The founder and chief executive officer of impak Finance Inc. had grown his financial technology start-up, based in Montreal, Canada, into a company with two main business lines: an extensive and comprehensive assessment and rating agency that used advanced social impact measurement and scoring software, and an online marketplace platform that used the cryptocurrency impak Coin and connected like-minded consumers, investors, and businesses to support socially sustainable and responsible firms aligned on their economic and financial principles. In case A, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the founder wondered which strategic direction he should take to ensure the long-term sustainability of impak Finance Inc.-invest heavily in developing the rating agency or grow the impak marketplace?

In case B, in late summer 2020, the founder has decided to prioritize the company's rating agency, advocating for robust and standardized impact assessments for all firms. He felt confident about his company's new strategic direction and focus during the pandemic. But how could he ensure impak Finance Inc. grew toward its mission and attained financial sustainability?

As You Are Seventh-Day Adventist Church (AYA) is located in Williamsburg, Virginia, in a low-income community, where it offers a wide range of primarily religious services. AYA is part of the River Seventh-Day Adventist Conference-East (RCE), which finds and pays for the pastors at each of its churches. In return, the RCE receives the weekly tithes as conference dues, and AYA keeps the offerings given by its members. This partnership has allowed AYA to expand its programming, serving community members facing homelessness, hunger, and financial difficulties. But over the years, AYA has had its own financial struggles, seeing a decline in tithes and offerings as its membership numbers have declined. It has been forced to end many of its community services in order to preserve church resources. And in 2015, the church's leader, Pastor Robert Haskins, announced his intention to leave his position early. The RCE decided to replace Haskins with Pastor Alexander Dean, who had a proven track record of turning troubled churches around. Dean begins his duties at AYA confident that he can correct the church's course. He quickly becomes a controversial figure, however, due to the changes he decides to make. AYA's volunteer treasurer wrestles with a conflict between her desire to support Dean in his effective efforts to welcome new members and higher cash donations and her misgivings about his aggressive insistence on increasing his budget as pastor and unilaterally signing off on expensive projects without church committee approval. The treasurer is deeply concerned about how AYA will survive financially under these new pressures, both from the new leader and from sources beyond the church's control.

Publicly traded companies in the U.S. must prepare financial statements in accordance with the requirements of U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (U.S. GAAP). However, many companies also report non-GAAP measures those calculated outside the requirements of U.S. GAAP in their earnings announcements, annual reports, and SEC filings. The SEC began regulating the release of non-GAAP measures in 2003 and has expressed ongoing concern regarding firms' disclosure of the same, but the use of non-GAAP measures continued to increase nonetheless. A 2018 Audit Analytics report found that in 2006, 76% of SEC filers included non-GAAP measures, but in 2017 that percentage rose to 96%. This installment of Accounting Matters provides an overview of the SEC regulations regarding non-GAAP measures, examines how investors react to non-GAAP disclosures, and provides guidance regarding how companies can avoid receiving a non-GAAP disclosure comment letter from the SEC.

Likened to the discovery of electricity and the introduction of the internet, the arrival of 5G network technology has been met with great enthusiasm and high expectations for its futuristic potential uses. Envisioned 5G-enabled applications include autonomous vehicle fleets; fully immersive, continuous virtual reality; a tactile, sensor-based internet; and billions of peer-to-peer connected Internet-of-Things devices. Despite the hype, a recent survey suggests that most business managers and executives do not understand the technology and its transformative potential nor how to assess its appropriateness for their existing operations. In this article, we explore the potential future applications of 5G, where we are today with the technology, its adoption challenges, and how managers should evaluate investing resources into 5G.

In this article, we describe how the black ceiling upheld by the powerful institutional logics of patriarchy and white supremacy, inordinately challenging and interlocking systemic barriers to leadership advancement leads to the dearth of Afro-Diasporic women in senior corporate leadership positions and pathologizes Afro-Diasporic women as multiple outsiders. As a result, Afro-Diasporic women's well-being in the workplace is compromised and many adopt coping and survival strategies to navigate a myriad of relational and environmental phenomena, such as spirit murder, emotional taxation, social closure, white privilege, and white fragility. To navigate and ameliorate these dynamics, we advance several individual, relational, and organizational strategies that support Afro-Diasporic women thriving in the workplace.

Central to the evolution of a digital business platform is the organization's ability to balance exploration (renewal) and exploitation (refinement) simultaneously. Drawing on prior research including digital platforms, contradictory tensions, and organizational ambidexterity and our own experience investigating digital business platforms in organizations, this article provides insights into how executives can manage this evolution successfully. More specifically, we present a framework recognizing three pairs of organizational capabilities (i.e., identifying-nourishing, expanding-legitimating, and augmenting-embedding) that enable balancing renewal and refinement of the platform over time. We close by providing critical managerial practices that executives can use in anticipating, adjusting, and evaluating the evolution of a digital business platform over time, including its initiation, development, and growth.

While business sellers frequently enjoy long-term relationships with their buyers, not every extended association is based on a genuine sense of customer loyalty. Many organizations remain in relationships with providers for too long; while the seller has stopped providing value, the buyer sticks to the routine. Building from empirical research and theory on buyer-seller relationships, this research extends our understanding of customer complacency and seller entrenchment and introduces the concept of customer lethargy. Synthesizing theory from multiple domains with exploratory interviews conducted with business customers, this article offers insight into the functioning of organizational buying centers, the evolution of business exchanges over time, and how some exchanges can be undermined by various forms of relational dysfunction. I define customer lethargy, explore its root causes and offer business buyers a strategy which aims to help them self-audit their loyalty, avoid complacency and lethargy, and keep sellers committed, not entrenched.

The gender pay gap is an important issue today in the U.S. The lack of transparency surrounding pay in businesses is viewed as one cause of this gap. The first section of this article explores the origins of the gender pay gap and presents a brief history of pay transparency. Then, I propose a framework built from three continua that breaks the concept of pay transparency into types and levels. Using this framework, I offer guidance to organizations that want to increase pay transparency. The article concludes with a discussion of the risks associated with increased pay transparency and suggestions for future research.

This study analyzes real experiences of culture management to better understand how ethics permeates organizations. In addition to reviewing the literature, we used an action-research methodology and conducted semistructured interviews in Spain and in the U.S. to approach the complexity and challenges of fostering a culture in which ethical considerations are a regular part of business discussions and decision making. The consistency of findings suggests patterns of organizational conditions, cultural elements, and opportunities that influence the management of organizational cultures centered on core ethical values. The ethical competencies of leaders and of the workforce also emerged as key factors. We identify three conditions a sense of responsibility to society, conditions for ethical deliberation, and respect for moral autonomy coupled with a diverse set of cultural elements that cause ethics to take root in culture when the opportunity arises. Leaders can use this knowledge of the mechanisms by which organizational factors influence ethical pervasiveness to better manage organizational ethics.

As e-commerce growth continues to surpass that of brick-and-mortar retail, temporary retail spaces, also known as pop-up shops, are becoming an important promotional strategy, especially for online retailers and service providers. Success in today's retail environment means being able to create and maintain brand communities, to generate instant and measurable hype, and to deliver personalized consumer experiences all of which can be readily achieved through a strategically placed physical business presence. In this study, a survey of retailing organizations worldwide reveals that among those that had implemented at least one pop-up shop, more than 80% considered it a success. The results also show that the primary reasons for activating pop-up shops were to create connections with current and potential customers, to increase brand awareness, to introduce a new product or brand to the marketplace, and to stage a new product or brand. While the respondents deemed revenue generated at pop-up shops important, they considered improving market visibility (e.g., through social media, website traffic, or media coverage) a more significant objective. Given the economic potential of pop-up shops, this research provides retailing organizations with guiding principles for developing and operating successful pop-up shops in the current marketplace.

GE's recent announcement that it was placing its 2020 audit out for tender has shone a spotlight on the audit bidding process and the possibility that auditors could fall prey to a phenomenon known as the winner's curse when bidding on new clients. In this article, we begin by describing the winner's curse utilizing an example that highlights how its primary features influence the likelihood of bidder's experiencing it. Then, we discuss how the winner's curse uniquely applies to the audit bidding process and develop a descriptive table through which to analyze key differences between these settings. Last, we overlay the winner's curse onto the various cost considerations firms assess in preparing their audit bids. Our goal is to assist auditors in preparing bids that accurately reflect the costs of conducting an audit with a deeper knowledge of features that can lead to the winner's curse.

Companies increasingly embrace the new types of work associated with coworking spaces. Coworking spaces started with the idea of a melting pot of open social interaction, collaboration, entrepreneurship, and innovation for freelancers, new ventures, or solo entrepreneurs. Companies may use coworking spaces to invigorate targets and further motivate and inspire their employees. Fundamental to achieving those targets is the coworking space's interior design and architecture that incorporates emotional and social values that may benefit companies. Our sociomateriality perspective helps to analyze conditions in coworking spaces and guides suggestions on how companies revitalize by using coworking spaces. The purposeful design of the different social and work areas in coworking spaces can improve communication, collaboration, and innovation in companies.

This article examines aspects related to diversity and inclusion in the context of media products. Specifically, it looks at key issues surrounding strategies to increase diversity and inclusion in comic books that come up short because of problems of implementation and execution. Using the context of Marvel Comics' "All-New, All-Different" strategy, whereby the firm created a myriad of new characters from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds, we explain how diversity strategy can backfire. In our analysis, both netnographic and interview data show how issues of perceived tokenism and of content creation without appropriate depth can thwart consumer acceptance of diversity and inclusion strategies. Consumer rejection of these strategies can harm both sales and brand equity. Implications for marketing managers and content creators are discussed.

Conventional wisdom regarding customer relationships suggests that a company should strive to deepen the loyalty of its customer base. While multiple approaches have been suggested, each approach advocates moving a subset of the customer base from one level of affinity (e.g., neither satisfied nor dissatisfied) to a higher one (e.g., satisfied). While seemingly appropriate, this approach assumes that moving customers up to higher categories is important and should be the focus of a firm's efforts. Instead, we recommend an approach that involves focusing a firm's resources disproportionately on its most satisfied customers. This approach provides two major benefits relative to conventional approaches. First, it focuses a firm's resources on a narrow segment of customers. Hence, it requires significantly less financial outlay and associated financial risk than any approach that is aimed at all or even a majority of customers. Second, as we demonstrate, the financial benefit from leveraging high satisfaction levels among a subset of the current customer base significantly exceeds the financial benefit of other strategies (e.g., moving customers up from neutral to satisfied). We present the results from two case studies that illustrate our main points and provide useful examples of how to leverage a firm's highly satisfied customers.

Many organizations are curtailing or even abandoning performance management because of difficulties measuring performance and disruptions in performance-based pay due to the COVID-19 crisis. Contrary to this growing and troubling trend, we argue that it is especially important during the crisis to not only continue but also strengthen performance management to communicate a firm's strategic direction, collect valuable business data, provide critical feedback to individuals and workgroups, protect organizations from legal risks, and retain top talent. To do so, we offer a solution to overcome the challenges associated with measuring performance during a crisis. Specifically, we extend and expand upon the well-established Net Promoter Score measure in marketing and introduce the Performance Promoter Score (PPS) to measure performance. We offer evidence based recommendations for collecting PPS information for individuals, workgroups, and other collectives, computing a Net Performance Promoter Score (NPPS); using multiple sources of performance data, and using PPS for administrative and developmental purposes as well as to provide more frequent performance check-ins. PPS is a convenient, practical, relevant, and useful performance measure during a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is also an innovation that will be useful long after the pandemic is over.

The operating executives of Health and Benefits for Onex Partners, Megan Jackson Frye and Sam Camens, faced a challenge: Healthcare costs for employees of Onex's portfolio companies were continuing to rise above the consumer price index, reflecting broader trends across employer-sponsored health insurance in the U.S. Against this backdrop, Frye and Camens considered recommending that Onex's portfolio companies adopt value-based insurance design (VBID) principles to encourage employees to take high-value medications, for example by reducing copays for drugs managing diabetes or heart conditions. The case encourages students to put themselves in the shoes of Frye and Camens, who were grappling with evidence promoted by VBID's proponents on its potential to simultaneously improve employee health and curb employer costs. The case includes content on employer-provided health insurance in the U.S., as well as the consequences of cost-sharing on consumer behavior, health, and spending.

A cup of Starbucks was a middle-class symbol in China. Since the opening of its first store in China in 1999, Starbucks had conquered the Chinese coffee market with its experience driven philosophy. Nonetheless, a few ambitious and well-funded Chinese tech entrepreneurs had decided to challenge Starbucks. Founded in October 2017, Luckin Coffee expressed a desire "to be part of everyone's life, starting with coffee." Leveraging its core competence in technology and a business model focused on delivery and heavy discounts, Luckin scaled up rapidly. By 2020 it operated more stores in China than Starbucks. But Starbucks was responding to the new threat, forging an alliance with Alibaba backed Ele.me. In this situation, what should both firms do to do to win the war for China's coffee consumer?

By the end of 2019, HelloFresh was able to deliver a profit for the first time in its history. Ever since it was founded in 2011, its founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Dominik Richter and his team had worked tirelessly to turn HelloFresh into the largest player in the global meal kit industry. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020 fundamentally changed the landscape and triggered changes in customer behavior that marked the beginning of outstanding revenue growth for HelloFresh. With millions of households forced to stay home, restaurants closed and widespread fear among people about catching the coronavirus, HelloFresh found itself in an ideal setting to grow as its home-delivered, delicious and healthy meal kits enjoyed terrific success across markets. Moving its global customer base up from 2.5 to 4.2 million in just a few months, HelloFresh was looking confidently at 2021 and beyond. Yet, two challenges appeared to be critical for the company going forward. First, even though sales had grown as a result of the lockdowns imposed by governments in several markets, could this remarkable growth be maintained in post-pandemic times? Second, the company had already invested heavily in its sustainability strategy, with Richter announcing in August 2020 that the company aimed to become the first carbon-neutral meal kit company globally, primarily through its participation in carbon offsetting programs. Yet, high amounts of plastics were still used in each HelloFresh box delivered worldwide. Would the carbon offsetting programs be enough to really win the sustainability battle going forward?

Today's leaders are in need of best practices for dealing strategically and operationally with a distributed, diverse workforce that crosses internal and external boundaries. We contend that the best way to address the shift to managing all types of workers is through the lens of a workforce ecosystem a structure that consists of interdependent actors, from within the organization and beyond, working to pursue both individual and collective goals.