Sai Coating, a small entrepreneurial firm, was one of the three firms that had received the license from ARCI for marketing the Detonation Spray Coating (DSC). Sai Coating made and sold the detonation gun (D-Gun) to three sectors, namely: Wire Drawing, Textiles and Aero components. The coating enhanced the life of the coated wire or surface and its functionality in some ways. The firm had a turnover of INR 4,500,000 and was looking to generate scale and maximize its revenues. The case revolves around the pricing strategy to be adopted by Sai coating to extract value from different set of customers. What should be the price levels given the nature of the product?

Vedavoo is a new venture created by Scott Hunter, a driven entrepreneur, avid outdoorsman, and environmentalist who is passionate about fly fishing and the great outdoors. The case follows the challenges Scott faces in building new products for what appears at first to be a declining market opportunity. With severely limited resources, Scott sets about designing and making a signature product, the Sling Pack, that has the unique characteristic of staying fixed on the back as the sportsperson engages in the energetic action of fly casting in sport fishing. When Scott introduces the product line at an outdoor sports trade show, interest in the product line grows rapidly. Determined to grow his product line organically over time, the founder faces challenges in design, quality manufacturing, and meeting customer demand while staying true to his values. The case follows Scott as he develops his opportunity, resources, and team to build a potentially scalable enterprise in a competitive field of outdoor adventure sports accessories (backpacks and customized bags for climbing, fly fishing, and a variety of outdoor experiences). After several frustrating attempts to find manufacturers that could make the intricately designed Vedavoo sling pack product, Scott heeds Yvon Chouinard's (founder and CEO of Patagonia) advice to learn all aspects of the business by learning how to do everything himself, including the making of the product, in order to learn all of the ins and outs of each business process of the product and venture. Ultimately, Scott undergoes many of the tests facing an entrepreneur attempting to build a new venture: building a line of products with unique characteristics that customers value, building a team and strong culture to operate effectively, and finding resources to define and grow the venture throughout the startup and early growth process.

MDSC is a 501(c)(3) organization, professionally staffed with a mission to ensure individuals with Down syndrome are valued, included, and given opportunities to pursue fulfilling lives. Though dedicated to the families of Massachusetts, MDSC is gaining recognition as an innovator and being called upon to train and support organizations in other parts of the US and world. When the case opens, MDSC's executive director, Maureen Gallagher, is departing a strategic planning retreat. She and her Board members have come up with an exciting list of strategic initiatives, including areas for potential service expansion. However, current initiatives and needs of its steadily expanding community were beginning to overwhelm the current operational model. MDSC had the know-how, the ideas, and the drive to do more, but this operational reality would constrain further service expansion. In addition to specifying three overarching directives and four specific strategic initiatives to support these directives, the board also determined that MDSC would move to a state-of-the-art approach to support its growing list of state-of-the-art services. The approach would include a revamped operational model built upon an updated digital platform. With these changes, MDSC would be able to scale its services to families, increase its donations, and win more grants to help sustain the organization's good work. Though there is consensus in the vision, there are questions regarding the steps this small, resource-constrained organization should take to make this vision.

Gen Z (1997-2013) is just now entering the labor market and employers need to be prepared for their arrival. While Gen Z shares many traits with the Millennial Generation, they also bring in new patterns of behavior. Managers today not only have to understand how to best manage youthful, inexperienced employees, but also the unique characteristics of the generation shaped by their experiences. Every generation has its doubts about the younger generation's culture and technologies. Understanding their behavior and the distinct needs that they have in the workplace will lead to better integration of the new employees and mutual success.

In his recent book, The Enlightened Capitalists, James O'Toole explores the challenges faced by two centuries of business pioneers who tried to do well by doing good. While many of their firms were financially successful, few of their progressive business practices turned out to be enduring. In light of this mixed historical record, this article explores the future of enlightened business leadership. It critically evaluates six trends that will greatly determine the extent to which corporate executives will introduce virtuous practices in the coming decade, including a new generation of enlightened capitalists, several consortia of socially progressive business leaders, the growth of social entrepreneurship, the emergence of benefit corporations, and changes in investor attitudes.

Managers often engage in risk-averse behavior, and economists, decision analysts, and managers treat risk aversion as a preference. In many cases, acting in a risk-averse manner is a mistake, but managers can correct this mistake with greater reflection. This article provides guidance on how individuals and organizations can move toward greater reflection and a more profitable aggregate portfolio of decisions. Inconsistency in risk preferences across decisions is a costly mistake for both individuals and for organizations.

Facing imminent disruption, many large, established firms have embraced innovation as a way to develop new growth businesses. To succeed in the face of disruptive change requires established firms to master three distinct disciplines: ideation, to generate potential new business ideas; incubation, to validate these ideas in the market; and scaling, to reallocate the assets and capabilities needed to grow the new business. This article illustrates how two successful firms (Amazon and IBM) have developed approaches that address all three disciplines.

The governance of multilateral alliances is an increasingly important strategic option as firms face discontinuities and disruptions. But not all multilateral alliances present the same governance and leadership challenges. The partners' co-specialized contributions to the alliance call for more creative overall alliance management and for more open-ended forms of collaboration. Governance options range from a very autocratic "hub-and-spoke" model to democratic and participative governance. This puts different demands on the approach and the leadership skills required from the alliance managers.

This article examines how firms respond to federal affirmative action regulation when it is temporary. As intended, affirmative action increases a firm's black share of employees. Strikingly, the black share continues to grow at a similar pace even after a firm is deregulated. This persistence is driven in part by affirmative action inducing employers to improve their methods for screening potential hires.

Research has shown that firms tend to suffer financially when a celebrity endorser becomes mired in a scandal, but the literature to date has offered little practical guidance. A new study, involving 128 incidents that generated negative publicity, finds that firms taking no action after an event--the path most follow--generally do poorly. Its authors also discovered a surprise: Companies that engage with a situation and handle it well don't just stanch the bleeding but come out ahead. The study identifies four factors that play a significant role in public reaction to celebrity misbehavior and provides several clear takeaways for endorsers and firms alike.

According to new study led by a professor from Erasmus University, body language sways potential investors more than technical explanations or figurative language do.

In early 2017, Judith Judson (Harvard Business School MBA, 2000), Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER), was reflecting on the results of the initiative she had led to identify the contribution advanced electricity storage could make to electricity generation and distribution in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The study was the first major output from the $10 million Energy Storage Initiative (ESI) launched by Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker's administration in May 2015. The advanced simulation techniques employed in the study indicated that over a ten-year period, the optimal deployment of storage capacity would cut the cost of electricity for consumers in the Commonwealth by $230 million per year, deliver $110 million in annual revenues for storage providers, and reduce CO2 emissions by 100,000 tons a year, the equivalent of taking 22,000 cars off the road. Moreover, neighboring states would benefit from $250 million in lowered wholesale prices. To deliver these benefits, 1.77 GWh of advanced storage would be required across the grid, costing between $970 million and $1.35 billion. Incorporating the perspectives of a wide body of stakeholders (from utilities to municipalities to generators), the study wound up recommending a suite of policies that would facilitate the installation of 600 MWh of storage capacity by 2025, representing about 6 minutes of the state's daily electricity consumption and delivering $800 million in benefits to ratepayers. It would also make the Commonwealth a leader in advanced storage technology and deliver substantial greenhouse gas reductions. At the end of 2015 according to figures from the Department of Energy, Massachusetts ranked 23rd in the United States in energy storage deployment, well behind the leader Arizona, with nearly 300 MWh, and Texas, with over 150 MWh.

When Jean-Philippe Courtois took control of Microsoft's global sales, marketing and operations in 2016, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella, he realised that he needed to lead the organisation away from an "inspection culture" towards a culture of learning and coaching. After a first phase of transformation focused on giving Microsoft's sales teams the right skills to accompany customers as they moved to the cloud, a second phase aimed to fundamentally transform their behaviours and mindsets. The case study describes how Courtois and his leadership team envisioned and executed a culture change effort consisting of harnessing technology to generate insights into employee and partner work patterns and enabling coaching conversations that would help staff more effectively leverage their time to serve customers and attain key results.

While they go about things in very different ways, every organization is actually in the same business: behavioural change. Whether it is a bank encouraging consumers to switch to their product; a government agency trying to get citizens to pay taxes on time;or a health agency interested in improving the consumption of medication, behaviour-change challenges abound. As a result, some of the smartest organizations have begun to embed behavioural insights (BI) into their everyday processes. The authors describe the four main ways that BI can add value to any organization, as well as four approaches that an enterprise can take to embedding BI in its work.

Our life outcomes are powerfully determined by seemingly trivial, repeated acts. Our health, for example, depends on thousands of daily choices-to eat well and exercise regularly, to avoid smoking, and to take medications as prescribed. Yet 40 percent of premature deaths each year result from suboptimal behavior. The authors argue that the most promising avenue for making behaviour change 'stick' is to take proactive steps to change our habits. They provide advice for achieving this by 'targeting the situation' and 'shifting cognitions'. In the end, they show that there is an enormous untapped opportunity at hand to enable sustained improvements in daily decisions on a collective level.

Many attempts to narrow the gender gap-ranging from greater disclosure to governance rules-assume that it reflects the personal bias of senior decision makers, in particular CEOs. However, this premise has been difficult to prove; until now. The authors set out to compare two things: the personal backgrounds of CEOs and their allocation of capital budgets to male and female division managers at U.S. conglomerates. The present their findings, which indicate that a CEO's formative years-including factors like whether they attended an all-boys school and whether their mother worked or not-have a significant impact on their later corporate behavior.

Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson argues that in every organization, moments of silence are leading to countless lost opportunities and errors-some of them life threatening. In a wide-ranging interview, she discusses her widely embraced concept of 'psychological safety' and argues that leaders must set the stage for it by leading their teams with 'situational humility' and 'humble listening'. In the end, she makes it clear that voice has become mission critical for every modern organization, regardless of industry.

Few would argue that artificial intelligence (AI) will have widespread implications for business and society. The authors argue that business leaders should focus their attention on understanding the effects in three key areas: jobs, inequality and competition. They outline both the pessimistic and optimistic views of AI's effects and provide their own views with respect to AI and jobs, AI and inequality and AI and competition. Among other things, they argue that the impact of AI will not affect all people and all firms equally, and that leaders must carefully consider their decisions in this arena, as they will have long-lasting effects on society.

A growing number of organizations-particularly in the public sector-are embracing behavioral insights to design and enhance their products, policies and services. The challenge is this: Their leaders and workers are human too, and are therefore influenced by the same heuristics and biases that they are attempting to address in customers. The authors-from the world renowned Behavioral Insights Team-introduce three core activities of policy making and strategy-making in any industry: noticing, deliberating and executing. In the article they focus on the first two stages-noticing and deliberating-and present some of the most important behavioral insights within each category-including confirmation bias and framing effects. They then provide tools to mitigate common biases.

The authors argue that Behavioral Science can make important contributions to innovation through nudges and other proven methods; but they believe it can contribute at an even greater scale by partnering with other disciplines-in particular, with the field of design. They introduce their integrative model, which hinges on the notions of where to play and how to win-first introduced by Roger Martin and A.G. Lafely in their book, Playing to Win. In the end, they show that by partnering with design and framing behavioral science as a speculative tool in addition to an evidence-based one, we can collectively better envision the new, in addition to testing the known.