The pandemic showcases a need to make slow-moving supply chains nimbler. By using data and collaborating with partners on scenario planning, companies can develop more responsive and flexible supply chains so they can identify risks and ways to mitigate them and pinpoint alternative suppliers more quickly.

Traditional manufacturers in the digital era are under pressure to create customer value in an environment of rapidly changing customer buying patterns, and their existing connections with customers no longer give them sustainable competitive advantages. Therefore, the ability to deliver value to customers and get customers engaged in the creation of business value has become a crucial objective in achieving sustainable business growth. As a leading enterprise in liquor production, Wuliangye Group holds an important position in the traditional liquor market. In this case, digital transformation started in the company's marketing function because it is the closest to the market, and can benefit from data asset acquisition as well as value creation and acquisition. Firstly, this case details the Group's practical journey on the path to digital marketing. This path includes organizational changes, profit distribution, customer participation, distribution channels, data resources and much other content. Secondly, the case highlights the Group's acquisition of substantial data assets and its formation of digital capabilities, starting with marketing, along with the actions that have laid a foundation for digital transformation of other business areas. This progressive strategic renewal may mitigate the resistance to digital transformation. In the course of driving deeper digital reform, further discussion and analysis should focus on whether Wuliangye Group can realize effective use of data resources and digital transformation of the enterprise as a whole based on data acquired from marketing.

Demographic realities and the passage of time leave no doubt that in roughly 10 years, the millennial generation will begin its takeover of the C-suite across industries and around the world. This eventuality is troubling to those who accept the popular view of the generation as narcissistic and impatient. In this installment of Organizational Performance, I report on a study involving detailed conversations with members of the baby boomer, Gen X, and millennial generations. From these conversations, I offer two contributions to a healthier understanding of the millennial generation and, in doing so, provide a way to better frame efforts to prepare millennials for their ascent to the C-suite. First, I distinguish between generational characteristics due to time-varying age effects and those associated with immutable period and cohort effects. This distinction makes clear the generational attributes that will pass with time and those that will continue to influence attitudes and behaviors. Then I discuss how period and cohort effects affect leader emergence. These efforts will help those charged with preparing talented millennial executives for the C-suite and ensuring they focus on the right things. After all, understanding today how to address the relevant gaps in millennial leaders' preparation is critical to future organizational performance.

In good times like those most businesses have enjoyed for the past decade, business owners have typically watched their income statements with pleasure, as year-to-year performance gains have fattened their dividend payouts and increased the valuation of the companies they own and run. All too often in such times, scant attention is paid to what's between the top line and the bottom line of the income statement. Worse, most business owners, in my experience, give little more than a cursory nod to the balance sheet. Why does this matter? When a recession lands on their doorstep with a sudden thud, as it apparently just has, many of these same people will find themselves having sailed too close to the wind, with cash running out and a dearth of tools to help them weather the storm and understand what has gone wrong. But it need not be so, for there are four simple tools to help any business owner answer these four important questions: (1) Where is cash going in my business, and where is it coming from? (2) To what extent are my profit margins improving or declining, and why? (3) To what extent am I effectively managing the cash-flow relationships with my customers and my suppliers? (4) What, if anything, can I do to better manage the cash that flows into and out of my business? If your business is threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic, here are some tools to help it survive.

In response to societal grand challenges, professors have unique opportunities to effect change, repurposing their expertise to deploy relevant, timely, practical, and research-backed knowledge for the betterment of communities. Drawing on scholarship on postcrisis organizing, the entrepreneurial hustle, and social entrepreneurship, we provide a firsthand, real-time case description of a three-day "virtual idea blitz" organized in response to the COVID-19 crisis. The event was organized and executed in less than a week and ultimately involved 200 individuals, including entrepreneurs, coders, medical doctors, venture capitalists, industry professionals, students, and professors from around the world. By the end of the weekend, 21 ideas with corresponding pitches were developed in five thematic areas: health needs, education, small businesses, community, and purchasing. We describe how the community was rapidly rallied, and we discuss the key learning outcomes of this spontaneous entrepreneurial endeavor. We provide evidence from participants and mentors that showcases the value of the time-compressed virtual idea blitz in accelerating social entrepreneurial action. We offer practical guidance to academic, community, and professional institutions that would like to replicate or build upon our approach to stimulate the formation of community-based and coordinating efforts to thwart the ongoing threat of COVID-19, as well as other societal challenges that might emerge in the future.

The increasing digitization of the economy means that a new digital resource-a digital twin of an organization-is now feasible. We suggest five principles that assist in the construction of an organizational digital twin and show how they combine into a dynamic evolutionary process that builds and maintains the digital twin incrementally. We also discuss the organizational implications of implementing a digital twin and how digital twins create value in an organization.

Influence vulnerability has recently become a concern across society and in business. Such vulnerabilities increase as social networks are leveraged by different entities, oftentimes through social media, to affect how we think and behave. While many instances of social influence are positive and beneficial, others can be quite negative and lead to harmful outcomes for organizations and individuals such as reputational damage and an inability to control desirable thoughts, narratives, and behaviors, as well as decreasing people's freedom of thought and behavior. This article draws on the concepts of social embeddedness and network commitment to outline people's influence vulnerabilities. We then propose three guidelines to help reduce influence vulnerabilities based on the concepts of trustworthiness, network commitment, and self-management.

As firms struggle with high failure rates when developing new products and services, they seek new approaches to innovation. One method garnering attention is design thinking (DT), a design-based method of problem solving. Businesses as varied as Airbnb and PepsiCo are embracing DT in growing numbers, but some may be joining the bandwagon without understanding its distinctions compared to the main alternative, the Stage-Gate (SG) methodology. SG, a project-review process, is used in many firms today to create innovations. To guide managerial consideration of DT, this article provides an explanation of DT as compared with SG, a framework to assess DT's fit with the firm, and ways DT may be effectively used.

Consumers often innovate with brand-related intellectual property (IP) without permission. Although firms often respond by exercising their legal right to stop such activity, there are a variety of situations in which consumers' unauthorized use of brand-related IP can be desirable for a brand or in which enforcing IP rights can adversely affect a brand. This article illustrates situations in which managers may benefit from choosing to forgo exercising their IP rights. To assist managers, this article contributes a framework for understanding the managerial approaches to situations in which consumers use IP without permission.

Prior studies that examine business model innovations lack consideration on how value propositions are best developed in specific contexts or how restructuring other components can deliver on value propositions. This article first identifies three types of Chinese consumption behaviors-imitation-based "good-enough" consumption, renqing consumption, and face consumption-and their corresponding value propositions based on value-hierarchy theory. We then look at Chinese companies that illustrate how business model innovations that focus on the targeted value propositions are initiated, formulated, and implemented. In particular, we identify four types of business model innovations: imitation-based "good-enough" business models, renqing business models, face business models, and hybrid business models. We conclude with practical implications for conducting and implementing business model innovations in China.

The proliferation of social media and information communication technologies (ICTs) has transformed the crisis communication landscape. We are increasingly seeing new crisis development patterns and stakeholder communication processes that overwhelm traditional crisis communication protocols. Crisis communication theories and best practices, however, remain largely reactive and may not provide practical implications for effective communication strategies in the digital age. Crisis communication must advance to proactive strategies with stakeholder-focused communication. This article provides research-based evidence with real-world examples to illustrate why stealing thunder must be considered a strategic crisis communication option in the digital age. Managers must understand how social media and ICTs influence the current crisis communication ecosystem and how stealing thunder can help them navigate crises.

Maker spaces-shared production facilities offering access to basic and advanced manufacturing technologies-have quickly become the latest must-have for universities, large corporations, and communities looking to foster entrepreneurship and innovation. While the entrepreneurial and educational prospects of maker spaces are certainly intriguing, questions remain concerning their design and effectiveness. Drawing primarily on case evidence and conversations with five maker spaces located across the U.S., we identify and present six key decisions for maker space leaders looking to foster entrepreneurship in their organizations. We conclude with a decision framework for maker space leaders and a series of questions for entrepreneurs as both groups work to pursue entrepreneurship through and in maker spaces.

Digital transformation is one of the key challenges facing contemporary businesses. The need to leverage digital technology to develop and implement new business models forces firms to reevaluate existing capabilities, structures, and culture in order to identify what technologies are relevant and how they will be enacted in organizational processes and business offerings. More often than not, these profound changes require firms to revisit old truths as they develop strategies that thread the needle between beneficial innovation and harmful disruption. This article uses the Internet of Things (IoT) as a backdrop to demonstrate the concerns associated with transformative technologies and offers five recommendations as to how firms can develop the strategies needed for digital transformation and become digitally conscious: (1) Start small and build on firsthand benefits; (2) team up and create competitive advantage from brand recognition; (3) engage in standardization efforts; (4) take responsibility for data ownership and ethics; and (5) own the change and ensure organization-wide commitment. As such, this article shows that digital transformation should be a top management priority and a defining trait of corporate business strategy, and that by becoming digitally conscious, firms may get a head start on their transformation journey.

How many police officer positions to fund? In August 2020, the question facing St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, which might have seemed routine to another mayor at another time in another place, was anything but. A pandemic had rendered the city some $19-$34 million short for 2021. Advocates across the country (and nearby) had pointed to a likely pool for budget cuts: police departments. The May 2020 killing of George Floyd, a Black man, in neighboring Minneapolis by a police officer there, had sparked calls nationwide to "defund the police" and pushback to those calls. What would St. Paul's mayor do? For Carter, the question was about much more than shifting money. He had swept into office in 2018 promising equity. He had spoken from experience about what it felt like to be pulled over by police because he was Black. He had committed to, and then undertaken with his police chief, use of force reforms in 2018. He had monitored closely an increase in neighborhood shootings and homicides in 2019 and declared that public safety must be "our first and highest ambition upon which all other dreams must be built." Carter wanted nothing short of a new public safety framework that would include-but be much more expansive than-simply responding to emergencies, and that would be rooted in community. "I see a clear vision of the future," said Carter, "but transitioning to get there is an open question."

By March 2020, Philip Morris International (PMI) had defined its purpose, "[to] create a smoke-free future and ultimately replace cigarettes with smoke-free products" and had validated PMI's materiality matrix. PMI's statement of purpose (SoP) was first published in the form of a letter from the board of directors to the company's shareholders and was published in its proxy statement of March 2020. PMI's sustainability leadership team (Huub Savelkouls, Chief Sustainability Officer and Jennifer Motles Svigilsky, Director of Social Impact & Sustainability) were working on the company's first ever integrated report (IR) due for publication by June 2020. Connecting a sound sustainability materiality assessment, a concrete SoP and a detailed IR would, they thought, bring together actions and words, and convey exactly how the company's strategy would create value for society and shareholders. They had the difficult task of setting realistic but ambitious targets, with a timeline to achieve them. They knew that targets - or a timeline - that were too ambitious and that the company could not deliver on could cause blowback for the team. At the same time, targets that were too conservative could lead to disengagement and exacerbate stakeholders' mistrust and undo all their hard work since 2015. The case is about a company in one of the so-called sin industries that has committed to phase out cigarettes in favor of a smoke-free future based on reduced-risk products.

The spring 2014 acquisition of U.S. alcoholic spirits maker Beam Inc. by Japan's Suntory Holdings vaulted Suntory from 15th to third-largest international spirits company in the world. Yet Suntory had borrowed nearly the entire $16 billion purchase price, and relied on Beam to fund repayment of that debt. In October 2014, Takeshi Niinami became Suntory's president and CEO, the first outsider to run the family business since its 1899 founding. Niinami immediately faced governance issues-not least relating to his relationship with Beam CEO Matt Shattock-and sought to enhance Beam's production quality and consumer focus without alienating either Beam management and staff or the family that had placed their trust in him to run Suntory.

Supplements (A) case: The spring 2014 acquisition of U.S. alcoholic spirits maker Beam Inc. by Japan's Suntory Holdings vaulted Suntory from 15th to third-largest international spirits company in the world. Yet Suntory had borrowed nearly the entire $16 billion purchase price, and relied on Beam to fund repayment of that debt. In October 2014, Takeshi Niinami became Suntory's president and CEO, the first outsider to run the family business since its 1899 founding. Niinami immediately faced governance issues-not least relating to his relationship with Beam CEO Matt Shattock-and sought to enhance Beam's production quality and consumer focus without alienating either Beam management and staff or the family that had placed their trust in him to run Suntory.

Chef Joan Roca, sommelier Josep Roca and pastry chef Jordi Roca were three brothers based in Girona, Spain whose complementary skills, collective ability, and relentless drive for innovation had brought worldwide fame and awards to their restaurant, El Celler de Can Roca. In 2020, their innovation skills were tested as they strategized ways to manage their restaurant and a growing list of other projects in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Pradeep Gupta founded Axis My India (AMI) as a printing and publishing company in 1998. In 2013, AMI expanded into consumer research and election forecasting. Although a relatively unknown entity, AMI predicted several election results accurately. Gupta describes AMI's rigorous process of research, primary data collection from each constituency, quality checking of data by auditors and data analysis. AMI partnered with India Today Group to broadcast its forecasts for post-poll studies. For pre-poll studies and market research, its clients now included political parties and corporates. In 2019, as the Haryana state elections were drawing to a close, Gupta found that his team's prediction for the election result was distinctly different from all other pollsters. Puzzled by this, he had asked for one more day to verify his data. As Gupta reviewed his team's analysis (which had been confirmed by another round of interviews during the last 24 hours), he considered whether he should publish these numbers or revise them just enough to avoid controversy.