Toxoplasma gondii, which is estimated to infect 10% to 50% of the population, affects your brain and makes you disinhibited and less risk-averse. It also makes you 29% more likely to found a start-up.
In April 2011, Dutch multinational Royal Philips, one of the most iconic companies in the country, decided to disrupt itself and transform from a diversified industrial conglomerate to a focused player in Health Technology. The case describes the first decade (2011-2021) of the strategic transformation in terms of refocusing the business portfolio, the new business model and, most of all, the efforts of top management to transform Philips' internal organisation in terms of structure, culture and systems. The first case author was a member of the executive board of Philips during the entire decade, working closely with the CEO, Frans van Houten, to effect the huge transformation. In addition to the author's personal experience as a senior executive with the firm, the case is based on numerous interviews with other members of the executive board, including van Houten.
The payments platform company Xendit came to life with a pivot. Its founders first built a product that would allow individuals to exchange funds--like Venmo but with more privacy--and then rolled out a simple business-to-consumer interface, similar to a pared-down version of Shopify. But they soon realized that such apps couldn't be successful without an infrastructure for digital transactions and banking. They'd already built an internal system to ensure quick and seamless incoming and outgoing payments, so they decided to offer it externally to speed transactions from bank to business and business to business, easing a significant pain point for enterprises of all sizes in the region. In the years since, they've maintained month-over-month revenue growth of more than 10% and expanded from a few dozen employees to more than 1,000 distributed around the world. And in its latest funding round Xendit achieved a valuation of more than $1 billion. Its leaders are taking the lessons learned in the company's earliest years--know your market, stay nimble, prioritize talent and culture--to overcome new challenges, from the Covid-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine. Their ethos is to move fast but thoughtfully, working product by product and country by country, to build and strengthen Southeast Asia's digital economy.
Innovation is all about finding and filling people's unmet needs. But even innovators and organizations renowned for their scanning capabilities often have trouble perceiving and correctly interpreting those needs. Drawing on their work as researchers, teachers, and consultants, the authors outline a four-part framework to help innovators diversify how and where they look. It involves two main strategies: improving your vision (seeing in greater detail) and challenging your vision (looking at people other than mainstream users). Within each you can adopt a narrow focus or take a wider view. You can zoom in on individual mainstream users and their everyday experiences (what the authors call a microscope strategy) or pull back to discover patterns in their aggregate behavior (a panorama strategy). Likewise, you can take a look at users outside your core (a telescope strategy) or seek a broader view of the patterns they exhibit as a group (a kaleidoscope strategy). For each of the framework's four parts, the authors describe how digital technologies can augment more-traditional ways of looking. Used together, the approaches they present will enable entrepreneurs to look further afield and on a larger scale than ever before.
Many DEI initiatives are scuttled because DEI leaders and legal teams feel themselves to be at odds over questions of acceptable risk. DEI leaders see lawyers as guardians of the status quo, whereas legal experts, trained to anticipate the worst, believe they are protecting the company from legal risk. However, as the authors point out, businesses routinely choose to accept significant legal risk. In most situations they're confronted with a risk-reward calculus that's easy to quantify. But with DEI that's harder, because the only thing on the balance sheet is the cost. Absent a foundation of trust and support, lawyers are skittish about signing off on initiatives, and the business is more likely to waste resources on performative exercises. And bad DEI poses a greater risk than does good DEI. When it comes to establishing a productive partnership between DEI leaders and legal counsel, the key is to collaborate early and often. In this article, the authors provide a framework to help you balance the nuances of legal risk with the need to implement effective initiatives.
Despite their reputation in the 1980s as corporate raiders, most private equity firms attempt to improve the performance of their portfolio companies through better corporate governance. But while the G in ESG (environmental, social, and governance) has always been important in the industry, the E and the S have been virtually nonexistent. Private equity has been comfortable seeking returns with little concern for the long-term sustainability of portfolio companies or their wider impact on society. That needs to change, the authors write, because PE has grown so large that society's most urgent challenges can't be addressed without the industry's active participation in the sustainability movement. Having interviewed a large sample of executives who run PE firms and the asset owners that fund them, the authors offer recommendations for how private equity can emerge as a leader in the ESG field--to benefit the wider world as well as its own long-term performance.
Companies often believe they should make their customers' experiences as effortless and predictable as possible. But the authors' research shows that this approach is overly simplistic--and can even backfire. While in some instances (say, watching movies on Netflix) customers want their journeys to be easy and familiar, in others (working out on a Peloton bike or playing World of Warcraft) they want to be challenged or surprised. This article outlines four kinds of journeys: Routines are effortless and predictable and are suited to utilitarian products. Joyrides are effortless and unpredictable and work with products that deliver an on-demand thrill. Treks are effortful and predictable and are associated with products that help people achieve challenging long-term goals. Odysseys are effortful and unpredictable and are perfect for products that facilitate customers' passion projects. Each type of journey has its own design principles. Routines should offer consistent touchpoints in familiar sequences; joyrides, endlessly varied moments of delight. Treks require goal-posting (breaking big objectives down into small ones), and odysseys, substantive variation and journey tracking.
Most companies struggle to capture the enormous potential of their data. Typically, they launch massive programs that try to meet the needs of every data end user or have individual application--development teams set up customized data pipelines that can't easily be repurposed. Firms instead need to figure out how to craft data strategies that deliver value in the near term and at the same time lay the foundations for future data use. Successful companies do this by treating data like a commercial product. When a business develops a product, it tries to maximize sales by addressing the needs of as many kinds of customers as possible with it--often by creating a standard offering that can be tailored for different users. A data product works similarly. It delivers a high-quality, easy-to-use set of data that people across an organization can apply to various business challenges. It might, say, provide 360-degree views of customers, of employees, or of a channel. Because they have many applications, data products can generate impressive returns. The customer data product at one large bank, for instance, has nearly 60 use cases, and those applications generate $60 million in incremental revenue and eliminate $40 million in losses annually.
Why are discussions of politically charged issues often so fraught in the workplace today? How can managers ensure that they aren't caught flat-footed by the conflict these issues sometimes create among employees? Not long ago such questions lay at the periphery of corporate life. But today they're central, according to the authors. In recent decades we've witnessed a surge in the proportion of people whose identities are deeply informed by their political allegiances and who believe they need to bring those identities to work. The result is often conflict that can spiral dangerously out of control. This is a new and rapidly evolving problem, and most leaders are ill-equipped to cope with it. The authors provide a framework to help managers understand when and how political conflict can become corrosive, and they explain how to navigate it more effectively and even harness its potential to strengthen the workplace.
Artificial intelligence poses a lot of ethical risks to businesses: It may promote bias, lead to invasions of privacy, and in the case of self-driving cars, even cause deadly accidents. Because AI is built to operate at scale, when a problem occurs, the impact is huge. Consider the AI that many health systems were using to spot high-risk patients in need of follow-up care. Researchers found that only 18% of the patients identified by the AI were Black--even though Black people accounted for 46% of the sickest patients. And the discriminatory AI was applied to at least 100 million patients. The sources of problems in AI are many. For starters, the data used to train it may reflect historical bias. The health systems' AI was trained with data showing that Black people received fewer health care resources, leading the algorithm to infer that they needed less help. The data may undersample certain subpopulations. Or the wrong goal may be set for the AI. Such issues aren't easy to address, and they can't be remedied with a technical fix. You need a committee--comprising ethicists, lawyers, technologists, business strategists, and bias scouts--to review any AI your firm develops or buys to identify the ethical risks it presents and address how to mitigate them. This article describes how to set up such a committee effectively.
Most companies have digital platforms that support specific functions, such as supply chain management, product design, or operations, and they tightly regulate who may join the platform. The Chinese appliance manufacturer Haier has extended its supply chain management platform to facilitate a broader range of collaborations from innovation and design to supplying materials and components to solving technical problems and providing new services. The platform allows Haier to capitalize on the expertise and resources of its ecosystem, rapidly exploit new business opportunities, respond quickly to disruptions, and achieve efficiencies in a wide range of activities.
For many of us, uncertainty can be nerve-racking. That reaction, however, obscures a crucial fact: Uncertainty and possibility are two sides of the same coin. Chances are, your biggest achievements and transformational moments all came after a period of uncertainty--one that probably felt stressful but that you pushed through to accomplish something great. Uncertainty doesn't have to be paralyzing. After studying innovators and changemakers who handle it well and reviewing research on resilience and tolerance for ambiguity, the authors have found that the following four principles can help: (1) Reframe your situation by focusing on the potential upside. (2) Prime yourself by taking small risks and reducing uncertainty in other areas of your life. (3) Take a series of modest actions instead of making bet-the-farm moves. And (4) Sustain yourself by recasting setbacks and focusing on things that have true meaning for you.
The founders of Protein Power Plates--a company with the slogan "Let's meat!"--contemplate adding plant-based burgers to their menu. This fictional case study by Lena G. Goldberg and Michael S. Kaufman features expert commentary by Lynn Blashford, Scott Uehlein.
The ballerina on recognizing and realizing her potential, breaking ground as the first Black principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, and mentoring those who follow.
The founders of Protein Power Plates--a company with the slogan "Let's meat!"--contemplate adding plant-based burgers to their menu. This fictional case study by Lena G. Goldberg and Michael S. Kaufman features expert commentary by Lynn Blashford, Scott Uehlein.
The founders of Protein Power Plates--a company with the slogan "Let's meat!"--contemplate adding plant-based burgers to their menu. This fictional case study by Lena G. Goldberg and Michael S. Kaufman features expert commentary by Lynn Blashford, Scott Uehlein.
MiracleFeet, a US-based non-profit, improves access to high-quality treatment of clubfoot in low-income countries, typically in partnership with public hospitals and local NGOs, by providing low-cost foot braces, training, advocacy, awareness-raising and financial and operational support. It aims to treat 100,000 children by 2024 across 70 countries - half of them middle-income countries. Having succeeded in low-income settings, it now plans to target middle-income countries, starting with the Philippines, convinced it can make an impact by taking a different strategic approach. However, the middle-income segment proves less straightforward than anticipated, even if healthcare infrastructure is more developed and families can cover some of the costs. The narrative follows the non-profit across a decade of development, culminating with the question: what can MiracleFeet do differently to ensure its service offering succeeds in the Philippines, and then rolled out to other middle-income countries?
By the late spring of 2019, it was clear to Samuel Kalika, Founder of Critical Concrete (CC), a sustainable architecture social enterprise in Porto, Portugal, that his organization needed to pivot. While he was not exactly clear on what strategy would help CC more reliably and consistently deliver on its social mission, Kalika was convinced that the organization's current focus on the Critical Concrete Summer School (CCSS) was not financially sustainable for much longer. The staff was spending an entire year in its planning and coordination, and the financial situation seemed inconsistent and fragile, among other challenges. He had to quickly decide on how to move forward and redirect their efforts. The 2019 CCSS would conclude in only three months, and after that, there was nothing scheduled, which also meant no funds were coming in beyond that point. CC needed to pivot, but Kalika had to figure out what to do next. Considering the mix of resources and challenges in the picture, what could he do to pivot the organization?
In April 2019, Robyn Denholm, the chairperson of Tesla, Inc.'s board was asked by a judge to work with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to settle the contempt of court charges brought by the agency regarding Elon Musk's, the CEO, use of Twitter to make factually incorrect market-moving tweets about the company's prospects. The contempt charge was about a violation of protocol that was set up following an adverse 2018 verdict against the company on a similar charge. Denholm and Tesla's board had to act against the backdrop of several factors, including Musk's tremendous popularity among his 24 million Twitter followers, a soaring Tesla stock price, and an ongoing defamation lawsuit that stemmed from a Musk tweet after a daring rescue of a stranded Thailand soccer team by a British diver in 2018. In settling with the SEC, the board had to consider a variety of options, including the nuclear option of firing Musk that was suggested by a Tesla investor.