. In this installment of the series, "Greed," we examine Leo Tolstoy's "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" This classic tale of a man who forfeits everything in his pursuit of more land gives students an opportunity to discuss how comparison and escalating acquisitiveness (greed) affect them in their professional and communal circles. It also creates an opportunity for meaningful discussion of ways to identify and manage the human tendency to want more.

The authors contend that addressing the question "How much do my employees trust me?" is the real key to employee engagement. They discuss a free tool developed at Deloitte "HX TrustID" that companies can use to gauge employee trust and devise strategies for improving it. They then describe how two organizations one large, and one small have used the tool to address leaders' performance in four areas that contribute to employee trust: humanity, transparency, capability, and reliability.

GRW Engineering (Pty) Ltd. (GRW) is a road transport equipment designer, manufacturer, and servicer based in South Africa. With GRW facing increased competition in 2022 when one of GRW’s major suppliers buys out a local competitor, Gerhard Van der Merwe, co-founder of GRW and chief executive officer since its inception in 1996, knows that GRW must now compete directly against a giant multinational and develop an appropriate strategy. Van Der Merwe must decide whether to compete directly with the international firm or to internationalize. If GRW were to internationalize, he will need to determine whether to focus GRW’s energies on Sub-Saharan Africa or to manufacture in Europe.

Although corporate venture capital (CVC) has been studied as part of open innovation (OI), assumptions about knowledge flows crossing organizational boundaries between "the inside" and "the outside" have limited those explorations. Drawing on an abductive approach to grounded theorizing, this article introduces an intuitive yet novel framework that traces the sources and applications of knowledge obtained from CVC to derive new conditions for how those investments allow companies to orchestrate knowledge flows to overcome barriers and increase their innovation effectiveness. Besides exploring traditional OI knowledge flows within the CVC context, this article further identifies and examines both outside-out knowledge flows (which help to shape an ecosystem for a corporate innovator) and inside-in knowledge flows (which overcome internal silos to achieve real innovation impact).

In March 2020, when Swiss citizens were subjected to semi-confinement measures to protect them from the rapid spread of COVID-19, Oliver Price, a young entrepreneur in the canton of Fribourg, decided to launch a web platform to support local businesses that had been forced to close. The goal of this platform, originally called Support for Fribourg Merchants, was to serve as an intermediary between those businesses and consumers wishing to help them by purchasing vouchers that could be redeemed when normal life resumed. This solidarity-based initiative was a resounding success, and when the semi-confinement mandated by the Swiss government came to an end, the platform professionalized and continued to innovate. But could a spontaneous act of solidarity be transformed into a sustainable local business?

GRW Engineering (Pty) Ltd. (GRW) is a road transport equipment designer, manufacturer, and servicer based in South Africa. With GRW facing increased competition in 2022 when one of GRW's major suppliers buys out a local competitor, Gerhard Van der Merwe, co-founder of GRW and chief executive officer since its inception in 1996, knows that GRW must now compete directly against a giant multinational and develop an appropriate strategy. Van Der Merwe must decide whether to compete directly with the international firm or to internationalize. If GRW were to internationalize, he will need to determine whether to focus GRW's energies on Sub-Saharan Africa or to manufacture in Europe.

In increasingly diverse workplaces, imposter syndrome may inhibit the performance of some of the best and brightest rising stars. Managers can help transform the hold that these fears can have on employees and make that concern a fleeting thought instead of a permanent restraint.

White lies (inflated claims) cost the insurance industry billions of dollars every year. After investing heavily to automate workflows (from policy subscription to claims processing), digitization has ironically made fraud easier to commit and harder to catch. To an industry drowning in data and paying out millions per day for fraudulent claims, artificial intelligence and machine learning offer new hope. The case introduces what it calls "explainable AI" seen through the eyes of a senior operations executive at Shift, an insurtech unicorn company whose algorithm is used by global insurers such as Generali France and Mitsui Sumitomo to fight fraudulent claims. The focus is on strategy making (following a private equity funding round) and algorithm-level decisions. With an anonymized dataset of more than 10,000 claims and a guided coding exercise in statistical computing softwares R and Python, students are able to backtest their strategies on historical data. Beyond the exercise there is ample material to drive case discussion. https://publishing.insead.edu/case/to-catch-a-thief

White lies (inflated claims) cost the insurance industry billions of dollars every year. After investing heavily to automate workflows (from policy subscription to claims processing), digitization has ironically made fraud easier to commit and harder to catch. To an industry drowning in data and paying out millions per day for fraudulent claims, artificial intelligence and machine learning offer new hope. The case introduces what it calls "explainable AI" seen through the eyes of a senior operations executive at Shift, an insurtech unicorn company whose algorithm is used by global insurers such as Generali France and Mitsui Sumitomo to fight fraudulent claims. The focus is on strategy making (following a private equity funding round) and algorithm-level decisions. With an anonymized dataset of more than 10,000 claims and a guided coding exercise in statistical computing softwares R and Python, students are able to backtest their strategies on historical data. Beyond the exercise there is ample material to drive case discussion. https://publishing.insead.edu/case/to-catch-a-thief

Information asymmetry is pervasive in business and can often confer great advantage. This note distinguishes forms of deceptive behavior in the face of information asymmetry and aims to help students analyze their impermissibility. The note also introduces students to the method of reflective equilibrium as an approach to ethical analysis.