This case builds on the Tufts Medicine Health Care System (A) case by exploring the barriers and challenges Tufts Medicine faced aligning operations and stakeholders. It discusses the challenges the leaders experienced bringing together an academic medical center with a community hospital system while meeting its goals of maintaining its competitive position while providing high quality care. A discussion of this case will enable instructors to explore the challenges and opportunities of health care mergers in depth.
This case describes the State of Colorado's initiative to create a state level series of interagency partnership that improve the coordination of support services for students and youth with disabilities and its work piloting and then sustaining this approach. It includes an example of a family including a youth with autism and their challenges navigating the complexites of the support system. The case describes the development of a services sequencing model and the use of four pilot sites to identify the best way to deliver aligned services. The case ends with the challenge of how to plan to expand the sequencing of services model.
This simulation puts students in positions of stakeholders in a fictional community negotiating whether to use 100% native species in new city plantings. Students are assigned roles as advocates, city officials and politicans all with different perspectives and interests. They must find common ground to come to an agreement that is both practical and evironmentally positive. The simulaiton enables instructors to illustrate the benefits of a value creation mindset in negoations.
This case describes the potential introduction of a new helicopter operation named "Smart Launch" at the leading non-profit air ambulance of Boston MedFlight, with the goal of decreasing the estimated arrival time of transports and thereby improving patient outcomes. The case first provides a detailed background for how patient requests turn into successful transports, and thereafter outlines the estimated operational, financial and social impact of implementing this new operation. This is an excellent case for leveraging real transport data and management's questions, with the challenge to determine if, how, and "what needs to be true?" to successfully unlock the new Smart Launch operation.
This first-hand account of the student takeover of the campus administration building raises strategic and operational issues through a lens of racial inequities and intersectionality. It has echos of a 1968 protest by black students, which had very similar demands and it happened in the context of student protests and demands across the nation. This is an excellent case for apprciating social protest through an organizational lens and appreciating ways that university campuses can be held to be accountable for their espoused values.
This case presents multiple operations challenges in a non-profit social services setting, with a focus on immigrant worker rights. The case inlcudes paid staff, volunteers, and executive leadership facing breakdowns in services to clients, legislators, advicates, and others. This is an excellent case for applying process-floew analysis in a social impact setting.
This case presents the branding challenge for Junior Achievement (JA) Worldwide, a very large and impactful social impact organization with limiting brand awareness. Reaching over 10 million students in over 100 countries, there is a great story to be told. The case provides students with the opportunity to lean in on a high impact branding challenge.
This simulation presents the challenge of integrating regional health system payments in a context where parties each operate independently and the social determinents of health are incompletly addressed. Set in New Hampshire, respoinding to a fedearal initiative, the simulation features five roles, each essential to the integraiton challenge. Ths case provides students with an experiential view on the challenge of breaking down silos in social impact service delivery.
This simulation puts studens in front-line health care roles navigating typical issues faced in a team-based work system. The facilitator role illustrates the imporance of facilitation (even with a student new to the role). Confidential role information for the five roles brings students to the meeting with both common and competing interests. This is an excellent case for illustrating the front-line dynamics in a high performance worksystem, as well as the value of employee voice.
At AT&T, a raindrop is an annoying policy, outdated process, or unhelpful tool. When enough of them pool up, people feel like they are drowning in bureaucracy. AT& Project Raindrops, which evolved from a grassroots effort to an office with six full-time employees, uses a streamlined process to vet and implement employee ideas on how to fix these annoyances. The company says the project has saved it $230 million so far. AT& CTO shares lessons for leaders on how to make such a program work.
Sheng Sheng F&B Industries Pte Ltd (SSFB) was set up in 1985 as a wholesaler. Based in Singapore, it produced and distributed food and beverage products. At the start of the 21st century, SSFB ventured into sweet spreads with their new brand, Golden Light. When the COVID-19 pandemic subsided, SSFB renewed efforts for Golden Light in a new direction - premium sweet spreads. Business Development Manager, Wayne Chua, was cognizant of the changed global and local market conditions and sentiments. Within Singapore, SSFB faced a number of challenges such as competition against new and established brands - both foreign and local, and increasing consumer desire for more healthy options and reduced sugar consumption. Furthermore, as a wholesaler with no online or physical retail presence, it was dependent on retailers such as supermarkets as well as smaller shops and e-commerce outlets to distribute its products. The existing supermarket landscape was dominated by NTUC FairPrice, which had its own house-branded sweet spreads. In the online arena, grocery apps and search engines' algorithms favoured established brands over small, homegrown labels like Golden Light. This case can support discussion topics like impact of operating environment, market disruption, changing consumer behavior, product development and channel strategies.
In the summer of 2023, Eduard ("Eddie") Croitoru, Vice President (VP) of ICL Group ("ICL") Corporate Initiatives, was reflecting on ICL's internal ideation program, the Business Innovation for Growth (BIG) Accelerator. When Raviv Zoller became the CEO of ICL in 2018, he recruited Croitoru, then his Chief of Staff, to help embed a culture of innovation throughout the company. He tasked Croitoru with addressing employee engagement and innovation challenges, which led to the creation of BIG. BIG enhanced ideation of employees (called "BIG Agents"), accelerated execution of ideas, and improved collaboration within the organization. Under Croitoru's leadership, BIG had evolved into a process where ICL employees from around the world contributed ideas, many of which would go on to be realized and funded as projects by senior management. Croitoru spent three years refining the program, expanding its reach from 3,500 to all 12,500 ICL employees in four new languages. To push the program forward, he anticipated two challenges ahead-continuing to scale BIG company-wide while combining technology with the human infrastructure needed to optimize the program's success, and fostering more breakthrough, "extra-corerestrial" (beyond the core business) ideas within BIG.
In August 2023, Raviv Zoller, CEO of ICL Group, discussed his upcoming business trip to St. Louis with Eduard Croitoru, VP of ICL Corporate Initiatives, to commemorate the construction of ICL's new $400 million advanced manufacturing facility. In preparation for the facility's launch, Zoller reflected on the transformation of an employee idea into a new and exciting business line for ICL-lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery manufacturing. When he first became CEO of ICL in 2018, he initiated a cultural transformation and tasked Croitoru, his then-Chief of Staff, with launching a company-wide innovation program, the "Business Innovation for Growth" (BIG) Accelerator. BIG became a crucial part of ICL's internal innovation foundation. Simultaneously, Zoller focused on cultivating external innovation partnerships by building an ICL ecosystem, launching the company's agri-food tech startup hub (ICL Planet Startup Hub), collaborating with Israeli and non-Israeli startups, and exploring possibilities in emerging innovation domains. Zoller hoped that the corporate theme for 2023, "Year of Partnerships," would continue to inspire his colleagues to do the hard work of ecosystem-building for the "art of the possible," in years to come, even in the face of tough economic times.
In the summer of 2023, Amperity management was facing a critical decision on its future direction. Given the dramatic changes occurring within the digital advertising ecosystem, as concerns over consumer privacy placed limits on the ability to engage in third-party tracking, Amperity had to decide whether to pivot and develop a dedicated solution for advertisers based on first-party data. Such a pivot would require shifting resources from improving the company's core product, the customer data platform (CDP), which helped firms unify all their data sources and properly identify customers; as well as take targeted marketing actions mainly on their existing customers (i.e., development and retention efforts). A shift to serve digital advertising players not only had far reaching product development implications, but also strategic and go-to-market consequences. In particular, Amperity was considered a leader in the CDP category and a pivot could risk that position. Furthermore, the move would likely require changing the company's communications approach-who its salesforce targeted and how-and could imply partnering with digital ad agencies as well as ad platforms, like Meta and Google Ads. The monetization structure going forward also required careful consideration. Specifically, to date Amperity's pricing was contracted upfront and largely based on the number of customer profiles its CDP was expected to identify and the amount of data to be ingested. However, in the paid advertising domain, players typically took a percentage cut of the overall campaign spend. Not lost on Amperity co-founder and CTO Derek Slager's mind was that many clients, existing and prospective, were looking for concrete ways to leverage generative AI tools to improve their customer relationship management efforts.
Ariel Fristoe co-founded the Out of Hand Theater ensemble (OOH) in Atlanta in 2001. OOH began as a traditional theater nonprofit, which Ariel and her colleagues ran on a shoestring budget. But over the years, the group transformed: First, around 2010, OOH pivoted to science outreach. Then, around 2018, OOH shifted its focus to racial and economic justice, and staged a series of shows in Atlanta community members' private homes.
The mass mechanization of farming, coupled with the push to go away for college, has led to rural communities losing many of their most educated and talented workers. This trend, referred to as brain drain, has resulted in rural communities suffering significant population declines and an array of social problems. But one set of rural communities has greatly deviated from this trend: Amish communities. Through an inductive field study of Amish communities and entrepreneurs, we reveal how the Amish have curbed mass exodus and promoted community preservation, resulting in the retention of roughly 90% of their community members and fostering a variety of entrepreneurial opportunities. Specifically, we discover that through a creation perspective toward work, a collectivist focus, and an emphasis on vocational practices, the Amish offer a nuanced approach to community cultivation, thereby reducing brain drain.
This article is about bolstering professor-student rapport (PSR) in business education. Specifically, we integrate relevant published works to advance a model of PSR that includes literature-supported concepts and some examples from Tim, a master rapport builder. We surveyed students in a southeastern university to gain qualitative inputs that we use to refine our conceptual model (n = 75) and present those findings to help explain why PSR impacts outcomes, the primary elements that explain when PSR will impact the outcomes, and the main learning and retention outcomes that PSR may influence. Last, we translate these ideas for the practicing professors in the classroom and summarize our suggestions to advance valuable educational outcomes.
Entrepreneurial firms, due to their size and limited resources, are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to attracting, hiring, and retaining top talent. These challenges place the firm's survival and success in jeopardy, as they waste resources on talent management and operate amid talent shortfalls. Simply put, in the scale-up phase, managing talent could be the most important activity entrepreneurs pursue. While entrepreneurs cannot eliminate their strategic shortcomings (e.g., prestige, the ability to pay top salaries), they can take advantage of their unique strengths (e.g., a more intimate environment, job flexibility, and greater opportunities for growth, advancement, and leadership) to make themselves more competitive among candidates not necesarily destined for large corporations. In this article, drawing upon the lessons of best practice and theory, we make three recommendations for entrepreneurial hiring managers: (1) treat all prospective employees as transformative organizational members, (2) recognize and embrace the contributions of all, and (3) make new and established employees consistently feel valued. While these lessons allow all managers to display their organizational strengths, they provide the best return on investment for those with the greatest hiring challenges: entrepreneurs.