In April 2022, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Agilus Work Solutions (Agilus) was considering how to handle the future of work at the company. With the company’s employees having worked primarily remotely since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, he wondered if now was the time to bring them back to the office. If so, would employees return to the office full-time, or was a hybrid model preferable? With employees having conflicting viewpoints on the issue, the CEO knew that whatever option was chosen would need strong justification and to be skilfully communicated to Agilus’s employees from coast to coast.

On March 5, 2022, Ronni Kahn sat at her desk in Sydney, Australia, reflecting on what she was going to share at an international conference on leadership. Kahn was the founder and chief executive officer of the food rescue organization OzHarvest, a charity with the goal to nourish Australia through redistributing food and food waste to those in need. Kahn’s work involved a combination of running OzHarvest and being an international ambassador for and keynote speaker on sustainable food practices and living with purpose and meaning. As Kahn reflected on the work that had been done over the last eighteen years, what were the leadership lessons she had learned that she could share with others?

In early 2021, Kent Fawcett was a food entrepreneur facing typical questions around scaling his enterprise, Local Pulse. Driven by a personal passion for food as a means to heal both people and the planet, he developed a line of shelf-stable plant-based foods, including breakfast cereals and dehydrated hummus. Since 2018, he had been offering his products online and at the local farmers’ market in Kamloops, British Columbia. He started selling Local Pulse goods wholesale and was beginning to understand the scale at which he would have to produce the goods in order for his business to be financially sustainable. Fawcett was not sure if he was ready to take the financial risk of investing in new facilities to grow the business.

At 11:33am on May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old man from Uvalde, Texas walked into the Robb Elementary School carrying a semi-automatic "AR-15-style" rifle manufactured by Daniel Defense and killed 19 children and two adults. Three days later, Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), Chair of the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to Marty Daniel, the CEO of Daniel Defense, requesting information for a Congressional hearing to be held on June 8. Daniel must now respond to the request for information on his firm's marketing practices, gun sales, and profitability; prepare for Congressional testimony; and decide whether to change any of his company's business practices (e.g., the products it sold and the way it marketed them). Daniel also had to decide whether to support new calls for gun control legislation or continue resisting all attempts to restrict Second Amendment rights to gun ownership. At a higher level, this case explores the legal, ethical, and moral responsibilities companies have, if any, for the criminal misuse of their legally manufactured and legally sold products.

On March 17, 2022, Greg Norman, CEO of LIV Golf, announced the 8-tournament schedule for the inaugural season of the LIV Golf Invitational Series. Norman, a retired professional golfer and former world #1, was helming the league to compete with the PGA Tour, which was the dominant affiliation for professional golfers. On June 9, 2022, the first LIV Golf event teed off outside of London, England. Immediately following the official start of the London tournament, Jay Monahan, the commissioner of the PGA Tour, released a memo stating that all 17 PGA Tour players participating in the LIV Golf event were suspended and ineligible to compete in PGA Tour events. Tensions continued to rise over the summer, as more players "defected" to LIV, lost sponsorships, and lost the ability to earn points on the world rankings. LIV Golf filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing the PGA Tour of anticompetitive practices, and the Department of Justice also launched an investigation. Both sides expected the conflict to escalate in the years ahead.

In a business environment characterized by accelerating change and growing uncertainty, teams whose orientation spans both the internal organization and the external business ecosystem are nimbler and drive more innovation and also serve to distribute leadership throughout the organization. The authors review the challenges of successfully implementing the x-team model of collaboration and describe the success factors common among high-performing x-teams.

When researchers asked employees what their supervisor could do to help alleviate the uncertainty that arose from the pandemic, the data revealed five categories of actions managers can take to help workers cope. The study also found that different employees want different kinds of support delivered in different ways during a crisis, including some that managers can't realistically provide. Consequently, managers must prioritize two behaviors: individualized consideration and building trust.

As many employees resist the call to return to the workplace from home offices established during the COVID-19 pandemic, managers worried about losing talent are accommodating them. The authors studied 20 global enterprises to gain insight into management concerns and emerging practices for managing hybrid work effectively.

This highly engaging exercise is designed to give participants a keen understanding of Blue Ocean Leadership and how to achieve high impact at low cost while saving time as leaders. Participants are introduced to a scenario-based exercise focusing on the fictional company Dunamis, an American video game company, and its recently appointed Director of Development, John Kedge. Kedge's first challenge is to create and produce a differentiated and low-cost mobile game. But during the production phase, Kedge finds out that all his good employees are leaving. Turnover is high. People are demotivated. He has to hire massively and still keeps missing deadlines. Now Kedge is really behind schedule and getting pressure from his boss. The scenario-based exercise is an engaging way to learn how to apply the theory of Blue Ocean Leadership and its tools to achieve high-impact leadership fast and at low cost. The exercise comes with a Teaching Note and templates for participants to apply.

In many cases, data analysts are given the question to answer or the data set to be analyzed. It's important, however, to understand that there are numerous steps, before and after the empirical analysis is done, that define an overall rigorous scientific process. This note outlines the basic steps that are important in asking an empirical research question, answering it, and presenting findings. The process described in the note generalizes to any empirical research domain. Given the rising prominence of data analytics in sports, we illustrate the process here using a question that is often discussed by basketball observers: Does calling a timeout in basketball end a run being made by the opposing team? At Darden, this note is used in the MBA and Executive MBA class "Data Analytics and Leadership Judgment in Sports"; it would also be suitable in many data analytics courses or a module in any course introducing the basics of an empirical research process.

This case introduces Aaron Johnson, a formerly at-risk youth who spent three years in prison, and who now faces many daunting tasks related to building his career: securing his first job, gaining admittance to the University of Virginia's (UVA's) McIntire School of Commerce (McIntire), getting an internship, and networking his way to a full-time offer. Johnson has just been offered a very appealing role in the Advanced Technology group at Opportune Delivery Services (ODS) as a financial analyst, but the salary offer came in lower than he expected, and he must decide whether he should accept the offer, try to negotiate, or look for a job someplace else. This case was designed to be taught in courses for non-MBA audiences that explore aspects of financial and social capability, such as storytelling, the power of creating connections and networking, the challenges that previously incarcerated people face when reentering society and looking for a job, and salary negotiation.

In April 2022, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Agilus Work Solutions (Agilus) was considering how to handle the future of work at the company. With the company's employees having worked primarily remotely since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, he wondered if now was the time to bring them back to the office. If so, would employees return to the office full-time, or was a hybrid model preferable? With employees having conflicting viewpoints on the issue, the CEO knew that whatever option was chosen would need strong justification and to be skilfully communicated to Agilus's employees from coast to coast.

In early 2021, Kent Fawcett was a food entrepreneur facing typical questions around scaling his enterprise, Local Pulse. Driven by a personal passion for food as a means to heal both people and the planet, he developed a line of shelf-stable plant-based foods, including breakfast cereals and dehydrated hummus. Since 2018, he had been offering his products online and at the local farmers' market in Kamloops, British Columbia. He started selling Local Pulse goods wholesale and was beginning to understand the scale at which he would have to produce the goods in order for his business to be financially sustainable. Fawcett was not sure if he was ready to take the financial risk of investing in new facilities to grow the business.

On March 5, 2022, Ronni Kahn sat at her desk in Sydney, Australia, reflecting on what she was going to share at an international conference on leadership. Kahn was the founder and chief executive officer of the food rescue organization OzHarvest, a charity with the goal to nourish Australia through redistributing food and food waste to those in need. Kahn's work involved a combination of running OzHarvest and being an international ambassador for and keynote speaker on sustainable food practices and living with purpose and meaning. As Kahn reflected on the work that had been done over the last eighteen years, what were the leadership lessons she had learned that she could share with others?

The case analyzes the evolution of the business model of the Spanish multinational Konecta, which, since its origin, was dedicated to providing Contact Center services. During a process of digital transformation, Konecta added the offer of comprehensive solutions and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) to traditional end-user services of client companies. Given the digital transformation, senior management decided to carry out a first phase of organizational restructuring to reflect these changes. To that end, it instructed the Strategic Transformation Committee to recommend modifications to the organizational design in order to meet new commercial and operational challenges. Proposals were to be tested as a pilot project to link the parent company with Konecta Peru, a subsidiary that operated in a market with important business prospects for the group. The members of the Committee were faced with the challenge of restructuring the organizational framework to leverage Konecta's position as a multinational company at the service of companies and clients with multiple demands. In this context, they needed to assess how the changes in structure could affect the local performance and the level of autonomy and flexibility in each country, while the parent company demanded an integrated approach that would promote synergies.

This article presents a strategic decision-making tool to assist corporate management in analyzing the trajectory of their business model portfolio. The tool provides a robust means of assessing the trajectory of a business model portfolio through the evolution of inter-business model complementarity and intra-business model complexity. The article illustrates the use of the tool through the example of the radical restructuring of Hewlett Packard's (HP) business model portfolio in 2015, which resulted in two smaller, more adaptive corporate entities with distinct business models that could pursue redefined growth opportunities after the split.

At the end of 2018, Ana Milena Munoz, of Carvajal Empaques S.A., a subsidiary of the Carvajal organization, was concerned. She was at a crossroads in her work because of the growing controversy at a global level about the use and disposal of plastic, the company's primary raw material. She had to present the 2019-2023 roadmap on sustainability in a week and had several alternatives on the table. However, she had not been able to get a full picture of the alternatives mentioned during the last meeting of the sustainability committee. Sustainability had made progress, but now, the challenges were significant. In the face of incoming legislation, the company needed to have a response to re-use and dispose plastic. The company had been working with Reciclplas a trade recyclers company. However, despite the support that Recicloplas had been receiving, this organization still had not reached the break-even point and the material it processed could not yet be integrated by Carvajal Empaques into its packaging due to food safety issues. Further, the supply and demand chains for the plastic resins used by the company were not structured in the country. Ana Milena reflected on several strategies to respond to the legislation, fulfill clients' expectations and maintain the social commitment to Recicloplas. These involved reflecting on the types of plastic resins or other raw materials the company would use.

This case concerns a family business's efforts to assess and shape collective decision-making among a large sibling leadership group and transition from an informal founder-led operation to a more formalized organization. In late 2021, the family behind MIC Food, a Miami-based processor and distributor of tropical fruits and vegetables, such as plantains, was led by six second-generation siblings, the children of the Honduran-immigrant company founders. The business had come through the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic well, with record expected annual revenue. But as competition and regulation increased, the siblings had to consider whether their informal decision-making--including weekly meetings and regular group texts--should be systematized to ensure strategic and efficient decision-making in the future. Readers will put themselves in the siblings' shoes to consider the best approaches to gaining consensus on strategy and growth goals; sharing power within the sibling group and, potentially, with executives brought in from outside; and creating vision and objectives for bringing the third generation into the enterprise.

Founded in 1950, King's Hawaiian, a Los Angeles-based bakery, operated in the competitive bread industry with an expansive list of rolls and bread, as well as a selection of other baked goods, which varied by region. As the business grew over the years, it had added production facilities and increased marketing. For decades, King's Hawaiian had focused on its core bread products, using occasion-based marketing to target consumers. However, in April 2021, with an ever-increasing market, the company had to decide whether to scale up into a mass-market company or continue to service a niche occasion-based segment by offering its unique sweet bread through in-store bakery and deli departments.

At the end of 2019, Ignacio Galán, the Chairman and CEO of the world's third largest utility, Iberdrola, relected on his almost 20 years at the company. He managed a portfolio of three very different businesses, each with their own specific opportunities and challenges. From the outside, the Renewables business appeared to be the flagship business, with engineering projects constantly increasing in scope and size. Less high profile but no less strategically important was the Networks business, which was characterized by its regulated nature and provided a stable financial base for the company. Finally, the Wholesale and Retail business developed customized and innovative solutions for customers. Iberdrola had invested early in renewable technologies to position itself as a leader in driving the electric industry's role in the fight against climate change. Over time, Iberdrola had honed the skill of constantly monitoring new technologues and strategically deciding when to make its move. Faced with the decision to invest in green technology, heralded as a key technology in the fight for net zero, Galán and his team were weighing up their options.