This case set is part of the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) curriculum. To see other material in the GVV curriculum, please visit http://store.darden.virginia.edu/giving-voice-to-values. Tom Patton is the head of internal communication at a cybersecurity company, RothBabbitt Cyber (RothBabbitt), which was the victim of a significant cyberattack. After informing Patton about the situation, his supervisor, Chief Communication Officer Lucille Givens, tells him to develop a plan to communicate the bad news to employees. Because the cyberattack is being announced to the public in two days, Patton will have only 24 hours to complete his plan. Fearing additional legal exposure, Givens and the company's general counsel instruct Patton not to share this news with anyone not already informed and to minimize the details that leadership will communicate to employees. Patton disagrees with this approach because he believes it is dishonest and unwise. He also thinks the company should be more transparent with the public. In his view, the right path is to provide full disclosure to employees who will already feel blindsided by the news. This case set is intended for use at the MBA level in courses on Strategic Communication, Organizational Behavior, Leadership, Tech Ethics, and Ethics. While it was written for an MBA curriculum, it can also be used by graduate and advanced undergraduate students in Communication, Journalism, or Computer Science who have experience employing the ideas in Mary Gentile's Giving Voice to Values (GVV) book and curriculum.

This case set is part of the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) curriculum. To see other material in the GVV curriculum, please visit http://store.darden.virginia.edu/giving-voice-to-values. Tom Patton is the head of internal communication at a cybersecurity company, RothBabbitt Cyber (RothBabbitt), which was the victim of a significant cyberattack. After informing Patton about the situation, his supervisor, Chief Communication Officer Lucille Givens, tells him to develop a plan to communicate the bad news to employees. Because the cyberattack is being announced to the public in two days, Patton will have only 24 hours to complete his plan. Fearing additional legal exposure, Givens and the company's general counsel instruct Patton not to share this news with anyone not already informed and to minimize the details that leadership will communicate to employees. Patton disagrees with this approach because he believes it is dishonest and unwise. He also thinks the company should be more transparent with the public. In his view, the right path is to provide full disclosure to employees who will already feel blindsided by the news. This case set is intended for use at the MBA level in courses on Strategic Communication, Organizational Behavior, Leadership, Tech Ethics, and Ethics. While it was written for an MBA curriculum, it can also be used by graduate and advanced undergraduate students in Communication, Journalism, or Computer Science who have experience employing the ideas in Mary Gentile's Giving Voice to Values (GVV) book and curriculum.

Athletic Brewing Company ("Athletic," for short) was founded by Bill Shufelt and John Walker in 2017. In creating Athletic, Shufelt and Walker opened the first U.S. brewery and taproom fully devoted to the production of non-alcoholic (NA) craft beer. By 2021, Athletic was generating around $15 million in annual revenue, and struggling to keep up with consumer demand. Athletic's success was notable in light of long-standing stigmas associated with drinking non-alcoholic beer, particularly in U.S. markets. For example, there was a historical societal stigma surrounding non-alcoholic beer as a result of assumptions that people who chose not to drink alcohol are abstaining because of a problematic relationship with alcohol. Athletic overcame this barrier, and found early success, by specifically addressing the needs of athletes who wanted to enjoy a great beer and be included in the social ritual of drinking without compromising their athletic performance. However, Athletic's success was also part of a larger cultural shift and increased receptivity to non-alcoholic beer in the U.S., which subsequently attracted stiff competition from both small and large brewers who created their own non-alcoholic offerings. Can Athletic continue its upward trajectory or will it be squeezed out by competitors? Will the bubbling embrace of non-alcoholic beer in the U.S. become mainstream or will it prove to be a passing fad?

The founder and executive director of Allswell Productions (Allswell), an amateur musical theatre company based in London, Ontario, and her team had seen tremendous success with their inaugural production, and they needed to determine what show to stage next. With a wide assortment of theatregoers in the London area, she needed to refine her target market and plan a production for the next season. She had to determine which show to stage, in which theatre space to stage it, how to price the tickets, and how to promote the show.

Jeff Henry, owner of and creative visionary behind Schlitterbahn Waterparks & Resorts, created one of the most sought-after water park companies in the United States. He was confident in his ability to create the best attractions and dominate the industry with his unique inventions. Then, at his facility in Kansas City, Kansas, a fatal accident took place after the construction and design of the Verrückt, a waterslide Henry hoped would set new world records. How should Henry have responded to the tragedy?

Vroom Inc. (Vroom) was a video conferencing technology company located in London, Ontario, Canada. The founder of Vroom was reviewing the company’s financial performance for its second fiscal year. He had already reviewed the company’s operating decisions over the past fiscal year and was now eager to review the company’s financing and investing transactions.

Jeff Henry, owner of and creative visionary behind Schlitterbahn Waterparks & Resorts, created one of the most sought-after water park companies in the United States. He was confident in his ability to create the best attractions and dominate the industry with his unique inventions. Then, at his facility in Kansas City, Kansas, a fatal accident took place after the construction and design of the Verrückt, a waterslide Henry hoped would set new world records. How should Henry have responded to the tragedy?

The founder and executive director of Allswell Productions (Allswell), an amateur musical theatre company based in London, Ontario, and her team had seen tremendous success with their inaugural production, and they needed to determine what show to stage next. With a wide assortment of theatregoers in the London area, she needed to refine her target market and plan a production for the next season. She had to determine which show to stage, in which theatre space to stage it, how to price the tickets, and how to promote the show.

Infosys, an India-based global IT consulting and software services provider, had more than 200,000 employees, mainly software specialists and technical consultants, who were assigned to projects by a talent allocation team that made staffing recommendations based on detailed manual assessments of employees' skill sets and experience. However, Infosys delivery managers, responsible for managing the talent assigned to projects, often rejected the matches proposed by the talent team and hoarded human resources for their own projects. In fall 2017, Infosys leaders assembled a cross-functional team and tasked it with developing a new AI-based talent management system to replace the old manual process. The new system was to provide a 360-degree view of open positions and available employees and use an algorithm to make hiring recommendations for projects. The AI team members had to make various data, design, and deployment decisions before they could begin building the new solution. First, they had to select data variables to define "supply" (i.e., employees available for assignments) and "demand" (i.e., staffing needs for client engagements). They also had to establish a system for ensuring this data was kept accurate and up to date after launch. Last--but perhaps most critical--the team had to develop a plan for maintenance and continuous improvement of the model, even at this early stage.

In contrast to the well-known stereotype of the boring, unsociable accountant, today's public accounting professionals argue that they are boundary spanners. Working at the intersection of the firm/client interface, these professionals contend that sociability is a requisite skill for routinely navigating the many interactions they have with multiple personnel at client organizations. This research aims to address this disconnect and to confront whether the public perception is warranted. Using the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue), we assess the sociability of 176 public accounting professionals and discover that, contrary to the stereotype, male public accountants are more sociable than males in the general population. Our analysis also demonstrates that female public accountants are no more or less sociable than females in the general population. Additional analysis shows that while male public accountants are more sociable than female public accountants, this effect is attributable to differences at lower levels of the profession and that male-female differences disappear when comparing male managers and partners to female managers and partners. Given the importance of sociability in public accounting, this research offers recruiting strategies that will help to dispel the myth of the unsociable accountant and provides training tips for enhancing sociability within the ranks.

Organizations underperform, or fail, when members avoid partnering with managers--whether through subtle resistance, disagreement, protest, or walkout--to achieve common purpose. Managers should boost partnering not by affecting a pretense of leadership but through a nuanced balance of managerial authority and understanding of members' points of view. The objective of this article is to sharpen attention on the concept of partnership with organization members and how it relates to some of the important previous literature. We also argue that some of the previous scholarly work contributes to misconceptions related to these concepts. Our work is forward-looking in that it is motivated by the dangerous societal and cultural differences evident in the world, differences that surround management's decisions and that may induce an overuse of authority to quash disquiet. Using our experiences in both industry and academia, we argue that the crucial link between managers and members is leadership--not leadership thought of as directional and inspirational, but leadership as building a relationship toward common purpose through partnership. "Lead" and "leader" are sorely misused terms, and worse, substituting "leader" for "manager" is just plain wrong. We believe that managers become leaders only when followers agree to follow, not when the managers simply step forward energetically with direction. Managers are cheated by mistaken definitions. Reviewing past perspectives about what makes good leaders and managers, we rethink ways to enhance organizational harmony through a clearer understanding of managership, leadership, followership, and partnership. Only by thinking and acting as partners in common purpose can managers and members form the core of success in organizational endeavors.

Despite the proactive efforts of many firms to combat gender bias within their organizations, societal prejudices still disadvantage women leaders and the firms who employ them. This external gender bias shapes outside stakeholder evaluations of women leaders' efforts in various ways, and firms need strategies to cope with this external gender bias. We examine the conditions that might alleviate this burden of external bias and what women leaders and top executives can do to leverage these conditions--from a strategic positioning perspective--that will effectively allow female leaders to differentiate their work. To do this, we synthesize and build upon evidence that the external gender bias against women leaders diminishes when they lead in areas that are unconventional rather than mainstream. We then propose a two-step process based on (1) identifying the likely threat of external gender bias, which is stronger in some industry contexts than others, and (2) leveraging unconventionality to circumvent male prototypical comparisons, thereby reducing the hazards of external gender bias.

Marketers know that running experiments is a proven way to improve results and gain competitive advantage against rivals. Despite this knowledge--and the fact that experiments are now easier to conduct than ever before--data shows that marketers consistently under-experiment. In this article, we examine why this gap exists and what can be done to close it. We do so by connecting with seniorlevel marketing professionals representing seven consumer-facing industries in two phases. First, through a series of interviews, we gain initial understanding of the concerns, challenges, and realities of those working in the industry. Following this phase, we surveyed a larger group to corroborate and extend our initial findings, comparing cases to identify challenges and the strategies used to overcome them. We present our findings as a series of experimentation myths before closing with a broader perspective on how organizations can infuse experimentation into their culture.

It is not a secret that many leadership development programs are not producing intended results, and the majority of first-time managers are ineffective. Even though organizations prioritize leadership development, most companies recognize that their programs need improvement in selecting and developing first-time managers. Perhaps it is time to reconsider the assumptions that these programs are based on. First, while organizations tend to promote high-performing individual contributors, the mindsets of an effective individual contributor do not translate to effective leadership mindsets. Second, leadership development programs generally assume that new managers can change behavior by focusing on skill development. These programs fail to identify, name, and address the underlying mindsets that influence individual action. In this article, I highlight research on leadership and leadership mindsets that can replace the flawed assumptions of underperforming leadership selection and training programs. Building on leadership mindset research, I make recommendations to help organizations better select and train new managers.

Most CEOs take a narrow, tactical view of pricing and delegate pricing to lower levels of the organization. This myopic approach is costly, as it prevents companies from realizing their potential. In the hands of the best-run companies, pricing is not a battlefield tactic to win a particular competitive skirmish but a transformative long-term strategy for sustained competitive advantage. We present an agenda of six specific action items that defines how to unlock the power of pricing. CEOs and senior executives, our research suggests, should not set prices, but instead, they should create the context, the capabilities, the behaviors, the infrastructure, and the aspirations that enable their organization to excel in pricing.

In the early onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., consumers experienced surprising shortages of essential goods that appeared to be unrelated to the pandemic: toilet paper, yeast and flour, and meat cuts. The usual explanations--attributing these shortages to demand spikes--often failed to provide an adequate explanation or predicted only temporary shortages. But these shortages ended up being real supply-chain struggles for which the true causes revealed a deeper set of unusual causes. Our detailed analysis of these supply chains identifies overlooked failure factors and hidden causes. We conclude with the profound lessons learned from the pandemic crisis on supply chains and the implied challenges of building resilient supply chains for the future, which require rethinking the relevant systems we plan and optimize. The level of investment required for building firm-specific redundancy of assets and operational flexibility might be prohibitive for any one firm, or their financial stakeholders, to pursue and accept.

The use of big data to help explain fluctuations in the broader economy and key business performance indicators is now so commonplace that in some instances it has even begun to rival more traditional measures. Big data sources can very often provide advantages when compared with these more traditional data sources, but with these advantages also come potential pitfalls. We lay out a checklist called SMALL that we have developed in order to help interested parties as they navigate the big data minefield. Based on a set of five questions, the SMALL checklist should help users of big data draw justifiable conclusions and avoid making mistakes in matters of interpretation. To demonstrate, we provide several case studies that demonstrate the subtle nuances of several of these new big data sets and show how the problems they face often closely relate to age-old concerns that more traditional data sources are also forced to tackle.

Networking events are seen as an essential activity for the establishment and maintenance of professional connections. Despite their ubiquity and perceived importance, networking events are often ineffective and unenjoyable. Suggestions for the improvement of networking outcomes typically focus on event selection or participant capabilities. In this article, we posit that greater success can be achieved by improving the design of networking events themselves. We adopt a research-through-design (RTD) approach to derive the design features that explain the success of Wok+Wine, a networking event that consistently delivers positive functional and experiential outcomes across a range of cultural and organizational contexts. From a synthesis of these design features, we derive six generalizable design principles that can support managers in the creation of better networking events as well as in the analysis and selection of existing ones.

Relations between U.S. and Chinese corporations are increasingly strained. In this article, we examine how differences in the key domains of corporate governance, underlying corporate philosophy, innovation, and dispute resolution contribute to this strained relationship. We illustrate these differences by examining the relations between Skyworks Solutions (U.S.) and ZTE (China). We discuss the three broad strategies available to U.S. managers in engaging with Chinese corporations, depending on the extent of their involvement and comfort with discord: (1) playing ball, (2) straddling the middle ground, and (3) decoupling.

Business leaders have increasingly committed to redefining corporate purpose in terms of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The challenge now is to enact this commitment. This article argues that to do so, managers must adopt a new cognitive frame (or mental lens). Specifically, managers must disengage from their existing instrumental frames, under which they consider CSR only instrumentally as a means to drive profit and pay only peripheral attention to external stakeholder goals, and instead engage with an integrative frame, in which CSR goals are intrinsic to business plans and are considered equivalent to, and simultaneously with, the firm's financial goals. To enable managerial transition from the established instrumental frame to a novel, challenging, integrative frame, this article presents a transformative learning experience (TLE). In the TLE, managers first are immersed in a business initiative explicitly designed to expose the inadequacies of the instrumental frame for the redefined corporate purpose. This activates disorienting dilemmas in which the instrumental frame no longer applies but a new frame is not yet apparent. In the second phase, firms provide managers with heuristics such as metaphorical reasoning to enable experimentation with an integrative frame. This article provides guidelines for the structure in which this process should be embedded, how this process can be activated, and the process and learning outcomes to measure.