Examines the key elements and principles behind Haier's performance management system and the organizational behavioral context in which it was implemented. Haier's performance management system constituted a significant competitive advantage and was a key factor in the company's transformation from a small, backward, collectively owned local company to the number five player in the global white goods industry. The strength of the case lies in the universality of the key principles behind Haier's management performance systems.

Discusses the product launch process at Logitech for a product in a new product category. Asks students to recommend target markets for introducing a (potentially) disruptive technology.

In April 2002, Venkatesh Tulluri, then strategy director of Rhodia's technical fibers division, announced to management that he wanted to engineer a spin-off and management buyout (MBO) of Kermel, a small company within Rhodia's portfolio. Kermel was a niche player in the specialty fiber market that had not been included in the ongoing company's asset divestment program. Investigates the evolution of the MBO process and the hurdles Tulluri has to overcome to give life to his endeavor.

Describes the leadership dilemmas facing the top management team of a leading Indian pharmaceutical company--the first in its industry to be listed on the NYSE. Much admired for its impressive growth, Dr. Reddy's stands at a crossroad. How much emphasis should it place on the legacy business of active pharmaceutical ingredients and generics that have brought the company its current stature, and how much should it focus on future business like specialty pharmaceuticals and discovering new chemical entities? The two represent different business models and straddling the strategy, organization, and human resources demands of each one is the challenge for Dr. Reddy's top team.

Hiram Phillips couldn't have been in better spirits. The CFO and chief administrative officer of Rainbarrel Products, a diversified consumer-durables manufacturer, Phillips felt he'd single-handedly turned the company's performance around. He'd been at Rainbarrel only a year, but the company's numbers had, according to his measures, already improved by leaps and bounds. Now the day had come for Hiram to share the positive results of his new performance management system with his colleagues. The corporate executive council was meeting, and even CEO Keith Randall was applauding the CFO's work. Everything looked positively rosy--until some questionable information began to trickle in from other meeting participants. It came to light, for instance, that R&D had developed a breakthrough product that was not being brought to market as quickly as it should have been--thanks to Hiram's inflexible budgeting process. An employee survey showed that workers were demoralized. And customers were complaining about Rainbarrel's service. The general message? The new performance metrics and incentives had indeed been affecting overall performance--but not for the better. Should Rainbarrel revisit its approach to performance management? In R0301A and R0301Z commentators Stephen Kaufman, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School; compensation consultant Steven Gross; retired U.S. Navy vice admiral and management consultant Diego Hernandez; and Barry Leskin, a consultant and former chief learning officer for ChevronTexaco, offer their advice in this fictional case study.

What could be more fundamental to management, or more difficult, than motivating people? After all, a manager, by definition, is someone who gets work done through others. But how? A typical recipe for motivation calls for a mixture of persuasion, encouragement, and compulsion. Yet the best leaders, we suspect, need no recipe: They get people to produce great results by appealing to their deepest drives, needs, and desires. And so we discovered when we asked a dozen of the world's top leaders to describe how they each met a daunting challenge in motivating an individual, team, or organization. Some of the leaders appeal to people's need for the rational and the orderly: Mattel's Robert Eckert emphasizes the reassuring power of delivering a consistent message, and HP's Carly Fiorina focuses on facing hard truths and setting step-by-step goals. Some, like celebrated oceanographer Robert Ballard, Pfizer CEO Hank McKinnell, and BP America president Ross Pillari, see the powerful motivating effects of asking people to rise to difficult challenges. Others focus more on the human spirit, appealing to the desire to do something, as BMW's Chris Bangle puts it, "rare, marvelous, and lasting." And quite a few inspire through example, as Dial chairman Herb Baum did when he donated $1,000 from his bonus to each of the company's 155 lowest paid people.

We live in a knowledge economy. The core assets of the modern business enterprise aren't its buildings, machinery, and real estate, but the intelligence, understanding, skills, and experience of its employees. Harnessing the capabilities and commitment of knowledge workers is arguably the central managerial challenge of our time. Unfortunately, it is a challenge that has not yet been met. Corporate ownership structures, governance systems, and incentive programs--despite the enlightened rhetoric of business leaders--remain firmly planted in the industrial age. In this article, the authors draw on history to lay out a model for a democratic business organization suited to the knowledge economy. The Athenian model of organizational democracy offers a window into how sizable groups of people can, in an atmosphere of dignity and trust, successfully govern themselves without resorting to a stifling bureaucracy. Such a system provides the synthesis of individual initiative and common cause that today's companies need to achieve if they're to realize the full power of their people and thrive in the knowledge economy.

Managers who motivate with incentives and the power of their vision and passion succeed only in energizing employees who want to be motivated. So how do you motivate intractable employees--the ones who never do what you want and also take up all your time? According to Nigel Nicholson, you can't: Individuals must motivate themselves. Instead of pushing solutions on problem employees, the manager should pull solutions out of them by creating circumstances in which the employees can channel their motivation toward achievable goals. That means addressing any obstacles--possibly even the manager's own demotivating style--that might be hindering the employees. Using detailed examples, Nicholson walks the reader through his method, pointing out potential pitfalls along the way. First, the manager creates a rich picture of the problem person. Second, the manager exercises flexibility and reframes goals so that the employee can meet them. Third, in a carefully staged, face-to-face conversation, the manager meets with the problem employee on neutral ground.

What's wrong with executive compensation, and what can we do about it? HBR and the University of Delaware's Center for Corporate Governance convened a roundtable of compensation experts last October on the university's campus in Newark, Delaware. The 12 panelists, from CEOs to investors, from the professionals who advise them to a chief justice who rules on their disputes, provided an extraordinary diversity of viewpoints. The panelists began by debating ways to align the interests of the senior executives with the long-term interests of the company. But the discussion expanded to cover broader questions of corporate governance and company values. It was a lively and wide-ranging discussion of one of business's most pressing issues.

It's a manager's perennial question: "How do I get an employee to do what I want?" The psychology of motivation is very complex, but the surest way of getting someone to do something is to deliver a kick in the pants--put bluntly, the KITA. Companies usually resort to positive KITAs, ranging from fringe benefits to employee counseling. But although a KITA might produce some change in behavior, it doesn't motivate. Frederick Herzberg, whose work influenced a generation of scholars and managers, likens motivation to an internal generator. An employee with an internal generator, he argues, needs no KITA. Achievement, recognition for achievement, the work itself, responsibility, and growth or advancement motivate people. The author cites research showing that those intrinsic factors are distinct from extrinsic, or KITA, elements that lead to job dissatisfaction. Jobs can be changed and enriched. Managers should focus on positions where people's attitudes are poor. The investment needed in industrial engineering is cost effective, and motivation will make a difference in performance.

What has long been recognized by teachers, physicians, and behavioral scientists holds true for management: One person's expectations shape another person's behavior. If a manager has high expectations, employees are likely to excel; if expectations are low, employees will likely respond with poor performance. In this HBR classic article from 1969, J. Sterling Livingston draws on numerous case studies and other research to demonstrate the importance of managerial expectations to individual and group performance. Consider the insurance executive who identified his six best agents and assigned them to his most capable manager. Not surprisingly, this group surpassed its already ambitious target. Equally unsurprising was what happened to a group of low producers assigned to the company's least capable manager. Their performance declined even further. But what happened to the group of average agents assigned to an average manager? That group increased its productivity by a higher percentage than the top group, because the manager refused to consider herself--or her agents--less capable than the superstars. And managers' beliefs about themselves influence how they view and treat their employees.

In this 1970 classic HBR article, Harry Levinson shares practical insights into the mysteries of motivation and takes a fresh look at the use and abuse of the most powerful tools for inspiring and guiding complex organizations. He argues that to motivate people successfully, management must focus on the question, "How do we meet both individual and organizational requirements?" When we make assumptions about individual motivations and increase pressure based on them, we ignore the fact that people work to meet their own psychological needs. Commitment must derive from the individual's wishes to support the organization's goals. Yet, the individual's desires are entirely absent from most performance measurement systems; managers assume that these desires are perfectly aligned with corporate goals and that if they're not, the individual should move on. Self-motivation occurs when individual needs and organizational requirements converge. Successful management systems begin with the employee's objectives. The manager's task is to understand the employee's needs and then, with the employee, assess how well the organization can meet them.

Nowadays, with organizations growing ever flatter and responsibility being pushed further down the ranks, admitting to a desire for power is a little out of fashion. But as the research in this 1976 classic HBR article shows, power is essential to good management. In fact, when it comes to managing big companies, the desire for power--that is, a manager's desire to have an impact, to be strong and influential--is more important than the need to get things done or the wish to be liked. The need to achieve, while important in small companies, actually becomes counterproductive in large, complex organizations, leading managers to try to do things themselves rather than spread tasks among many people. And managers who need to be liked tend to make exceptions for particular subordinates' needs, undermining morale. But seeking power is not the same as seeking glory. People who want power only to further their own careers, rather than the goals of the organization, tend to have subordinates who are loyal to them but not to the company, making them less effective on the whole. And wanting power is not the same as throwing it around. Correlations between employee morale and sales figures show that individuals who manage by fiat are less effective than those whose style is more democratic. As the many examples show, top executives can learn to tell who the good managers are likely to be and to train existing ones to be more effective. McKinsey Award Winner.

Unlike the traditional factors of production--land, labor, and capital--knowledge is a resource that can't be forced out of people. But creating and sharing knowledge is essential to fostering innovation, and it is the key challenge of the knowledge-based economy. To create a climate in which employees volunteer their creativity and expertise, managers need to look beyond the traditional tools at their disposal. They need to build trust. The authors studied the links among trust, idea sharing, and corporate performance for more than a decade. They explored why managers of local subsidiaries so often fail to share information with executives at headquarters, and they studied the dynamics of idea sharing in product development teams, joint ventures, supplier partnerships, and corporate transformations. They offer an explanation for why people resist change even when it would benefit them directly. In every case, the decisive factor is what the authors call "fair process"--fairness in the way that a company makes and executes decisions. The elements of fair process are simple: Engage people in decisions that directly affect them, explain why decisions are made the way they are, and clarify what will be expected of them after the changes are made.

Hiram Phillips couldn't have been in better spirits. The CFO and chief administrative officer of Rainbarrel Products, a diversified consumer-durables manufacturer, Phillips felt he'd single-handedly turned the company's performance around. He'd been at Rainbarrel only a year, but the company's numbers had, according to his measures, already improved by leaps and bounds. Now the day had come for Hiram to share the positive results of his new performance management system with his colleagues. The corporate executive council was meeting, and even CEO Keith Randall was applauding the CFO's work. Everything looked positively rosy--until some questionable information began to trickle in from other meeting participants. It came to light, for instance, that R&D had developed a breakthrough product that was not being brought to market as quickly as it should have been--thanks to Hiram's inflexible budgeting process. An employee survey showed that workers were demoralized. And customers were complaining about Rainbarrel's service. The general message? The new performance metrics and incentives had indeed been affecting overall performance--but not for the better. Should Rainbarrel revisit its approach to performance management? In R0301A and R0301Z, commentators Stephen Kaufman, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School; compensation consultant Steven Gross; retired U.S. Navy vice admiral and management consultant Diego Hernandez; and Barry Leskin, a consultant and former chief learning officer for ChevronTexaco, offer their advice on this fictional case study.

Hiram Phillips couldn't have been in better spirits. The CFO and chief administrative officer of Rainbarrel Products, a diversified consumer-durables manufacturer, Phillips felt he'd single-handedly turned the company's performance around. He'd been at Rainbarrel only a year, but the company's numbers had, according to his measures, already improved by leaps and bounds. Now the day had come for Hiram to share the positive results of his new performance management system with his colleagues. The corporate executive council was meeting, and even CEO Keith Randall was applauding the CFO's work. Everything looked positively rosy--until some questionable information began to trickle in from other meeting participants. It came to light, for instance, that R&D had developed a breakthrough product that was not being brought to market as quickly as it should have been--thanks to Hiram's inflexible budgeting process. An employee survey showed that workers were demoralized. And customers were complaining about Rainbarrel's service. The general message? The new performance metrics and incentives had indeed been affecting overall performance--but not for the better. Should Rainbarrel revisit its approach to performance management? In R0301A and R0301Z, commentators Stephen Kaufman, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School; compensation consultant Steven Gross; retired U.S. Navy vice admiral and management consultant Diego Hernandez; and Barry Leskin, a consultant and former chief learning officer for ChevronTexaco, offer their advice on this fictional case study.

Two-party integrative e-mail negotiation between a soccer star and her long-term representative over the terms of a potential new agency contract. It is the year 2030. Football (formerly referred to as "soccer" in the United States but now known as "football" worldwide) continues to be the most popular international sport. Women's football has surpassed men's football as the most attended, watched, and marketed sport in the world. Three years ago, in the 2027 Women's World Cup, a previously unknown Ghanaian forward named Ama Ata Fie emerged as one of the most prolific goal scorers in the world. Kofi Mwenchena, a Ghanaian sports agent, has represented Fie for the past six years, even before she surfaced as one of the world's most popular and successful football stars. Fie and Mwenchena signed an official contract six years ago, just before Fie was drafted to a Ghanaian club team. Mwenchena's contract with Fie has now expired, and the two have not yet been able to agree on terms of a potential new contract. International club rules state that official free agent negotiations begin in less than one week. Fie is still in Brazil completing some marketing obligations for Maccabi Wireless, while Mwenchena is back in Ghana to attend his brother's wedding ceremony, but he and Fie have agreed to try to finalize their contract negotiations via e-mail.

Two-party integrative e-mail negotiation between a soccer star and her long-term representative over the terms of a potential new agency contract. It is the year 2030. Football (formerly referred to as "soccer" in the United States but now known as "football" worldwide) continues to be the most popular international sport. Women's football has surpassed men's football as the most attended, watched, and marketed sport in the world. Three years ago, in the 2027 Women's World Cup, a previously unknown Ghanaian forward named Ama Ata Fie emerged as one of the most prolific goal scorers in the world. Kofi Mwenchena, a Ghanaian sports agent, has represented Fie for the past six years, even before she surfaced as one of the world's most popular and successful football stars. Fie and Mwenchena signed an official contract six years ago, just before Fie was drafted to a Ghanaian club team. Mwenchena's contract with Fie has now expired, and the two have not yet been able to agree on terms of a potential new contract. International club rules state that official free agent negotiations begin in less than one week. Fie is still in Brazil completing some marketing obligations for Maccabi Wireless, while Mwenchena is back in Ghana to attend his brother's wedding ceremony, but he and Fie have agreed to try to finalize their contract negotiations via e-mail. Confidential Instructions for Ama Ata Fie.

Two-party integrative e-mail negotiation between a soccer star and her long-term representative over the terms of a potential new agency contract. It is the year 2030. Football (formerly referred to as "soccer" in the United States but now known as "football" worldwide) continues to be the most popular international sport. Women's football has surpassed men's football as the most attended, watched, and marketed sport in the world. Three years ago, in the 2027 Women's World Cup, a previously unknown Ghanaian forward named Ama Ata Fie emerged as one of the most prolific goal scorers in the world. Kofi Mwenchena, a Ghanaian sports agent, has represented Fie for the past six years, even before she surfaced as one of the world's most popular and successful football stars. Fie and Mwenchena signed an official contract six years ago, just before Fie was drafted to a Ghanaian club team. Mwenchena's contract with Fie has now expired, and the two have not yet been able to agree on terms of a potential new contract. International club rules state that official free agent negotiations begin in less than one week. Fie is still in Brazil completing some marketing obligations for Maccabi Wireless, while Mwenchena is back in Ghana to attend his brother's wedding ceremony, but he and Fie have agreed to try to finalize their contract negotiations via e-mail. Confidential Instructions for Kofi Mwenchena.

Lattitude.com is a simple two-party, single-issue, primarily distributive negotiation regarding the potential sale of an internet domain name. It is designed to be negotiated entirely via e-mail, and may either be used in an online course or as a supplement to a face-to-face course. This simulation is a good vehicle for discussing the dynamics of distributive bargaining as well as the effect of the communication via email on both process and outcome.