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Betsy Sugarman, a rising star in a biotech company, finds out that she is pregnant. This is good news for her, but bad timing for her career. She has been interviewing internally to take on a new role as the director of overseas operations, a position that requires a great deal of travel. Her prospective boss has all but offered her the job and is expecting a commitment from her within a week. She wants the job and feels she is prepared to do what it requires, but she's hesitant to disclose such personal information. Should she tell him about the pregnancy or not? With commentaries by Mary B. Cranston, the firm senior partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, and Michael Hamilton, a partner at Ernst & Young.

James Patterson, one of the world's most popular and prolific novelists, discusses creative problem solving, collaboration, and productivity.

Betsy Sugarman, a rising star in a biotech company, finds out that she is pregnant. This is good news for her, but bad timing for her career. She has been interviewing internally to take on a new role as the director of overseas operations, a position that requires a great deal of travel. Her prospective boss has all but offered her the job and is expecting a commitment from her within a week. She wants the job and feels she is prepared to do what it requires, but she's hesitant to disclose such personal information. Should she tell him about the pregnancy or not?

Betsy Sugarman, a rising star in a biotech company, finds out that she is pregnant. This is good news for her, but bad timing for her career. She has been interviewing internally to take on a new role as the director of overseas operations, a position that requires a great deal of travel. Her prospective boss has all but offered her the job and is expecting a commitment from her within a week. She wants the job and feels she is prepared to do what it requires, but she's hesitant to disclose such personal information. Should she tell him about the pregnancy or not? With commentaries by Mary B. Cranston, the firm senior partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, and Michael Hamilton, a partner at Ernst & Young.

The case is based on the crisis faced by Kingfisher Airlines during November 2011. It describes the paradoxical situation faced by the airline industry in India which experienced exponential growth in passenger volumes; but with the exception of IndiGo Airlines, all the airlines failed to make profits. However, in general, the low-cost airlines did better than the full service airlines. Other than the government-owned Air India, Kingfisher Airlines, a full service airline, was in the worst possible shape and close to bankruptcy during that period. Lack of cash forced the airline to cancel about 35 flights in a day in November 2011, disappointing customers, the only stakeholder group that was happy with the airline. This event brought the whole industry under public scrutiny. Using the stakeholder perspective, the case suggests that owing to an excessive focus on one stakeholder group, the customers; and the neglect of the other four stakeholder groups, namely, suppliers, employees, community and society, including government agencies, and also the owners or shareholders; the organization had nearly gone bankrupt. The top management has to chalk out a strategy that reengages with all the stakeholders to get them to support it during Kingfisher's struggle for survival and to put the airline on a track of recovery.

This case chronicles the evolution and challenges faced by LabourNet, an organization that was conceptualized as a social enterprise to create and enhance income opportunities for workers in the Indian urban informal sector, workers who are typically poor, exploited, and disenfranchised. LabourNet endeavored to establish linkages between informal-sector labourers and potential employers through an Internet-based portal and cellular phones, bringing about efficiency in the search process as well as reducing the role of intermediaries who typically exploited the labourers and reduced their share of wages. Realizing that informal sector labourers were mostly migrants from rural India who did not possess any proof of identity or social security, LabourNet worked with banks and insurance companies to provide the registered labourers with proof of identity, insurance, bank accounts, and ATM facilities. Further, LabourNet provided the registered labourers with training so that they could command better prices for their services. However, LabourNet struggled to earn revenue and to become financially self-reliant because of difficulties in scaling its operations, its inability to monetize the services that it provided as well as for being unable to command any price premium for their labourers from the markets. The case ends at a point where LabourNet had to decide its future course of action because the donor funds on which it was relying was becoming exhausted and LabourNet was unsure about the strategy that it should adopt in order to create a business model that was both inclusive and financially sustainable

This case critically analyzes the positioning journey traversed by Saffola, one of India's leading cooking oils. For nearly half a century, Saffola was strongly associated with the health of the human heart, with its visual language, communication strategy, and brand positioning, all revolving around heart-related risks. With changing trends and market sentiments, Saffola became painfully cognizant of its shrinking relevance as a brand, indicated by stagnating sales, thus posing a unique conundrum: how should Saffola expand its user base to include non-heart patients while still being relevant to its current, loyal user base? In order to address this, the marketing team at Saffola undertook two re-positioning exercises, one in 2001 and the other in 2004. This case studies both these efforts in detail, analyzing the dynamics of the brand's image, identity, and positioning in tandem with changing consumer trends and market conditions.

In India, air travel in the early twentieth century is mostly between major cities and has historically been driven by businesses. However, a set of relatively unused airfields exist in or near smaller cities, presenting a potential opportunity for generating air travel demand in these locations. This would require a thorough understanding of existing travel options and the design of an air travel offering that can successfully compete with these options. The three-part case describes a methodology to arrive at the appropriate new air travel offering and an assessment of the extent of potential demand in this context. In the first part (A), competing travel modes are examined and the attributes that are relevant to the design of a new air travel offering are identified. A choice-based conjoint experiment is designed and pilot data is obtained and analyzed.

In India, air travel in the early twentieth century is mostly between major cities and has historically been driven by businesses. However, a set of relatively unused airfields exist in or near smaller cities, presenting a potential opportunity for generating air travel demand in these locations. This would require a thorough understanding of existing travel options and the design of an air travel offering that can successfully compete with these options. The three-part case describes a methodology to arrive at the appropriate new air travel offering and an assessment of the extent of potential demand in this context. Inputs from part (A), which detail a pilot conjoint study, are used to refine the design and data is collected from a large sample for one origin-destination pair and presented in the second part (B).

In India, air travel in the early twentieth century is mostly between major cities and has historically been driven by businesses. However, a set of relatively unused airfields exist in or near smaller cities, presenting a potential opportunity for generating air travel demand in these locations. This would require a thorough understanding of existing travel options and the design of an air travel offering that can successfully compete with these options. The three-part case describes a methodology to arrive at the appropriate new air travel offering and an assessment of the extent of potential demand in this context. In the first part (A), competing travel modes are examined and the attributes that are relevant to the design of a new air travel offering are identified. A choice-based conjoint experiment is designed and pilot data is obtained and analyzed.

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As commercials migrate from television to the Internet, marketers need to use different techniques to keep viewers watching--and to encourage them to send the ad to others. Harvard Business School's Thales Teixeira utilizes infrared eye tracking and facial-emotion-detection software to understand how people respond to online ads, and he offers five techniques to increase the odds an online ad will go viral.

Studies have always shown that the adage "There's no such thing as bad publicity" is wrong. It turns out, though, that sometimes the saying has merit. By studying sales of books reviewed in the New York Times, Jonah Berger of the Wharton School demonstrates that if a product is relatively unknown, even the most scathing publicity can help the bottom line by making people aware of the product's existence. This is good news for smaller and unknown producers, who might want to allow some bad press or to make controversial moves that risk incurring it.

When you're building a team to generate radical innovation, make sure you include a few conformists among the radical thinkers and rule-breakers. Conformists are crucial because they support the creatives and strengthen group cohesion, according to research on a high-tech company by Ella Miron-Spektor, Miriam Erez, and Eitan Naveh of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

A new study, which looks at the impact that typefaces have on learning, reveals that readers actually remember material better when it is presented in smaller, less-legible fonts. Teachers, marketers, and publishers, take note.

Federal budget deficits are grave threats not only to national security but also to economic competitiveness. They consume the resources we must invest in keeping the United States competitive. The good news is that we still have time to deal with the problem. But we can't solve it simply by growing, raising taxes, or making cuts. All of us have to make sacrifices. In a world of limited resources, we have to make choices. So far, though, Washington hasn't been willing, and the business community--eager not to antagonize the members of Congress whose support they need--is partly to blame. If we in the business community allow members of Congress to think that doing nothing is OK, then that's exactly what they'll do. All of us in business must put aside our individual wish lists and think about what's really important for the country.

America needs to restore confidence in the country's innovation machine.

Societies that are better at utilizing tools are likely to be more productive. The authors have studied when 161 countries adopted 104 technologies over the past 200 years, and they conclude that profound economic advantages--as measured by per capita income--accrue to early adopters of technology.

Excerpts from a hedge fund's report accusing a Chinese bond company of using fraudulent financial statements.