Blockchain technologies are quickly changing the competitive business landscape. Companies need to think strategically about how best to prepare for a future in which they might systematically enhance value and unleash new value using blockchain. In this article, we address how cooperating companies jointly create unique value with blockchain technology, the risks they face along the way, and how they can mitigate those risks. We briefly identify three different reasons a company might adopt blockchain: to enhance value creation, to strengthen existing value ecosystems, or to create new value ecosystems. Then, we identify three strategic risks of blockchain adoption as they relate to business issues, legal issues, and technological issues. Finally, we highlight four different strategic maneuvers for minimizing these risks. The strategic maneuvers include the all-industry approach, the walled-garden approach, the many-gardens approach, and the options approach. We provide prescriptive advice to managers on how to strategically think about blockchain adoptions, how to identify the underlying risks, and how to consider strategic approaches to mitigate their adoption risk.

Trust has long been recognized across cultures, industries, and organizations as a key component of social exchange. Yet in many communities and organizations throughout the world, there is a growing trust deficit. In this article, we explore what leaders can do to generate trust among the individuals within their organizations to help facilitate better relationships and positive outcomes for both individuals and organizations. More specifically, we present a qualitative study in which semistructured interviews with employees at an assisted-living care facility highlight two ways that leaders can build trust within their organizations: (1) by demonstrating humility in their communication and (2) by exhibiting compassion in their behavior. We further highlight two characteristics, authenticity and proactivity, that can help leaders increase the effectiveness of these actions. By making these behaviors part of how they lead, leaders and managers can more successfully generate feelings of trust among the individuals within their organizations and help their organizations to maintain and strengthen their competitive advantage.

Enforcement of laws that prevent corrupt international business dealings has recently intensified. Firms have paid record-setting fines of hundreds of millions of dollars, and individuals have been tried and convicted. This escalating situation demands effective action from business leaders. Compliance has become increasingly complicated as more countries have enacted antibribery laws. To address this situation, I identify four root causes of corruption and present innovative real-world examples of solutions. Combinations of these solutions can be crafted to create high-compliance work systems (HCWSs) to avoid corruption. Firms can formulate their own unique, innovative, and dynamic models to achieve high levels of firm success while also avoiding corruption. These models go beyond trade-off thinking, which suggests that compliance must be exchanged for performance. Pivoting away from such trade-off thinking enables innovative solutions to manage corruption risks and offers firms a sustained competitive advantage over their peers.

Companies spend time and money training employees; in the case of a merger or acquisition, they spend resources such as cash, stock, and debt. It makes sense, then, that they do not want an employee to take the expertise the company underwrote to a competitor. Thus, employment contracts will often include noncompete clauses--sometimes known as covenants not to compete--which state that the employee cannot move to a competitor for a certain period of time. Though not all employees have the heightened fiduciary duty of board members and officers, they frequently have signed agreements that, at least on paper, restrict their employment mobility. Not only have officers and board members often signed such agreements as well, but they also have fiduciary duties further restricting their new employment plans. In decades of teaching courses in the legal environment of business as well as in business ethics, no topic flummoxes students more than this one. After all, in a free country, a person should be able to work where they wish, right? How can such restrictions be fair? Legally and ethically, this is a complicated area and one in which the old lawyer's answer--it depends--is true. This article provides some parameters for employees and employers to know when fiduciary duty precludes certain employees from moving to a new company, including when those are legal in what ways they are fair.

Farmer Lee Farms was a family-owned farm 70 kilometres from Johannesburg, South Africa. The farm was founded in 2005 by Jimmy Botha, a sixty-year-old, first-generation Black commercial farmer. From 2005 to 2017, the farm had experienced steady growth and was recognized as a Black business success story in post-apartheid South Africa. During this period, the farm had a clear target market of high-end food packaging houses and food retailers and specialized in the supply of high-quality, high-value fresh produce. However, a severe hailstorm in 2017 destroyed important infrastructure on the farm that was crucial for growing the farm’s temperature-sensitive products. The capital required to repair the infrastructure was not available. As a result, the farm lost key off-take agreements with high-end retail customers and Botha had to change his crops to hardier but lower-value cash crops. In November 2020, the farm urgently needed to re-evaluate its strategy to avoid bankruptcy, for which Botha was considering four options: continue growing cash crops and hope for a market turnaround, apply for a bank loan for funds to repair the damaged infrastructure, access the available government grants to carry out repairs to the infrastructure, or change his farming methods entirely and learn an alternative farming technique known as hydroponics.

In September of 2017, CavinKare Private Limited was faced with a tough decision about how to continue its growth in the personal care products industry. The company had been successful in the hair colour market in India, particularly in the southern regions of the country. CavinKare’s success was largely due to their focus on research and development and innovation. The hair colour market showed room for growth, and CavinKare wanted to make sure that they capitalized on its potential. There were three options before the company: stay with their existing products and markets, expand their existing products into new markets, or create innovative new products. To make the decision, CavinKare had to consider many factors, including consumer behaviour, new product development, marketing strategies, and trade partnerships. Only by considering all of these things together would the company have an answer to its question: what was the best option for growth?

Launched in September 2018, e-retail startup DealShare has created a tech-enabled model for the Indian mass market that allows customers to buy together, save money on good quality goods, and at the same time have fun. It targets customers who are still getting used to the Internet for commerce and for whom big e-commerce players are not an ideal option. As DealShare transitions from a regional to a national company, the founders are at a crossroads. Until now, they have prioritized profitability at the unit economics level over growth. Now that they are confident that the DealShare concept can be profitable, should they relax their commitment to profitability and expand rapidly to preempt competition? Will the investments required and added complexity derail the company's success?

As Singapore's national garden and tourist attraction, Gardens by the Bay (GB) had succeeded in developing the necessary physical infrastructure to showcase innovative sustainability initiatives to visitors. As it embarked on the next phase of its sustainability journey, GB sought to enhance its sustainability DNA. It recognised that every new and existing employee has an important role to play, and now faces the challenge of how to further engage staff and get them on board this journey through effective induction training. This case examines the challenges of integrating Singapore's new Green Plan into GB's sustainability agenda with special reference to its induction training approach. The United Nations Sustainability Development Goals and the environmental, social and governance parameters can serve as a guide for integrating relevant sustainability content into the induction curriculum. Like other for-profit and non-profit organisations combating climate change, GB must determine how best to impart respective competencies to its internal stakeholders. Through the case, students will learn to appreciate sustainability-related challenges and develop induction training solutions that can be applied by GB's human resource team in support of the overall mission and vision of the organisation. The case can be used in both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on sustainability management, business management, environmental management and human resource management.

Set in May 2021, this case describes the journey of transformation Hai Sia Seafood (Hai Sia), a Singapore-based seafood company, embarked upon five years earlier. Hai Sia, a family business established forty-five years earlier, supplied high quality, fresh, and processed seafood at competitive prices for domestic consumption in Singapore. However, the seafood processing industry in the city-state, including the port, was woefully backward. Hai Sia operated a manual processing plant that was twenty years old, and relied completely on labour intensive work processes, even though digitisation was on the rise in the country and consumers were increasingly migrating online in their buying behaviour. The company faced many challenges such as quota constraints on the number of foreign workers it could hire, inconsistency in quality due to human error, low productivity, and more importantly, the changing profile of its customer base. Hai Sia undertook many steps to transform its operations, including plant renovation and automation, digitisation of work processes, expansion into e-commerce, launch of a consumer brand, and product development for the retail market. The results were promising and the business grew from 1800 tons in 2015 to 2500 tons in 2020. However, the considerable corresponding investments to support these initiatives had adversely impacted the company's profitability. Ang Junting, the deputy director, knew that if he were to spend more time and resources in modernising the business, the senior management would need to be convinced about the returns that these investments would eventually bring. Moreover, he wondered if going forward, a similar business model that centred on automation, upskilling, training, and consumer retail could be successfully replicated in the neighbouring Southeast Asian economies.

Farmer Lee Farms was a family-owned farm 70 kilometres from Johannesburg, South Africa. The farm was founded in 2005 by Jimmy Botha, a sixty-year-old, first-generation Black commercial farmer. From 2005 to 2017, the farm had experienced steady growth and was recognized as a Black business success story in post-apartheid South Africa. During this period, the farm had a clear target market of high-end food packaging houses and food retailers and specialized in the supply of high-quality, high-value fresh produce. However, a severe hailstorm in 2017 destroyed important infrastructure on the farm that was crucial for growing the farm's temperature-sensitive products. The capital required to repair the infrastructure was not available. As a result, the farm lost key off-take agreements with high-end retail customers and Botha had to change his crops to hardier but lower-value cash crops. In November 2020, the farm urgently needed to re-evaluate its strategy to avoid bankruptcy, for which Botha was considering four options: continue growing cash crops and hope for a market turnaround, apply for a bank loan for funds to repair the damaged infrastructure, access the available government grants to carry out repairs to the infrastructure, or change his farming methods entirely and learn an alternative farming technique known as hydroponics.

Spotify Technology S.A. (Spotify) was facing significant problems with public relations due to artists' claims of poor treatment. They had accused Spotify of underpaying artists, obscuring its business practices, and being overly litigious. The objections reached a critical point with a union of creatives, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), submitting a petition to Spotify and on March 15, 2021, protesting at its global offices. Spotify management must decide how to navigate this issue.

Countless enterprise blockchains fail to live up to high expectations, often because the supporting governance structures are insufficiently established or have become stagnant. Based on interviews with 153 blockchain executives and an analysis of publicly documented use cases, this article offers a guide for blockchain scholars and practitioners. Its framework highlights the coordination and control challenges that exist in blockchain governance contexts and presents four generic governance modes to address them: chief, clan, custodian, and consortium. Managers can use these governance modes as a basis for four strategic moves (connecting, isolating, loosening, and tightening) to navigate blockchain governance challenges.