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This case is useful in bringing together several different disciplines: strategy, management control, and change management. The organization was a newly formed integrated clinical enterprise that included an academic medical center, a community hospital, and a academic practice plan. It also was tied strategically and financially to a college of medicine. It was attempting to achieve clinical and financial integration between its physician practices and its provider institutions, mainly the medical center, but the effort had been compromised by a budget crisis that had had a detrimental effect on the organization, and had led to mistrust among the physicians, some of whom were considering leaving the organization.

This case provides students with an opportunity to look at both structure and process issues in a highly bureaucratic context, and to consider the appropriate balance between centralization and decentralization in a management control system. It also provides students with an opportunity to assess the value of a management control report.

This case allows students to analyze the impact of rate changes in a purchase-of-service system. One conclusion is that these systems function as communication media whereby the public sector signals its priorities to the private sector (the service providers). The situation being analyzed is one in which the public sector wishes to establish a one-time payment for the completion of a given task-an adoption-which will eliminate the ongoing cost of foster care for the adopted child.

This is a case designed to illustrate how a management control system might be designed in an educational setting. Students need to determine (a) if it is a good control system, and, if so, why, (b) if it is a system in need of modification, and, if so, where, or (c) if it is akin to killing a fly with an elephant gun and should be scrapped.

This case gives students an opportunity to determine the appropriate size of a nonprofit organization's surplus. The case also lends itself to the use of a spreadsheet if the instructor wishes the students to have practice in preparing one.

This case provides an opportunity to use a number of analytic techniques, and it raises several issues associated with benefit-cost calculations.

While uncertainty is rampant in today's economy, the authors argue that one thing is clear: public policy to increase innovation is generally not working, and this is due largely to confusion between the terms 'invention' and 'innovation'. While the terms are often used interchangeably, there are important differences in definition, intent and process. They describe these differences and argue that the focus must switch to a particular type of innovation: user-driven innovation. This type of innovation enables users to do something that they could not have done before and can also lower costs for users. They explain how to 'refresh' innovation policy to embrace user driven innovation, putting an end to inventors creating inventions that nobody really wants.

The global financial crisis has caused public trust in institutions to fall to its lowest level in history. The authors begin by defining the three elements of the 'trust failure' that has taken place, and then present six strategies for repairing trust. These include increasing external regulation, changing the way boards function and fostering a culture change. They end by warning that a number of reforms have been put in place to restore institutional trust, but the jury is still out as to whether they will 'stick' over time.

Throughout history, sudden insights across industries and disciplines have had one thing in common: they tend to come at strange times and places, and they tend to happen after an intense, prolonged struggle with a particular problem, followed by a break. The author describes the importance of the break or 'broken pattern' in our day, showing that it comes in two types: breaks that we make and breaks that we take. In both cases, breaks enable us to think differently - and more resourcefully, and those who aspire to creative thinking should make them a regular habit. He provides three approaches to daily breaks: meditation, 'pulsing' and daydreaming walks, all of which enable you to stop looking for 'the answer' - and find it.

Wealthy people don't just have better toys; they have better nutrition and better medical care, more free time and more meaningful labour-more of just about every ingredient in the recipe for a happy life. And yet research consistently shows that they aren't much happier than those who have less. If money can buy happiness, then why doesn't it? The authors argue that five principles apply to the money/happiness equation, including 'buy experiences instead of things' and 'help others instead of yourself'. In the end, they show that money can buy many of the things that make us happy; and if it doesn't, the fault is ours.

New entrepreneurs are in a tough spot: sixty-five per cent of seed-round startups in North America never make it to the next level of funding, and just 12 per cent end up successfully delivering a product or service. Why even try? "Because my idea is better than all the others, and the numbers don't apply to me." We all have such 'necessary illusions' in our minds, says the author. Dangerous delusions, on the other hand, are just that. The question is, how to distinguish between necessary illusions and dangerous delusions? He argues that the answer is to become an experimentalist about one's own life and business, which forces you to take an outsider's view of it.

Frugal innovation' is a new style of innovation that is popular in India and other countries in the global south, where citizens face global challenges such as poverty and climate change with limited resources. The solutions it puts forth must be low-cost, robust and easy to use, and have the potential to be targeted at large populations. However, solutions tend to be developed and used locally, and scaling local innovations presents some key challenges. The authors describe how to go about creating a 'hybrid model' for scaling an innovation, which entails attention to five baseline factors: cost, active demand, a sustainable business model, outcome demonstration and effective leadership.

In an age of dwindling resources, our excessive economic paradigm cannot possibly survive. The author argues that it is time to stop seeing the world as it is, and to begin to see it as it could be. But before this can happen, we must change our notion of what constitutes success. He describes what would be involved in a 'renaissance of human values', touching on our nine core needs as humans and the roles of design and ecology. We will build a new civilization, he says, the way we built the current one: with incentives, social rewards and new ways of meeting our needs.

When it comes to innovative product and service design, quantitative, data-driven methods often lack the design insight and texture that inspires new ways forward. Meanwhile, qualitative behavioral and emotions-based research provides invaluable inspiration for human-centered designers, but the insights unveiled can be fragile if they are not backed by hard numbers. Integrating quantitative research methods with qualitatively methods is a powerful new approach that the author and his colleagues have dubbed 'hybrid insights'. In this article he shows how hybrid insights out-perform conventional market research tools in unveiling significant early-adopter segments

What could a family-run pig farm in France have to teach mainstream business folk about profit, market share and shareholder value? As it turns out, plenty. The author describes the 'artisan's approach' to value creation and the three ways that it differs from the traditional growth-obsessed firm. For one, instead of pursuing scale, artisans remain at a fixed size - but they exert control over the whole process, from end to end, achieving 'holism' over scale. In the end, she shows that the engine that keeps artisans running has a good chance of outlasting faster-burning models, and as such, it presents a working alternative worth considering.

The former Medtronic CEO and current Professor of Management Practice at Harvard describes the importance of following your True North and explains why he refers to the past 10 years as "leadership's lost decade". He describes five types of leaders that often lose sight of their True North and get derailed. He also talks about the importance of leading an "integrated life" and shows that authentic leadership entails a transition from 'I' to 'we'.

A few decades ago, Prada believed that its future depended on gaining market share through acquisitions in Western Europe and the United States. Today, however, it remains mostly focused on its core brands--Prada and Miu Miu--and the emerging markets. China alone now accounts for 22% of company revenue. Meanwhile, Prada has prospered, retaining its independence in an industry increasingly dominated by luxury conglomerates. According to Bertelli, what makes the difference is Prada's organizational culture. Despite all the changes and challenges the company has faced, the essential principles and values that guide managers' decisions and inform their communications with one another and with stakeholders have remained remarkably constant. The author illuminates the six Prada principles: control through transparency; go where the risk is; give respect to get performance; sell only your own designs; obsess over details; and give young managers real responsibilities. Bertelli describes himself as "a great fan of young people," especially those who experience the world. Right now that means Africa, which he believes will be a huge market in 10 or 15 years.

The innovation revolution spurred by venture capitalists decades ago has created the conditions in which scale enables big companies to shift from shackling innovation to unleashing it. Three trends are behind this shift: (1) The ease of innovation and its decreasing cost mean that start-ups now face the same short-term pressures that have constrained innovation at large companies. (2) Taking a page from start-up strategy, large companies are embracing open innovation and integrating entrepreneurial behaviors with their existing capabilities. (3) Innovation increasingly involves creating business models that tap big companies' unique strengths. In this context, entrepreneurial individuals, whom the author calls "catalysts," are working with corporations' resources, scale, and growing agility to develop solutions to global challenges. Here are the stories of four corporate catalysts: Keyne Monson, at Medtronic, spurred the creation of a program called Healthy Heart for All, which seeks to bring pacemaker technology to hundreds of thousands of Indians who desperately need it. Yuri Jain, at Unilever, sought and found a scalable solution to purifying drinking water--Pureit, a portable system that provides safe water at just half a cent per liter. Nick Musyoka, at Syngenta, devised a program called Uwezo (Swahili for "capability"), which uses the sachet distribution model to provide smallholding farmers with affordable, premeasured packages of crop protection chemicals. Colin Harrison, at IBM, was instrumental in developing the company's Smarter Cities program, which offers bundled technological infrastructure and related services to help cities save money and improve lives.

Many managers feel doomed to trade off the futile rigor of ordinary strategic planning for the hit-or-miss creativity of the alternatives. In fact, the two can be reconciled to produce novel but realistic strategies. The key is to recognize that conventional strategic planning, for all its analysis, is not actually scientific--it lacks the careful generation and testing of hypotheses that are at the heart of the scientific method. The authors outline a strategy-making process that combines rigor and creativity. A team begins by formulating options, or possibilities, and asks what must be true for each to succeed. Once it has listed all the conditions, it assesses their likelihood and thereby identifies the barriers to each choice. The team then tests the key barrier conditions to see which hold true. From here, choosing a strategy is simple: The group need only review the test results and choose the possibility with the fewest serious barriers. This is the path P&G took in the late 1990s, when it was looking to become a major global player in skin care. After testing the barrier conditions for several possibilities, it opted for a bold strategy that might never have surfaced in the traditional process: reinventing Olay as a prestigelike product also sold to mass consumers. The new Olay succeeded beyond expectations--showing what can happen when teams shift from asking "What is the right answer" and focus instead on figuring out "What are the right questions?"

How do successful companies shape their high-level strategies? A decade ago, London Business School's Sull and Stanford's Eisenhardt looked for the answer by studying the era's leading high-tech firms. They discovered that such firms relied not on complicated frameworks but on simple rules of thumb. Managers translated corporate objectives into a few straightforward guidelines that helped employees make on-the-spot decisions and adapt to constantly shifting environments, while keeping the big picture in mind. This article describes the authors' subsequent research into why simple rules work and how firms develop them. Typically, after setting its priorities, a company will identify a bottleneck preventing it from making progress toward them and then create rules for managing that bottleneck. At America Latina Logistica, for instance, the problem was capital spending: The railway had only a tenth of the funds it needed to invest in growth and infrastructure. So a cross-functional team came up with rules to guide spending: Any proposal had to remove obstacles to growth, minimize up-front costs, provide immediate benefits, and reuse existing resources. The rules allowed employees across departments to make difficult trade-offs and quickly innovate solutions that put the firm on the fast track. Effective rules, the authors say, are specific, not broad; draw from historical experience; and are made by their users, not the CEO. Moreover, as a company evolves, they evolve with it.