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Origo Commodities Indian Pvt. Ltd. (Origo) had grown to achieve revenue of US$40 million in just a decade, making it one of the leading players in India's agricultural commodity sector. The co-founders had explored various avenues to accelerate growth but had repeatedly encountered employees' discomfort with implementing technology. By 2020, with emerging competition, growing investor interest, and the movement of government processes to online platforms, they needed to take tough decisions now to grow further. Would restructuring the organization and hiring technology-proficient replacements be their only option? Since the employees had been with Origo since its inception, replacing them would be an agonizing decision. The founders had to decide what to do and how to do it before their investors' meeting in four weeks.

The case is set in January of 2023; the protagonist is Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber Technologies, Inc. Uber operates a diversified ride-hailing and transportation platform in over 70 countries, some 10,000 cities, and has 120 million active monthly users. The Uber online network lets users connect with drivers through a smartphone app to request rides and food or grocery deliveries. In 2022, although Uber had revenues of $32 billion, it lost more than $9 billion, bringing the total company net losses since 2016 to almost $30 billion. CEO Khosrowshahi recognizes several issues he needs to address: 1) how to achieve consistent profitability, 2) how to attain scale and scope economies within its widely-diversified technology platform, and 3) the risk of Uber experiencing a diversification discount.

By the time Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy in 2019, OxyContin had accumulated $35 billion in sales. In a few short years before the bankruptcy filing, the Sackler family siphoned off $13 billion in profits, making them one of the world's wealthiest billionaires. The case discusses the ethically questionable tactics that the Sackler family employed to turbocharge the supply-induced demand for OxyContin, including creating a national pain movement, obtaining FDA approval, downplaying the risks of addiction, ignoring symptoms of addiction, ambitious sales representatives, targeting high prescribers, pampering physicians, addressing regulatory changes, and hiring McKinsey. Purdue Pharma coopted regulators, medical accreditation boards, hospitals, and doctors to do their bidding. As a result, over one million Americans have died from drug overdoses since 2000.

On the morning of May 7, 2021, Colonial Pipeline Company became aware that the company had been the victim of a malicious ransomware attack that had stolen and locked up company data. The extortionists demanded 75 bitcoins (worth about $4.4 million at the time) in exchange for the decryption tool needed to unlock the data. To contain the system infection, the control room promptly shut down all company pipelines that transported nearly half of all refined oil products consumed in the East Coast of the United States. Within hours, external experts and governmental authorities were assembled to help but information was still limited on how to manage the cyberattack. As the passing of every minute threatened the oil supply to 13 states and the nation's capital, CEO of Colonial Pipeline, Joseph Blount had to make one crucial decision: whether to pay the ransom or not. The case discusses Colonial Pipeline's cybersecurity practices, ransomware trends, detail of the ransomware attack at Colonial, impact of the attack, Colonial's response to the attack, and post-attack repercussion. Overall, the case prompts readers to contemplate how organizations should prevent and respond to the ever-increasing threat of cyber breaches.

Agility comprises three processes, each of which contains a pitfall that can subvert its outcomes: Alertness harbors the pitfall of hubris, decision-making harbors the pitfall of impulsiveness, and mobilization harbors the pitfall of resource fatigue. The authors offer advice to help leaders identify and then avoid these often ignored risks in implementing organizational agility.

The owner of Primes and Zooms, a retail still photography rental organization based in Pune, India, was facing a hard choice in the spring of 2022. After ten years in the business, he saw that the market was changing in some unexpected ways. These changes, coupled with the challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic had brought, meant that Primes and Zooms needed to determine a new growth strategy. There had been fast-paced growth in the video photography space, compared to the still photography space. The options were as follows: should Primes and Zooms enter new geographies with its existing still photography business, or should it expand its current locations to include video rental services?

Lululemon Athletica Inc. was a Canadian multinational athletic apparel company for women and men. Founded Vancouver in 1998, the company ended fiscal year 2020 with a strong performance, bringing in over US$4.4 billion in annual sales. However, with only 14 per cent of its sales coming from international markets outside North America, the company's priorities for 2021 and beyond included global expansion. As of February 2021, the new executive vice-president international was a month into his role and faced the challenge of quadrupling 2018 international sales of US$360 million to US$1.44 billion by the end of 2023. How many new stores should Lululemon Athletica Inc. plan to open in each of the company's three major international markets of China, Asia-Pacific, and Europe? Which geographic regions or countries should it focus on to grow the Vancouver-based company internationally?

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When it comes to providing career development support for employees, most companies offer three key elements visibility into opportunities and paths, the means to learn and practice, and rich feedback and coaching only to high-potential performers. The authors explain how organizations can integrate those elements into a career development system that works across all levels of the workforce to boost retention and cultivate needed skills.

When two software engineers decided, in 2013, to launch an enterprise software-as-a-service business around GitLab-the open-source collaborative software-development application that they'd been working on-they didn't intend to turn it into the world's largest all-remote organization. But they lived 2,000 kilometers apart-one in Ukraine and the other in the Netherlands-and their first hire was in Serbia. None of them wanted to move, so GitLab began its corporate life with a small, distributed workforce. As the founders began hiring more people, they made it official: The company would have no offices; employees could work from anywhere. Today GitLab's 2,000 team members are spread across some 60 countries and regions around the world. The company neither owns nor rents any corporate office space. Well before the Covid-19 pandemic hastened such a shift for other organizations, GitLab's leaders embraced and developed best practices around virtual collaboration. They learned that success depends on measuring output, not input; aligning people on norms and values; ensuring that policies and processes are continually and openly documented; and reinforcing key self-management and people-management skills.

Once upon a time, leisure was a sign of prestige. Today that idea has been turned on its head, and busyness is the new status symbol. Busy people are considered important and impressive, and employees are rewarded for showing how "hard" they're working. Such thinking is misguided. It can cause organizations to overload their employees, base their incentives on the amount of time they put in, and excessively monitor their activities, all of which undermine productivity and efficiency, research shows. Meanwhile, reducing work to manageable levels can actually enhance them. This article explores both the downsides of busyness (employee turnover, reduced engagement, absenteeism, and impaired health) and the reasons for our obsession with it. It's partly human nature: The harder we work to achieve something, the more we value it; most of us hate being idle; and we think customers like to see us busy. The authors also present strategies for breaking away from this fixation: Reward output, not activity. Eliminate low-value work to make time for "deep work." Force people off the clock, and allow time for their minds to wander creatively. Model the right behavior, and build slack into your systems. Activity is not achievement, and the sooner companies recognize that, the better off they and their employees will be.

Many of us assumed that by now, years into the pandemic, we'd have settled on new structures, practices, and processes for hybrid work. But we haven't. Instead most companies are stuck in a transitional phase, where little is resolved. Why is it taking us so long to work this out? Because, the author writes, the new world of hybrid work isn't simply about determining whether everybody should come back full-time to the office. It's also forcing us to test long-held assumptions about how work should be done and what it even is. The changes to workplace practices and norms that we're contemplating could be more significant than anything that's happened in generations, Gratton writes, and we may need years to fully sort things out. So it's time for leaders to start thinking differently about the problem and approach it just as they would any other major change in how they do business-by asking tough questions and learning deeply. Gratton surveys recent research on the pros and cons of hybrid work and offers leaders some fundamental questions they can use to guide their organizations into this new phase of redesigning how we work.

The debate about the best way to lead has been raging for years: Should you empower your people and get out of their way, or take charge and push them to do great work? The answer, say the authors, is to do both. Their research shows that effective leaders routinely shift between these two seemingly opposing modes-and build teams whose members are good at switching back and forth too. Sometimes teams need diver­gent thinking (during idea generation, for instance); at others, they need convergent thinking (to, say, make a decision and map out next steps). Leaders must be crystal clear about which mode is appropriate when. They have to make it psychologically safe for people to speak up, contribute, and argue, and when it's time to end the discussion and act, signal that they're taking charge again. There are four ways to increase the ability to shift modes: Question your assumptions about power and fixed hierarchies. Study your habits and your team's to see if you're stuck in one mode or the other. Set clear expectations with meeting agendas and rituals that mark transitions. And reinforce shifts with your own words, deeds, and body language.

Compared with start-ups, established corporations have many resources and capabilities that ought to give them a head start: customers, products, operations, licenses, distribution, marketing, and capital. But corporations lack one critical capability: the entrepreneurial muscle to take an idea from small to big, from zero to one. The authors describe a new model-the hybrid start-up-which differs from typical internal cor­porate ventures. It combines the best of people, processes, and resources from both inside and outside the company. They show how many big companies are creating their own hybrid start-ups to unlock the value of their assets and defend their markets while becoming digital leaders. They draw on lessons from more than 190 such ventures launched over the past eight years with the help of BCG Digital Ventures, including those created by companies such as UPS (Ware2Go), Mercedes-Benz (RepairSmith), Volkswagen (Heycar), First American (Endpoint), AIA (Snackbox), Airbus (UP42), and others. The data provides strong evidence both that the model works and that hybrid start-ups are two or three times as likely to succeed as independent start-ups.

Many workers today are stuck in low-paying jobs, unable to advance simply because they don't have a bachelor's degree. At the same time, many companies are desperate for workers and not meeting the diversity goals that could help them perform better while also reducing social and economic inequality. All these problems could be alleviated, the authors say, if employers focused on job candidates' skills instead of their degree status. Drawing on their interviews with corporate leaders, along with their own experience in academia and the business world, the authors outline a "skills-first" approach to hiring and managing talent. It involves writing job descriptions that emphasize capabilities, not credentials; creating apprenticeships, internships, and training programs for people without college degrees; collaborating with educational institutions and other outside partners to expand the talent pool; helping hiring managers embrace skills-first thinking; bringing on board a critical mass of non­degreed workers; and building a supportive organizational culture. IBM, Aon, Cleveland Clinic, Delta Air Lines, Bank of America, and Merck are among the companies taking this approach-and demonstrating its benefits for firms, workers, and society as a whole.

China's companies have long been acclaimed for their manufacturing prowess and, more recently, for their pragmatic approach to innovation. Now it's time to recognize how they are reinventing the role of management through an approach the authors call "digitally enhanced directed autonomy," or DEDA. These companies use digital platforms to give frontline employees direct access to shared corporate resources and capabilities, making it possible for them to organize themselves around specific business opportunities. Autonomy is not complete, nor is it given to everyone. It is directed exactly where it is needed, and what employees do with their autonomy is carefully tracked. The approach contrasts with the Western model of empowerment, which gives employees broad autonomy through reduced supervision. This article describes the three core features of the DEDA approach: granting employees autonomy at scale, supporting them with digital platforms, and setting clear, bounded business objectives. It offers examples of how companies are using those features and draws lessons for Western companies.

Teams under pressure often fall back on dysfunctional coping mechanisms that are deeply rooted in human evolutionary psychology. The group works like a pack, instinctively looking for ways to alleviate its members' collective anxiety. It might unconsciously ascribe an unwanted role, such as scapegoat or savior, to one or more members and lapse into skewed interactions-for example, directing its energy toward fighting a common enemy, whether real or perceived, rather than advancing its actual mission. The authors discuss how to spot these harmful patterns and break their hold. They describe a powerful tool deployed in their work with top teams: sociograms, or pictorial representations of team members, their connections, and their interactions. By understanding the unconscious forces that influence them in times of stress, teams can become less captive to such forces and more engaged with improving performance.

Controversy has swirled around psychological targeting-the practice of influencing people's behavior by mining their digital footprints, identifying their personality traits, and then tailoring messages to them. Because it was misused to try to sway votes during recent elections, some have made it out to be a brainwashing tool. That's simply a myth, explains Sandra Matz, a leading expert on it (who actually helped break the election story). Psychological targeting can't radically change minds, she says. However, marketers can use it to shift opinions and attitudes, create demand where there was none, and engage with customers on a much more personal level. In this article she describes how companies can employ it in a way that creates the maximum value for them and their customers-and adheres to fundamental ethical principles.

A surprising number of extremely successful people are often wracked by anxiety, the author writes. They suffer from what psychologists call thought traps and others might refer to as cognitive distortion or thinking errors: negatively biased and untrue patterns of thought that arrive automatically and often ensnare us, preventing us from seeing clearly, communicating effectively, or making good reality-based decisions. To combat thought traps, some anxious achievers turn to overwork, others to coping mechanisms such as substance use, avoidance, or passive-aggressiveness. Aarons-Mele explains the 11 most common thought traps-all-or-nothing thinking, labeling, jumping to conclusions, catastrophizing, filtering, discounting the positive, "should" statements, social comparison, personalization and blaming, ruminating, and emotional reasoning-and recommends strategies for overcoming all of them.